To call Stephen Sondheim America’s greatest musical dramatist is to make him into a monument. He was that, of course, bringing to Broadway, in his lyrics but also his music, the psychological acuity and convincing characterization of theater at its most elevated.
But Sondheim, who died in 2021 at the age of 91, was also just a damn fine tunesmith, turning out songs that, in context or out, pop style or classical, slip easily into your ears en route to your soul. To pick just 14 is thus a harrowing task: He wrote music and lyrics for 15 musicals that opened on Broadway between 1962 and 2023 — and one that, in 1954, did not. He wrote songs or scores for television (“Evening Primrose”) and movies (“Dick Tracy,” “Stavisky,” “Reds,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution”). The Sondheim anthology has become an oeuvre unto itself.
Still, when we asked some notable fans, and our colleagues, to pick one song to offer a Sondheim newbie, even stipulating that he had to have written both music and lyrics (so nothing from “West Side Story” or “Gypsy” or “Do I Hear a Waltz?”), no one was stymied. All they had to do is think back on what had made them feel most joyous or bereft, most stunned or stung. Or, most characteristically, all four at once. — Jesse Green
‘Send In the Clowns,’ from ‘A Little Night Music’
When I first heard ‘Send in the Clowns,” I just lost my mind. I didn’t know who Sondheim was. I didn’t know what “A Little Night Music” was. But when I heard the song, I knew that it was going to be mine. “Da da da da!” — it puts you into the heavens immediately. And by the time the lyrics come — “Isn’t it rich?” is a wonderful introduction to everything about life. “Are we a pair?” — What a question! The whole thing is so beautifully crafted. I have no idea what it’s about, and I don’t pretend to. Whoever hears it interprets what it is to them. He thought it was a terrible song, which is funny and cute and admirable. It was a blockbuster. It became a hit almost immediately, and it’s the only hit that Sondheim has had. — JUDY COLLINS, singer
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‘The Ladies Who Lunch,’ from ‘Company’
This is a musical about a perennial bachelor who has just turned 35. One of his friends is a rich upper-class socialite, and in this song, she is painting a picture of certain women in her social set. It’s a song that I’ve always responded to because Sondheim, who’s obviously a brilliant composer and lyricist, also is an incredible playwright through song; in addition to all his technical wizardry, he is able to paint a vivid picture of a character that has a real arc in form and content. Within the verses, he has these internal rhymes that suggest the character is getting drunker as she sings, and more stinging in her observations. It seems to be about all these other women, but at the end she’s ultimately singing about herself. It’s a brilliant turn that both exposes the rot within the character who is singing it, but also paints a picture of the broader social implications. — MICHAEL R. JACKSON, composer and lyricist
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‘Losing My Mind,’ from ‘Follies’
This is a song that rips your heart out and serves it back to you on a breakfast-in-bed tray. It is sung, in the second act of the 1971 musical “Follies,” by Sally Durant Plummer, a former showgirl. A love song and its opposite, it’s a hymn to Ben, her onetime lover. Effortlessly, impressionistically, the song follows Sally through her day, showing how during every chore and social interaction, she is consumed by thoughts of Ben. Long before Sally sings, “You said you loved me / Or were you just being kind?/ Or am I losing my mind?” the yearning chords and melancholy harmonic shifts tell us the truth: The love — the obsession — goes only one way. This is the song I sang to myself in the early days of the pandemic lockdowns, when I was suddenly at home with two young children and a faltering marriage. I sing it much less now. I think I love it more. — ALEXIS SOLOSKI, Times culture reporter
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‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,’ from ‘Sweeney Todd’
For me, the single song of Sondheim’s that can snare an unsuspecting non-Sondheim person and keep that leash tight is “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” from his 1979 masterpiece, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” I’ve seen that song seduce opera aficionados who don’t like musicals; I’ve watched it work its dark magic on conventional musical-comedy fans who think they’re immune to Sondheim’s sour-note chill. Part of the power of the ballad is the way Sondheim quotes a very old piece of music: a medieval plainchant setting of the Dies Irae, which includes a four-note phrase that has become a sonic synonym for “death.” (It’s used widely in cinematic composition: If you go watch the moment in “The Lion King” when Scar tells the hyenas to kill Simba, you’ll hear Hans Zimmer use that same eerie progression.)
The first voice in the ballad sings, “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” sliding along the Dies Irae’s characteristic intervals, and already our hindbrains are thinking subconsciously about dying. Then Sondheim hits us with the emergency. The climax sounds as if someone has driven an ambulance into the theater: voices singing at the painful top of their range screech “Sweeney Sweeney,” each syllable whining up an evil half-step, heading toward a double fortissimo Hiiiiiiighhhhh C sharp!!!! in the sopranos. We’re only halfway through the first song, and most of us are in fight-or-flight mode. Oh, Sweeney. It makes me panic with delight just thinking about it. — HELEN SHAW, Times chief theater critic
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‘Not While I’m Around,’ from ‘Sweeney Todd’
I am a devoted Stephen Sondheim fan, and his breathtaking artistry as both a composer and a dramatist is on full display in “Sweeney Todd.” It’s a score that is operatic in scale, often performed by opera companies now. A perfect example of his brilliance is “Not While I’m Around.” Here we have a sweet ballad of devotion, easily enjoyable for its lovely melody and moving harmonic structure. But in typical Sondheim fashion, there are deeper currents and darker emotions beneath the surface, and it advances the plot, rather than halting it (as ballads so often do). The innocent Toby assures the unscrupulous Mrs. Lovett of his loyalty, vowing to protect her from “demons.” But she realizes during the duet that Toby has figured out that Sweeney is a murderer. When Mrs. Lovett sings the melody back to him, a creepy dissonance in Jonathan Tunick’s gorgeous orchestration hints at her evil intention. — RENÉE FLEMING, singer
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‘Comedy Tonight’ from ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’
During its 1962 tryouts, the curtain for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” opened with a lightly tripping noodle of a song called “Love Is in the Air.” Despite a few nifty phrases — “Some are hasty, some are halting / some are simply somersaulting” — it bombed with out-of-town audiences, immediately deflating the evening. The director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, brought in to fix the show in Washington, diagnosed the problem: “Love Is in the Air” wasn’t announcing, in style or substance, that “Forum,” based on low Roman buffoonery, would be a knockabout farce. Sondheim, finally writing both music and lyrics for a big Broadway show, took the note, quickly turning out a tune with a title that could not be more direct: “Comedy Tonight.” Its simple melody, repeated a dozen times and set to a big, galumphing rhythm, still made room for his signature wordplay: “Nothing with gods, nothing with fate / Weighty affairs will just have to wait.” But now everyone knew, as surely as if they had been spritzed with seltzer, what they were getting, and welcomed it. — JESSE GREEN, Times culture correspondent
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‘Anyone Can Whistle,’ from ‘Anyone Can Whistle’
Back in my “Evita” days, I was hiding out in the piano room during a party at Hal Prince’s house, trying to get away from everyone. So was Angela Lansbury. And as I’m telling her about how my father took me to see “Mame” for my bar mitzvah, who walks in but this guy. I didn’t know who he was, but Angela stands up and introduces us. “Oh, you’re the one on the Scrabble album, aren’t you?” I said, meaning the Sondheim tribute album with the Scrabble letters on it. He shook his head yes and squished his eyes. “And you did that one song — could you do it for us?” So he sat down at the piano and played and sang “Anyone Can Whistle.” It’s about a person who can do everything but that, the easiest thing. “Maybe you could teach me how to let go, lower my guard / learn to be free,” he sang. “Maybe if you whistle / Whistle for me.” It’s a prayer for freedom, to get out of your own way. Like all the great writers, Sondheim was writing down the wishes he wished for himself but couldn’t realize. He leaves those wishes for eternity, for the rest of us, to make true. — MANDY PATINKIN, actor and singer
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‘Finishing the Hat,’ from ‘Sunday in the Park With George’
“Finishing the Hat” arises as George Seurat chooses the act of making art over the act of loving. Alone at his sketch pad, chasing images — fixing them! — before they disappear, he meditates on the “woman who is willing to wait” while he works. We are often sold on Sondheim for his words, but it’s the musicality that matters most here. There’s a liquid, lyrical sound to the melody, as if images forming off the tip of his pencil could dissolve before the singer’s very eyes; then there’s a rising fury in the melody as pain washes through as if to say: All the things I sacrifice! What begins as a lulling, almost childlike arpeggiation becomes a relentless pulse, the sound of a mind racing against time. Sondheim lets the lyric think in real time — “Look, I made a hat / Where there never was a hat” — as if creation itself were a form of breathless survival.
Sondheim once insisted to me, in a memorable exchange of letters, that the song was specific to Seurat and his setting, and resistant to gender swapping. Yet I still insist that when sung by a woman, the waiting lover carries a different charge, and the price of devotion (family, children and their absence) feels still more painful. This isn’t art as fulfillment, but art as compulsion: the terrible, sublime beauty of a focus so intense, it costs you human connection. — MELISSA ERRICO, actress and writer
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‘What More Do I Need?’ from ‘Saturday Night’
Stephen Sondheim’s takes on matters of the heart tend to be wistful, ambivalent, sardonic. This makes the giddy “What More Do I Need?” a delightful outlier. Sondheim, barely out of college, wrote it for “Saturday Night” — whose planned Broadway run was abruptly canceled, leading to the show being shelved for over 40 years. The song kicks off pensively, with an undercurrent of surprise: “Once I hated this city,” it begins, “Now it can’t get me down / Slushy, humid and gritty / What a pretty town.” The pace slowly picks up until the number turns into pure joy with the realization that love has the power to transform our very perceptions. Beautifully capturing that awakening in a version recorded in 1993, the soprano Dawn Upshaw sounds like someone who realizes that no matter what, the world is hers. — ELISABETH VINCENTELLI, Times theater writer
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‘A Bowler Hat,’ from ‘Pacific Overtures’
“A Bowler Hat” is absolutely a miracle of a song. You start with this 19th-century Japanese man, Kayama, whose wife has committed suicide, and he’s been by a fluke elevated with dizzying speed to an important diplomatic position. He’s overwhelmed, but then you listen to him get used to foreigners and foreign culture, until he’s ceased to be recognizable to other Japanese people, and possibly to himself. He becomes Western, wearing a bowler hat and a pocket watch. It’s a chilling and remarkable journey.
The poetry, especially the bird imagery, is extraordinary. In the first verse, it’s this heartbroken image of a bird tearing across the sky. In the third verse, the bird reappears, not as an image of evanescence but of warfare. By the last appearance, with Kayama now a gourmand who is reading Spinoza and drinking too much wine, the bird is exploring “the corners” of its life. Then, the most brilliant of all is at the very end: Kayama starts to sing as if there’s going to be another verse, but stops after the first line: “It’s called a cutaway.” (He’s wearing a cutaway coat.) And that’s the whole song in just one word. He’s been cut away from himself, from his land, from his culture. I don’t think you could find any modernist poem that accomplishes as much as this does with more beauty and acuity and insight and depth and even mystery. — TONY KUSHNER, playwright
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‘Sunday,’ from ‘Sunday in the Park with George’
The first act of “Sunday in the Park With George” ends with a coup de théâtre: A disparate cast of characters, sniping and sulking over various slights and resentments, coalesces to form the glorious grouping of Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” As the figures slip into place, so do their voices — cacophony becoming harmony in “Sunday,” a song that, like the show, probes the hunger, and the cost, of artistry. The lyrics both describe and echo the dots of the painting — “our perfect park/made of flecks of light and dark” — and the solo voices meld into a shattering chorus. I distinctly remember the first time I saw this show, realizing, as this song unfolded, that there were tears streaming down my face, not because of sorrow, but because of beauty. — MICHAEL PAULSON, Times theater reporter
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‘I Wish I Could Forget You,’ from ‘Passion’
You can really tell how great a composer is by how they compose their ballads, because there’s so much more exposure to the gifts and shortcomings. This song, about the positive and negative feelings brought on by irrational love, reminds me of something Miles Davis would do, with all the colors and modes. One of the things that’s indicative of Sondheim, and prevalent in this song, is that the lyrics really go with the beautiful music that he wrote. The way that he sculpted this thing, with the weaving in and out, not just of keys, but moves, and modes, gives emotion to the words that are being spoken and is really compelling. The passion that it brings out of not just the words, but the harmonies and music and melodies that come with it, is indicative of the greatness of Sondheim. — SHERMAN IRBY, saxophonist, composer and arranger
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‘Agony,’ from ‘Into the Woods’
The dimwitted princes of “Into the Woods” are such interchangeable pretty boys that they don’t even have their own names. One is Cinderella’s Prince, the other Rapunzel’s Prince, and their duet is a comic high point of the show. Clever but not cerebral, simple but not austere, it’s sly silliness: a couple of fragile, entitled drama queens with a competitive sense of their own suffering.
The source of their agony? Being foiled in their romantic pursuits. Cinderella has run off (“The girl must be mad,” her prince reasons) and Rapunzel is trapped in a tower (though “you know she would go with you, if there only were doors,” her prince sings). By the reprise, each has won his princess yet is chasing someone new. Faithless buffoons, absolutely. But awfully funny. — LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES, Times theater writer
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‘Goodbye for Now,’ from ‘Reds’
Sondheim is credited alongside Dave Grusin with the score for Warren Beatty’s epic 1981 film, “Reds,” starring Beatty and Diane Keaton as the real-life revolutionaries and lovers John Reed and Louise Bryant. In reality, Sondheim wrote only the love theme for the film, “Goodbye for Now”; Beatty didn’t love the rest of Sondheim’s work on the score and brought in Grusin. But that theme is gorgeous and melancholy, and Sondheim later added lyrics that fit the nature of Reed and Bryant’s relationship: “We’re free / That’s what we said we’d be / At leave to come and go / You as well as I.”
There have been many recordings of the song — the most famous may be Barbra Streisand’s on “The Movie Album,” all velvety and lush — but I’m partial to this plaintive performance from a couple of years ago by Bernadette Peters, which captures a certain wistful Sondheimian irony: The lovers don’t actually want to be apart, but their commitment to their radical ideals leave them little choice. “See, I free you / And I’ll see you when I see you / Fine, OK.” It’s a little tragic, and of course, very romantic. They always find their way back to one another in the end. — ALISSA WILKINSON, Times film critic
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Michael Paulson and Jesse Green interviewed the contributing artists.
The post 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sondheim appeared first on New York Times.
