Stephen Sondheim and the Conundrums of Post-war Man

A t the inspiring/dispiriting conclusion/beginning of Merrily We Roll Along, the flop/classic 1981 Stephen Sondheim musical, three friends stand on a rooftop in upper Manhattan with awe and hope in their eyes as they watch the Sputnik rocket pass overhead. They sing a lilting paean to youth called “Our Time”:

It’s our time, breathe it in
Worlds to change and worlds to win
Our turn coming through
Me and you, man, me and you.

How rapturous to be young, clever, and talented in 1957. Doors will shortly begin to open. The future beckons with a warm smile. Except: This story is being told backwards, and so the hopeful beginning is actually a dismal ending. Since the show starts with the characters in grumbly middle age and retreats in time with each scene, we’ve observed how the three will achieve huge success, then become cynical and hardened and bitter and alcoholic. They rise with joy, then crash into their own errors. The song strokes your heart because it’s beautiful, but it rips out your guts at the same time. The audience is overcome by anguish for these three and their future of shattered friendships and abandoned principles, three people who stand for a lot of other people whose lives fell apart.

A year ago I wrote this 90th-birthday tribute to Sondheim, and last Friday he died, sent on his way by an outpouring of Broadway love that extended from fans very old to very young, all of them transported by Sondheim’s unsurpassed genius in his form. Sondheim did not come up with the idea for Merrily We Roll Along (which was adapted from the 1934 play of the same name by Kaufman and Hart), but the attraction of the material to the composer/lyricist was obvious. Sondheim was the bard of uncertainty, ambivalence, hesitancy.

In contradistinction to the many great artists who began by greatly simplifying the world so it could fit into a tidy story, Sondheim always defaulted toward complication, sometimes to the exasperation of his audience in his “difficult” shows (Passion was about an ugly woman stalking a handsome soldier, Follies about decay, Assassins about murdering presidents) and very often to the exasperation of his musicians and singers, forced to grapple with strange time signatures, sudden key changes, and hyperspeed lyrics such as those in “Not Getting Married Today” (from Company) or “The Miller’s Son” (A Little Night Music). In the first act of his last great musical, Into the Woods (1987), Sondheim interweaved four traditional fairy tales with a new one that sounded traditional, then wrapped everything up so ingeniously that the show seemed to be over at intermission. In the second act, he came back with a disturbing meditation on what happens after the happily-ever-after. In Sunday in the Park with George (1984), the first act was about the creation of a famous Georges Seurat painting; the second informs us that Seurat died at 31 and fast-forwards a century to the dilemmas of Seurat’s great-grandson, an artist who struggles with his own doubts.

After the monsters have been slain, after the wars have been won, after prosperity has been built, what then? Sondheim was the post-war man, the wondering wanderer, in a quest for he knows not what. In previous stories, it was obvious what heroes desired; their journey was a tale of how they set about getting it. Georges Seurat knew exactly what he wanted, focused maniacally on achieving it, and left the world a masterpiece. His great-grandson is afflicted and conflicted and distracted and refracted by concerns about business, critics, exhibition — the crush of the art mob. “Art isn’t easy,” he moans. His great-grandfather would have scoffed. Back then, you just did the work. Simple.

The character creations of Sondheim’s avuncular mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, whom Sondheim revered as a man but dismissed as an artist, had clear paths to straightforward goals. Putting the torch to the conventions of the romantic comedy-drama in Company (1970), Sondheim considered the plight of Bobby, a lonely hero with too many friends, a lover without anyone he particularly wants to love. Some directors present Bobby as gay, as Sondheim was, but that’s so simplistic that it amounts to insulting the material. It wasn’t necessarily hard to be gay in 1970 Manhattan. What was just beginning to seem like the chief quandary facing post-war man was how to forge a genuine connection with another person, if indeed permanent attachment was a wise goal in an age when sexual gratification without commitment was suddenly on offer. One husband tells Bobby in “Sorry/Grateful” that marriage is an unending series of wearisome compromises.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s leading ladies and gentlemen did not fret about such matters. They had fewer options, and they made their choices quickly. Bobby casts his eye around the many married folks he knows, takes in their various compromises and tribulations, and isn’t sure he wants to become one of them. His equivocation is summed up in the title of a song cut from the original production: “Marry Me a Little.” In the exhilarating eleven o’clock number “Being Alive,” Bobby experiences revelation: a committed relationship may be exhausting, excessive, and exasperating, but it’s finally worth the steep price: “Somebody force me to care, and ruin my sleep, and make me aware of being alive.” It’s an uncharacteristically emphatic moment for Sondheim, but he makes the audience earn this exhilaration.

Sondheim’s famously clever lyrics and unexpected rhymes (“Perhaps I’ll collapse in the apse”) put him at the top of his generation for his words. Looking back over the entire history of Broadway, his only real peer as a lyricist was Lorenz Hart, who drank himself to death at age 48 and left his partner Richard Rodgers with an opening into which stepped Hammerstein. Yet Sondheim was such a magical composer that he was Rodgers’s equal on that front as well; with Sondheim it was as if Rodgers and Hart, each of them the leaders in their field, were the same person. The music for A Little Night Music, with its elegant waltzes, is at least as splendid as peak Rodgers; Sweeney Todd’s blend of hellfire compositions to accompany the murder scenes and filigreed ballads such as “Johanna,” “Not While I’m Around,” and “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” is dazzling.

To Broadway, the loss of Sondheim is comparable to the rock world losing Paul McCartney and Paul Simon at the same time. “Send in the Clowns,” “Comedy Tonight,” “The Ladies Who Lunch,” “Good Thing Going” . . . Sondheim could make us soar with his music even as he made us roar with his lyrics, but this week he’s made us all cry with his passing.