Why we are so passionate about Stephen Sondheim's work

10 April 2012

At 80, Stephen Sondheim is more popular than ever, with new productions of two of his musicals, concerts that sold out in hours and a Prom on Saturday. So why are we so passionate about him, asks Petroc Trelawny...

I was in my mid-twenties when I first saw a Stephen Sondheim show. The Donmar's celebrated 1995 production of Company starred Adrian Lester as a relationship-phobic New York bachelor called Robert. Bobby, as his friends know him, enjoys brief encounters and fleeting relationships; he's lonely, and living in fear of a life of committed monogamy.

What makes Sondheim stand out among creators of music theatre, says Daniel Evans, star of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s Evening Standard Award-winning Sunday in the Park with George, is that he is both lyricist and composer — "the fact that both elements come fropm the same brain gives them depth and credence and fluidity"

At dinner with friends after the show, I was unusually quiet. They'd invited me out to a musical — surely the lightest, most transitory form of theatre. Yet I'd seen a deep, thoughtful masterwork that accurately encompassed all my own fears and insecurities. There was Bobby, dismissing the idea of spending a life with one person, "someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep". To which his married friends tut-tutted, and extolled the virtues of coupledom. "Don't be afraid, it won't be perfect," sings one, "the only thing to be afraid of is that it won't be." "It's better living it than looking at it," suggests another.

That night I saw myself on stage, a young man enjoying the freedom and fun of London while simultaneously being terrified of the risks attached to the thing I really wanted — a steady
relationship.

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It's this ability Sondheim has, to turn the emotional crises of real life into compelling theatre, that in part explains the passionate following he evokes. Seats for Saturday's 80th birthday Prom have long since gone; when the Donmar announced this month that it would stage concert performances of Company, and another of his shows, Merrily We Roll Along, in the autumn, all 4,000 tickets sold out within 24 hours.

Yet Sondheim is still seen as something of an art-house composer, a writer whose work best suits the subsidised theatre rather than the commercial West End. His shows are complex and multi-dimensional; they are not painted in the rich, primary colours that make them immediately appealing to coach parties and overseas tourists.

The Welsh actor Daniel Evans, who has starred in Sondheim shows in London and New York, says it is his skill at "exposing darkness" that makes his output so great. "All his work is about a kind of yearning for love and acceptance," Evans told me this week. "Sondheim brings to the stage that deep human wish to be accepted for what one is. You get people warts and all."

Sondheim's characters always seem real. We can see aspects of ourselves in Bobby, in Sally and Phyllis, the long- retired vaudeville stars of Follies (1971), even in the demon barber Sweeney Todd (1979). They are fully developed, three-dimensional, human creations. They sing lyrics that are sometimes waspish, bitter, sometimes regretful, often comic, but completely convincing. Sentences we might use in real life.

Critics argue that Sondheim's lines, with their complex internal rhymes, are too clever but they cannot deny his innate literary skill. My favourite lines from Company (1970) go, "It's sharing little winks together/Drinks together/Kinks together/That make marriage a joy" and from the same song, "The hobbies you pursue together/Savings you accrue together/Looks you misconstrue together/That make marriage a joy."

There's more to Sondheim than wordplay, of course. What makes him almost unique in the first division of music theatre creators is that he is both composer and lyricist. "It's completely holistic," says Evans, now director of the Sheffield Theatres. "There's something about the fact that both elements come from the same brain that gives them depth and credence and fluidity."

Sondheim's musical influences are catholic; Leonard Bernstein, with whom he collaborated on West Side Story; Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde New York composer who taught him; Maurice Ravel, the French composer whose music he adores. With his natural talent, if he had taken another direction he probably could have been one of the great modern American classical composers. Much of A Little Night Music (1973) is in waltz-time; Pacific Overtures (1976, set during trade negotiations between the US and Japan in 1853) utilises minor keys inspired by the tones of the Japanese pentatonic scale. When the rich, sinister score of Sweeney Todd was first heard, some suggested it would have suited the Metropolitan Opera better than on Broadway.

Classical influences pervade Sondheim's work but are often set alongside more conventional music theatre fare — what Sondheim describes as "real 32-bar songs", and standards that have gone on to have independent lives: Send in the Clowns, Good Thing Going, Losing My Mind.

I haven't had complete success convincing my friends as to the wonder of this man. A good few wince when I propose an outing, muttering darkly about the complexity of his music. "Just when you think a tune is nearby," says one, "there's some radical musical shift, a complete key change or such like. And you're off in a brand new direction." Sure, I'd argue back, some of Sondheim's music is not the most accessible — but it's like going to an opera for the first time; make sure you know the story, and listen to bits of the recording before you get to the theatre. That way you'll get a huge amount more out of it.

Not that the composer himself would necessarily welcome that suggestion. According to the producer Cameron Mackintosh, Sondheim "never wrote with the aim of being esoteric. He creates every song for a hit Broadway show. We should never forget that he is a real child of Broadway; one of its most brilliant offspring."

"I've never been popular," Sondheim told The New York Times on his 70th birthday. But maybe more popular acclaim is finally coming. The Donmar's Sondheim festival includes a new staging of his 1994 show, Passion, later this year; Into the Woods (1987) opens next month at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.

"The older Sondheim gets the more his shows get done," says Mackintosh. The original 1964 Broadway production of Anyone Can Whistle closed after just nine performances, yet a tight, clever staging of what is surely the first musical to explore the issues of mental health and local government corruption was the sell-out hit of the year at the Jermyn Street Theatre. The Menier Chocolate Factory's intimate revival of Sunday in the Park with George in 2005, starring Daniel Evans in the title role, transferred to take both the West End and Broadway by storm.

As co-owner of Music Theatre International, which controls the rights of Sondheim's shows, Mackintosh adds: "I see the paperwork and it's a wonderful extending graph of the number of performances.

"I remember pointing this out to Sondheim. He came straight back: I see, so what that means is I get the cachet and you get the cash.'"

Under Sondheim's spell as I am, I'm still living something of Bobby's non-committed life. But there's always a Sondheim lyric to provide reassurance. My current favourite, from Sunday in the Park with George, abrogates any responsibility for wrong decisions. As Dot sings to the artist George, lost both creatively and emotionally: "The choice may have been mistaken, but choosing was not. You have to move on."

Petroc Trelawny will present the BBC Radio 3 live broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall of Saturday's Sondheim at 80 Prom, performed by Bryn Terfel, Dame Judi Dench, Maria Friedman and Daniel Evans, and chairs a platform discussion with Stephen Sondheim at 5.45pm at the Royal College of Music for Proms ticket-holders. Passion previews at the Donmar Warehouse (0844 871 7624; donmarwarehouse.com) from September 10; for other Sondheim events, check the Donmar website. Into the Woods is at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre (openairtheatre.org; 0844 826 4242) from August 6.

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