Stroll by the Broadway marquees near Times Square, and you’ll see the titles of dozens of shows, ranging from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running “The Phantom of the Opera” to Mel Brooks’ soon-to-open stage version of “Young Frankenstein.”
You won’t encounter Stephen Sondheim’s name anywhere, but don’t be misled. No one has had more of an impact on the Great White Way during the past five decades than the celebrated 77-year-old composer and lyricist.
“He’s the seminal artist from the second half of the century on,” said Lonny Price, who appeared in the original production of “Merrily We Roll Along” and has gone on to direct concert productions of Sondheim works by the New York Philharmonic and others.
“He’s done more to change the face of musical theater and perhaps theater in general than anybody. There’s nobody who has not noticed his appearance and had to make adjustments in the way they worked too. He raised the bar for everybody.”
Sondheim will make a rare appearance Saturday at the Colorado Festival of World Theatre in Colorado Springs to accept the Donald Seawell Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre Award – a prestigious coup for the 4-year-old event.
The seven-time Tony Award winner typically shuns ceremonies of this kind but was persuaded to take part by his longtime friend Peter Shaffer, a renowned playwright who participated in the festival’s three previous installments and has become a major booster.
“Peter is somebody I know well and who would never ask me to do anything that he didn’t think would be fun for me or in some way rewarding,” Sondheim said.
“He was enthusiastic about the spirit of what they’re doing there. So this is all about not only me but boosting what is a cause worth boosting.”
Festivities will include two performances of “Beautiful Girls: A Sondheim Tribute,” a Sondheim revue directed by Price and led by Paul Gemignani, who conducted the original productions of such works as “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods.”
That Sondheim’s name is not constantly up in lights has nothing to do with the unparalleled inventiveness and enduring substance of his works and everything to do with the limits of popular taste.
“What he writes about is sometimes for the general public not as popular as what other people write about,” Price said “He’s interested in a murderous barber who winds up chopping people up and putting them in meat pies.
“That’s not ‘Mame.’ That’s not ‘Hello Dolly.’ A lot of musicals are feel-good shows. Steve asks you to feel, but he also asks you to think, and a lot of people don’t want their musicals like that.”
Reshaping the musical
The chronicle of Sondheim’s career is essentially the story of the contemporary transformation of the American musical. He has taken the seemingly familiar form and reshaped and reimagined it, investing it with unprecedented depth and complexity and pushing it far beyond the bounds of earlier classics such as “Carousel.”
After critical early mentoring from a childhood neighbor, Oscar Hammerstein II, lyricist for such famed shows as “Oklahoma!” and “The Sound of Music,” he attended Williams College and later pursued private studies with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt.
Sondheim’s big break came in 1955 when he was chosen to be the lyricist for “West Side Story,” working with such towering talents as composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins.
“You’re getting not just theoretical experience but you’re working with people who have been through the mill and who are imaginative and gifted,” Sondheim said. “It’s first hand. It’s not taught. Most young people don’t get the chance to work with people that brilliant. I was lucky enough.”
After another stint as a lyricist with Jule Styne on “Gypsy,” he struck off on his own, starting with “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962). But he did not settle into his own voice until “Company” (1970), a multifaceted, nonlinear look at marriage.
“That score, it seems to me, is the first time that it wasn’t unduly affected by other people’s work,” Sondheim said. “It seems to me like mine. It just felt like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s who I am.”‘
In each succeeding musical, he found inspiration in an array of unexpected places – Japanese history in “Pacific Overtures” (1976), a Seurat painting for “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984) and fairy tales in “Into the Woods” (1987). And each varied subject sparked a new sonic world and musical structure.
“He comes up and disappears and comes up in a different place – a splendid magician,” said Shaffer, who was responsible for such plays as “Equus” and “Amadeus.” “He does that over and over again. He has a novelty of creation, a really startling ability both in the music and words to come up in another place.”
For Sondheim, it’s all about “content dictating form” – a phrase that has become one of his recurring mantras.
But certainly nothing could be a more unexpected and unnerving subject for a musical than presidential assassins, yet such ignoble figures are precisely the focus Sondheim’s musical “Assassins.” It opened in 1991 and was revived on Broadway on 2004 after slight revisions, winning five Tony Awards.
While not playing down the horror of each of the assassins’ acts, Sondheim, like he does so well elsewhere, manages to invest the work with surprising emotional poignancy.
“Nobody else has done anything like it,” Shaffer said. “All his work is a great monument to exploration and innovation. He’s always extending the parameters of his own work.”
But no matter what Sondheim is writing about, his musicals can always be counted on for wit, clever wordplay and uncompromising sophistication.
“The great joy of his work is that you’re not playing one color,” Price said. “You’re playing complexity and nuance and maturity of thought, and that’s very exciting for performers and very enlivening for an audience.”
Discouraging time
After reaching the peak of his success in the 1970s and ’80s, Sondheim confronted a changing Broadway scene. As production costs skyrocketed, emphasis has shifted to revivals and reworkings of movies and television shows.
The composer also faces the reality that theater has been pushed to the periphery of American culture amid a time of much discussion of the “dumbing down” of society. He admits being discouraged at times.
“People demand less,” he said. “They’re less interested in what’s going on. It’s particularly noticeable in books and the fact that Broadway is 90 percent musicals and 10 percent plays. When I grew up, it was 60 percent plays and 40 percent musicals. It means a whole aspect of the culture is being sidestepped.”
But Sondheim remains undeterred. “Sweeney Todd,” probably the best known of all his works, was revived in a well-reviewed Broadway production in 2005-06 that will soon tour. And director Tim Burton has created a movie version with Johnny Depp that is set to open in December.
He is putting the final touches on the latest permutation of “Bounce,” a musical that has undergone multiple revisions and received its share of mixed reviews along the way. This version will be performed under the auspices of next year’s New York Shakespeare Festival.
But Sondheim acknowledges that writing only gets harder as he gets older.
“You find yourself perhaps writing the same thing in a disguised way that you’ve written before, which bothers me. But also, people expect more of you, and that is a stigma.
“I try to pick subjects and songs that I haven’t touched before, so they frighten me, so they challenge me, so I have to think of new solutions as opposed to something with feels familiar.”
After all, pursuing the unfamiliar has served Sondheim well for a half century, making him one of the unquestioned titans of American theater.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
