What happens when you read or hear the word “musical”? Do you wince at the memory of an over-amplified theatre evening watching spandex-clad adults pretending to be cats? Were you “changed” for good – and not in a good way – this Christmas season by Wicked, a stage show turned cinematic juggernaut that the New York Times described recently as “cultural bludgeoning”?
The modern musical has a lot to answer for since it swallowed 1980s steroids to bulk up. Entrepreneurs took a century-old theatrical form and turned it into the mega musical: slick, reproduceable, tourable, mass-marketable, candyfloss waterboarding.
Embraced by some, dismissed by others, mega-musical spectacles have long-since eclipsed what the musical once was – and, for some, still is.
For many of these musical purists, Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021 aged 91, was their pope.
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A lifelong wisecracking New Yorker, Sondheim inherited the musical theatre tradition from his mentor, Oscar “Sound of Music” Hammerstein II, and opened up the form’s possibilities to the ambivalence of modern life.
One member of the worldwide church of Sondheimites is Richard Schoch, professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast. Unsatisfied by Sondheim obituaries and tributes, he began writing a book exploring the universality of Sondheim shows. Their themes and lessons are so ingenious, he promises, that they can change your life.
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“What Sondheim offers us is not life with all its riddles happily solved but life deconstructed and laid bare, in all its confusion and disarray,” he argues. “Virginia Woolf once described George Eliot as a novelist for ‘grown-up people’, and the same is true of Stephen Sondheim. His musicals are for grown ups.
Schoch is so passionate about his subject that he’s kindly agreed to an interview – via satellite – from the Queen Mary 2, halfway across the Atlantic. In between occasional line drops he explains why Sondheim is different from the mega-musicals of big gestures and hummable, repetitive tunes. (Full disclosure: I have been a Sondheim admirer since 1996 when I floated down London’s South Bank after a Royal National Theatre performance of A Little Night Music, a Swedish-set musical farce starring Judi Dench best known for Sondheim’s only pop hit, Send in the Clowns.)
For Schoch, the Sondheim spark came from seeing Angela Lansbury as the cannibal-adjacent pie-maker Nellie Lovett in Sweeney Todd.
His Sondheim passion has stayed with him in the subsequent four decades: as a theatre director in Washington DC and New York and later at the New York Public Library’s performing arts archives. After teaching for 15 years in London he is a covert recruiter to the Sondheim cult through his over-subscribed Queen’s musical theatre acting class and an advanced module on the composer-lyricist.
“The students arrive in class thinking musical theatre is one thing – jazz hands and toe-tapping tunes – but end class realising that it can also be proper theatre,” he says.
More than that: Schoch’s entertaining and engaging book argues that Sondheim’s works are high art. They explore the human condition with precision, yet remain malleable enough to remain fresh for each new generation.
Take the largely plotless Company (1970) about a bachelor with intimacy issues, wondering how best to survive being alive: as a stoic singleton or as a sorry-grateful husband. Revived recently with a female lead, it became a Tinder-era exploration of urban loneliness and the ticking biological clock.
Gypsy, an early work with Sondheim lyrics, is about a pushy stage mother but recent productions highlight the mother-child conflict over unlived lives.
Follies tackles middle-aged people and lies they tell themselves to rationalise poor life choices.
Sondheim’s favourite themes – obsession, loss, regret – can be a dark business, just as his music can switch without warning from peppy showtune to restless Ravel.
For Schoch, Sondheim’s rare talent as a composer-lyricist allowed him go beyond hummable melodies to explore the dramatic possibilities of merging words and music, conflicting emotion and intellect.
“There are Sondheim dissonances and angularity; you can get quite positive lyrics sitting on music that is troubling,” he says.
With complex music and ambivalent lyrics and stories, Sondheim’s work attracts criticism for favouring a chilly cerebral approach, more clever than kind. Schoch is having none of it, praising Sondheim shows for daring to show “characters who reflect on their situation”.
“They are smart enough to step back from their experience to try and understand ... something we all want to do,” he says.
After his last Broadway musical in 1994, Sondheim enjoyed a surge of popularity late in life. Film versions of Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods helped; a third – Merrily We Roll Along – is in the works from Richard Linklater. On stage, meanwhile, actors and comedians from Daniel Radcliffe and Jake Gyllenhaal to Stephen Colbert and Catherine Tate are lining up to appear in Sondheim productions.
A decade ago Tate delivered a standout performance in a London revival of Sondheim’s 1991 show Assassins, about the nine people who – with varying levels of success – set out to kill a US president. Amid jokes, revue numbers and a carnival setting, Assassins mockingly celebrates the American dream as a logic trap: if an American’s self-realisation dream is to kill the president, should they go for it – and should we disapprove or applaud?
How does Schoch view the show, months after two failed attempts on the life of Donald Trump?
“It’s never been more timely,” he says. “Life in America can get so bad that a wayward few will go to horrific extremes to put things right. It’s wrong, but it happens, and it happens for a reason.”
Sondheim’s last work, Here We Are, is coming to London in April, while Northern Ireland Opera will present Follies in Belfast next September.
Before his death, Sondheim had passed the musical torch on to a new generation lead by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton. Even if it’s too soon to tell if the grown-up musical form remains creative or is calcifying, Schoch is confident that Sondheim shows will still be playing in a century’s time. Why?
“There’s the harmonic, architectural complexity of the music itself, the cleverness, dexterity and insightfulness of the lyrics,” he says. “His work is about what the music and lyrics make it possible for us to see, hear or feel. The music and lyrics work together to provoke us stir up something.”
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch is available now.
