Composer Stephen Sondheim’s greatness lies “beyond the clever lyrics, beyond the complex music.” Sondheim can make you a better person:
“The ambitions, dreams, disasters, and fixations of Sondheim’s characters can teach us how to get through our own lives—so that, like Petra’s vow in A Little Night Music, we’ll not have been dead when we die,” author Richard Schoch (pronounced Shook) argues in How Sondheim Can Change Your Life (Atria Books, 304 pages.)
Schoch, a long-time drama professor, one-time theater director and ardent Sondheim aficionado, extrapolates the life lesson he contends is central to each of a dozen Sondheim musicals. (See chapter titles below.) One need not accept the novel premise to benefit from this scholar’s erudition, insights and enthusiasms.
It’s easy to start out suspicious of the promise in the catchy title, for at least two reasons.
Sondheim did not create the characters on his own. In “Gypsy,” for example, the first musical that the author analyzes, the “characters” were based on real-life people that Gypsy Rose Lee wrote about in her memoir; the musical adaptation had a score by Jule Styne and a libretto by Arthur Laurents. Sondheim served as the lyricist.
And then, much of what the author elucidates is arguably descriptive rather than prescriptive. However much insight the musicals provide into human nature, can individual theatergoers really use them as manuals to change their own lives?
Again using “Gypsy”as the example: Schoch marshals the evidence to conclude that the show is not just about how Madame Rose tries to fulfill her own dreams by imposing them on her children; it’s about how Louise breaks the cycle of emotional and actual abandonment that began generations ago in her family — Rose’s mother abandoned Rose; Rose’s daughter June abandons Rose by eloping with one of the chorus boys. Louise never abandons Rose; she stays with her, supports her, because she is able to become independent both professionally and emotionally. But she does this by becoming a professional stripper; this is hardly a useful roadmap for the average theatergoer.
Such objections seem increasingly trivial given the care and sophistication with which Schoch guides us through the musicals, providing basic plot, context, critical analysis, and something more. “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life” offers a fresh way to look at some great works, without Ignoring Sondheim’s greatness as a lyricist and composer. Rather, Schoch often demonstrates the subtle brilliance with which Sondheim uses his words and music to illuminate character.
In “Company,” for example, the music often deliberately undermines the surface meaning of the lyrics, to indicate that the characters are lying to themselves. In the title number, when all of Bobby’s married friends sing that they love him, the word is sustained for an astonishing fifteen seconds (“We loooooooove you”) – so exaggerated that it feels performative: fake. His friends idealize Bobby, and pity him, and, for their own selfish reasons, want to keep him the way he is, which is lonely. To the author, the musical is not about marriage, as is commonly assumed, but about loneliness.
For Bobby’s part, he says he wants intimacy, but he doesn’t really; this is obvious in the musical number “Barcelona,” but the author closely examines other songs in which his resistance is less obvious, his claims of truly seeking love self-delusional, as the audience understands in part because of the dissonance between the music and the lyrics.
Schoch’s critical analyses are enhanced by research.
His chapter on “Sweeney Todd” cites Francis Bacon’s 19th century essay “Of Revenge,” and recounts a modern Swiss science experiment on the pleasure that people experience from contemplating revenge, as indicated by brain scans.
He mines both published and unpublished sources to tell the story of how Sondheim came up with his most popular song “Send in the Clowns.” He also painstakingly explains how so many singers – including some of the actor-singer students he instructs – get it wrong. The song, like the musical for which it was created, “A Little Night Music,” is about regrets. And in the scene in which she sings the song, Desiree frees herself from her regrets by admitting them, and trying to make amends despite how vulnerable that makes her. There is so much that’s fascinating and wise in Schoch’s analysis of the song that a succinct summary can’t do it justice. Let me also offer a tidbit:
“When an act bombed in an old-time vaudeville show, the stage manager really did bring on the clowns to give the audience a little comic relief after the fiasco they had just witnessed. When Desirée invokes that same image she is admitting that she’s made a mess of her life. But there’s an ironic edge to it. Desirée calls for the proverbial clowns only to realize that they’ve been there all the time—because she is the clown.”
Throughout his book, Schoch includes brief asides about himself at relevant moments in his discussion of one Sondheim musical or another.
He says he is intrigued by the Boatman in “Sunday in the Park With George,” because he too has only one working eye.
He tells us he took the initial critical panning of “Merrily We Roll Along” personally. The same age at the time as the three main characters in their youth, he felt that the song Our Time was “like the echo of my own greedy desire—it’s my time—but amplified in ardor and eloquence.” Decades later, having seen the recent hit revival, “what I feel in the score for Merrily is my own journey: I’m being escorted back into my past but also being warned not to indulge a false nostalgia for it.”
He mentions coming out of the closet in two different chapters. In the chapter on Follies, which he subtitles “How to Survive Your Past,” Schoch discusses Paul’s song “The Road You Didn’t Take,” in which the character pretends not to care about the past, but, as Sondheim indicates in several ways, Paul is actually tormented by it. Then Schoch writes: “whenever I’m in the mood to torture myself…I return to all the roads I didn’t take ,” and then enumerates a few — what if he hadn’t put career over love, what if he hadn’t stayed in the closet in his twenties. “This other Richard is leading a parallel life—the life that this Richard might have led, but now never will. It’s too late.”
Later, the chapter on Into The Woods, which is subtitled “How to Choose the Right Path,” focuses on the Baker’s Wife, and how her hero’s quest to placate the witch changes into a kiss with Prince Charming – the kiss convincing her that the right path for her is the original one she had chosen for herself, back with the Baker. At this point, Schoch recalls the man he himself kissed thirty years ago “who became for me a prince” – a kiss that convinced him to leave the safety of the closet, at a time in the early 1990s when it felt to him like a risk to do so. “Suddenly I was launched into a new phase of my life; into, indeed, life itself. Into the woods, and then out”
When Schoch returns to the discussion of the Baker’s Wife, he argues that, contrary to the view of many others (including actresses who have portrayed her), her rejection of the prince’s kiss is not the mature choice, but “the foreclosing of her own future, the future that the prince has just revealed to her…” – not life with the prince per se, but a fuller life, an awakened consciousness.
“It’s a harsh thing to say, but the Baker’s Wife heard the call of life—and tuned it out,’ Schoch writes. “That’s what I find in her story. She squandered her chance.”
That this PhD from Stanford who has authored scholarly texts can get so personal – not just with these unobtrusive personal asides but with such a humble, anti-authoritative remark like “that’s what I find in her story” – may be the most effective overall lesson in “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life.” Sondheim’s musicals can start changing your life because you start taking them personally. This may be the most satisfying way to approach and appreciate any work of art.
1 Gypsy: How to Be Who You Are
2 Company: How to Get Close
3 Follies: How to Survive Your Past
4 A Little Night Music: How to Handle Your Regrets
5 Pacific Overtures: How to Be a Part of the Whole
6 Sweeney Todd: How (Not) to Deal with Injustice
7 Merrily We Roll Along: How to Grow Up
8 Sunday in the Park with George: How to Be an Artist
9 Into the Woods: How to Choose the Right Path
10 Assassins: How to Let the Darkness In
11 Passion: How to Love
Exit Music: Here We Are
