On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide by Ethan Mordden (review)

Stephen Sondheim, in his 87th year at the time of writing, has for so long been the revered senior figure of the American musical that it comes as a shock to realize that no concise, approachable guide to his work has hitherto existed. At 198 pages and an admirably affordable hardback price, Mordden’s On Sondheim bids for that slot and wins it. That is not to say that his book is a triumph: in a number of ways it is unsatisfactory and in some quite odd, but it still manages to serve its purpose surprisingly well. It is impressively up to date, and includes commentary on the 2014 film of Into the Woods and the 2015 West End production of Gypsy.

Mordden belongs to that endangered species, the freelance professional writer on the arts, and he has specialized in Broadway musicals, of which probably no one in the world has a greater working knowledge, in opera, and in film, as well as writing fiction and essays on gay culture, especially New York’s, and other topics. One would lament the disappearance of a remarkable skill set that goes with this particular way of earning a living and reaching a relatively wide readership, for he is incapable of writing a boring sentence or making a less than insightful observation. At bottom this is critical technique of a practical kind rather than sustained brilliance, but it goes a long way, and I found myself delighting in many things I had never before thought about or properly thought through in Sondheim’s oeuvre.

One very simple observation, which comes early on (p. 4), is that the four types of show Oscar Hammerstein set the young Sondheim as training in musical theatre—to adapt a play he admired, to adapt a play with problems that needed solving, to adapt a non-dramatic source, and to write an original—were reflected in Hammerstein’s own work of the 1940s, not all of it yet in being at the time of the assignment: the types apply respectively to Carousel, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and Allegro. The academic may find this a little too pat and wish to quibble, but Mordden’s aperçus are in general far above the infuriating ‘opinionated guide’ his unnecessary subtitle portends. ‘[Sondheim’s] characters struggle with neurotic problems, just as people in the audience do’ (p. 34). Yes. ‘I think something’s wrong here’, he states after quoting Sondheim’s explanation of why he dislikes his own lyrics for ‘I feel pretty’ (p. 41). I agree (and it is important for critics to take on Sondheim the self-critic). Assassins tackles ‘the unfathomable malice of the born loser’ (p. 129). Yes again. Mordden can be trite, as when describing the incompatible production elements of Bernstein’s 1956 operetta Candide as ‘Western Civilization in the form of a pageant co-authored by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, and Bugs Bunny’ (p. 8). He can be brutal, notably about critics: Clive Barnes was an ‘idiot’ (p. 94), Walter Kerr worse (p. 186). He can be wickedly funny: ‘The whole show could have taken place in Zabar’s’, he says of the over-theatrical original Broadway production of Into the Woods (p. 157)—a New Yorker’s in-joke, but you can look it up. (He is much kinder to the first London production of Into the Woods, and is finely attuned to London productions in general.) Most of the time he is judicious, while remaining vividly readable.

The book is divided into two introductory chapters and three closing ones framing a succession of very short essays, one on each show. Eighteen shows are treated, starting with Saturday Night (Sondheim’s unproduced Climb High has yet to be reclaimed) and ending with Road Show. West Side Story, Gypsy, and Do I Hear a Waltz?, the stage musicals for which Sondheim wrote lyrics only, not the music, are included, and so is the expanded...