Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook (review)

Stephen Banfield introduces his landmark study, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, by observing that the English language offers no single word, other than the term songwriter, “for an artist who creates lyrics and music together as an aesthetic entity” ([Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993], 1). While so modest a designation might barely accommodate a Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, it is inadequate for Sondheim, who arguably has engaged diverse musico-dramatic and melopoetic problems more consistently and imaginatively than any composer since Richard Wagner. But where Wagner attempted to create the Gesamtkunstwerk almost singlehandedly, Sondheim thinks of himself as a “collaborative dramatist,” the composer-lyricist at the hub of a continuously evolving team of specialists who have collectively created more than a dozen musical plays for the commercial theatre.

It is in this sense that we must interpret the inclusion of a collection of essays about Sondheim in Garland’s series of Casebooks on Modern Dramatists, which has previously addressed such figures as Shepard, Shaffer, Mamet, Hare, Simon, and McNally. According to its prefatory note, the series “has not previously concentrated on a playwright who has written exclusively for musical theater” (vii). While few might contest the general editor’s assertion that “Sondheim has created musical theater which has all the depth and range of so-called ‘legitimate’ theater” (vii), the playwright credit will certainly raise more than a few eyebrows. Sondheim himself has cautioned that “though the public may call his shows ‘Sondheim musicals,’” he doesn’t. “Those who feel they can identify typical Sondheimian themes and moods—ambivalence, disillusionment, darkness, defeatism—are laboring under a delusion. The stories come from the librettists; the themes and atmosphere are theirs” (quoted by Stephen Schiff in “Deconstructing Sondheim,” The New Yorker [8 March 1993], 80). Nevertheless, most of the fourteen essays in this anthology treat him as nothing more or less than a “playwright,” frequently misattributing to him the contributions of his various collaborators while privileging every other parameter over his music. Ironically, the unique talents of the composer-lyricist are proportionately devalued, and his diverse stylistic responses to varying collaborative dramatists undifferentiated. In a telling footnote, one critic admits that he categorically excludes music from the “text” of a musical: “instead, my chief concern is to determine how the text(s) of the drama—both lyrics and book—together construct an aesthetic statement, a total ‘philosophy’ of art” (183).

In her curiously perfunctory introduction, volume editor Joanne Gordon characterizes the anthology as “eclectic”: “each writer was encouraged to find in Sondheim something that excited them [sic] . . . to allow something of his genius to be comprehended” (4). That few of her authorial recruits were familiar from existing Sondheim scholarship initially tantalized me with hopes for fresh critical approaches deriving from genre and cultural studies, metadramatic theory, intertextual readings, feminist perspectives, and unfamiliar primary source materials. (Sandor Goodhart’s mini-symposium of essays on Sondheim in volume eight of Ars Lyrica [1994] has demonstrated just how fruitful such endeavors can be.)

At the conclusion of one of the Casebook’s more nuanced pieces, Edward T. Bonahue, Jr. articulates an objective more ambitious than Gordon’s:

[E]mbracing . . . Sondheim’s pieces . . . as legitimate dramatic texts deserving analysis from literary and cultural studies requires that they be placed on the same playing field as other important works. We must bring to the serious musical the same kind of careful critical techniques as we do to other drama, we must ask the same difficult questions, and we must be willing to criticize as well as praise.

[183]

Focusing on Sunday in the Park with George, Bonahue deconstructs the cliché of “Sondheim as revolutionary” and persuasively argues that structural innovations serve traditional aesthetic values (creative genius, mystical inspiration, skillful execution, and the creation of a transcendent artifact). He concludes that Sondheim’s oeuvre is therefore more accurately situated within modernist rather than postmodern strategies.

Unfortunately, few of the essays rise to...