Reading Musicals

Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays edited and with an introduction by Sandor Goodhart 2000: Garland

Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musical by Stephen Citron 2001: Oxford University Press

Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader edited by Steven Cohan 2002: Routledge

Why has the musical—the stage musical at any rate—so rarely attracted critical writing of any quality? Unlike the opera or the popular arts, the Broadway musical seems to inspire passion or disdain but not serious thought. There are no Cahiers de la Comedie Musicale. Without serious defenders—or, at least, serious analysis—the Broadway (or Broadway/West End) musical remains largely outside the pale, beyond the reach of critical discourse. At best, it appears as a kind of middle-class social phenomenon accompanied by a body of guarded journalistic criticism with a formulaic view of the state of the musical—mainly a ritualistic mourning over its perpetual decadence and imminent demise.

If musical theater is in a state of continual decadence, it must therefore always be in need of renewal and reform. The Princess Theater musicals, Show Boat, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kurt Weill, the "Broadway operas" of the forties and fifties, and the book musicals of the following years are conventionally described as rescue operations for a form in danger of degenerating into girlie shows. Alas, this standardized view of the history of musical theater as perpetually striving toward higher ground has never succeeded in raising its perceived intellectual stature.

The musical theater of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd-Webber would seem to offer the chance for some radical reassessment. The so-called Euro musical, dominated (perhaps originated) by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, moved from rock opera to pastiche to pseudo-grand opera in only a few years. Lloyd-Webber has presided over an astonishing transition from "alternative" music-theater to the globalization and operatizing of the musical and its transformation into a transnational industrial product. This amazing success story surely deserves some kind of explication. On the other hand, the Stephen Sondheim story is almost the direct antithesis of the Lloyd-Webber saga. Sondheim emerged directly from the culture of the old New York musical theater to evolve a new form of musical that is quite independent of opera but nevertheless capable of commanding serious critical and intellectual attention.

Joan Peyser recently produced a study (Sondheim and Bernstein: Almost Parallel Lives, given as the Henry James lecture at New York University on April 2, 2001) of the many parallels between the life and musical theater work of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Her view is that Sondheim actually produced the "new American musical" that had long been expected from Bernstein. The parallels between the life, work, and career of Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber are not so obvious. For starters, Sondheim is an extremely private person, while Lloyd-Webber's private life has been largely conducted in public. The result is that Citron's Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber: The New Musicalis long on Lloyd-Webber biography and short on Sondheim gossip. More importantly, the artistic trajectory of these two composers offers a remarkable study in opposites. Both are composers whose force of personality dominates their work but who, as suggested above, have moved in almost exactly opposite directions. There was everything to expect from the creator of JesusChrist Superstar and Evita while A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum hardly seemed to offer a glimpse into the future of anything. But it was Lloyd-Webber who, backpedaling furiously, created the notion that nostalgia for the past was the future that awaited us. And it was Sondheim who, without ever really having left the confines of the contemporary "book musical," actually evolved something new.

How did this happen? What does it mean? Is "serious musical" an oxymoron or a possibly real phenomenon? Is Sondheim's work purely personal or truly the beginning of a new genre? What has been the influence of these two men on a younger generation of creators? What are the implications of Lloyd-Webber...