GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – January 2022
It’s 1992 and Sam Mendes’ celebrated staging of Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins is in rehearsal at the Donmar Warehouse. In the green room Stephen Sondheim sits reading a copy of Gramophone during the lunch break (yes, really), a cue if ever there was one for an old friend of mine in the cast to drop my name. Sondheim responds with, let’s just say, guarded admiration calling me a ‘very fair critic’. From almost anyone else in the business I might consider that damning with faint praise – but from him it was the best thing I’d heard all year.
An informal lunch was then proposed for us to meet and compare notes and looking back I was eternally grateful for quality time in which I was not under pressure (as I would be subsequently) to probe into the fine print of Sondheim’s own work (an ordeal for him too as he hated repeating himself). Actually we talked about English Choral Music and we talked about Percy Grainger, a mutual passion. To my delight I was able to introduce him to a work he didn’t know – Grainger’s ballet The Warriors – an exotic and rip-roaring 15 minutes of music the like of which I’ve still never heard. It occurred to me that Grainger’s fascination with mutation of the same material in different guises might well have been one aspect that drew Sondheim in. That, and the unexpected, the constant wrong-footing in terms of harmony and instrumentation.
As time goes by the most fitting epitaph to this titan of musical theatre might be that line from his Pulitzer Prize winning Sunday in the Park with George: ‘White. A blank page or canvas. So many possibilities.’ No one could possibly have imagined or second-guessed where Sondheim and his collaborators would take us.
The first act of Sunday in the Park with George (perfection however you look at it) culminates in all the elements of Seurat’s painting finally falling into their rightful place with that heart-stopping ensemble ‘Sunday’ – the apogee of aspiration and affirmation. But where the piece goes next was and still is jaw-droppingly unexpected. The same is true of Into The Woods – and Company doesn’t even have a plot, just an imperative. Company is to relationships what Sweeney Todd is to London and meat pies.
But I must say more about the beauty of Sondheim’s music and the way that his very distinctive harmony makes the tunes so ‘auspicious’ when they arrive. Of course, the words are dazzling, but the way in which the composer’s own musical ‘voice’ is subsumed in the style and tinta of each show is so deft and so organic as to be almost unnoticeable. And the myriad tunes that the ignorant and/or tone deaf always said he couldn’t write: ‘Take Me To The World’, ‘In Buddy’s Eyes’ (that ravishing postlude), ‘Loving You’, ’With So Little To Be Sure Of’ or my own personal favourite among his songs ‘Anyone Can Whistle’.
If I had to pick just one show it would probably be Follies not least for its glorious tributes to a bygone Broadway. Sondheim was the ultimate Broadway Baby who grew up to chart its destiny – and from his place among the immortals he still will.
