It’s an off-putting therapeutic title --How Sondheim Can Change Your Life -- but theatre scholar, critic, and Stephen Sondheim devotee Richard Schoch believes that by attending to the interaction of music and words in Sondheim’s innovative musical dramas we can learn how to “survive, handle, deal with and accept” life’s challenges. The verbs are from Schoch’s chapter heads, part of the “life’s lessons” he feels are inherent in Sondheim scores. The feel-good phrases are, in my opinion, unfortunate, but what Schoch does with his Jung-inspired analyses is critically impressive.
Just when we think we have the meaning down of a Sondheim song, a couple of notes, an unexpected interval, a shift in meter, key or tempo suggests we’ve been taken in and have fooled ourselves, the way Sondheim’s characters often fool themselves. Schoch’s analyses deepen our appreciation of the wit and cleverness of a Sondheim score: its ambivalence, “stabbing dissonance,” what a marvelous Sondheim phrase that is. Schoch’s overall theme is that Sondheim forces us to be honest with ourselves. Of course, being gay, Schoch is partial to Sondheim, who was also gay, but he points out the irony of Sondheim’s dark themes, intuited typically by heterosexual characters, often hurt, fierce women trying to make it in a man’s world.
In informal, conversational prose, Schoch suggests that his commentaries may be off or inconclusive. He suggests, he does not insist, though at times, unnecessary to me, he also interjects his own confirming “life experiences.” Readers may skip chapters dedicated to shows they don’t know, but these, too, emphasize the often deliberate uncomfortable relationship between text and music. Traditional musicals offer an escape from life, Schoch says. Sondheim’s confront it. “We are all Fosca,” Schoch quotes Sondheim, about the contemptible, psychopathic protagonist of “Passion,” some say is his most inaccessible work. Schoch also notes that “Passion’s” male protagonist Giorgio sings “the least mawkish love song ever written” an achievement of force and candor, but he admits that not everyone is sold on this 1994 no-intermission musical drama. When I saw it, people got up to leave.
Unlike pre-Sondheim musicals that put the pieces of life back together, Schoch says that Sondheim takes them apart and leaves the audience with ambiguity. He offers not life with all its riddles happily solved, but “life deconstructed and laid bare, in all its confusion and disarray.”
Audiences have not always understood or accepted such a perspective, but what Sondheim gives is truth, not self-comforting artifice, and with the right performing artists, stunning complexity. “Send in the Clowns,” for example, is sung best when it’s performed by a dramatic artist who is not primarily a singer (Barbra Streisand and Sarah Vaughn notwithstanding), as it originally was by Glynis Johns, for whom Sondheim wrote the piece, and who delivers it in the context of A Little Night Music. Or Elaine Stritch in “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Company, or Angela Lansbury in “Sweeney Todd.”
The surprise, then, is that, instead of a group of essays about self-coping, each focused on a particular musical drama, what Schoch gets us with are nuanced readings of 13 works in the Sondheim playlist that may get us to forego regret and self-delusion, not to mention better understand and enjoy brilliant musical drama.
