chapter 16 Temporality and Control in Sondheim’s Middle Period: From Company to Sunday in the Park with George1
Raymond Knapp
Revisiting the Past in the Musical’s Present
Stephen Sondheim’s musicals from the early 1970s marked out new territory in many ways. In professional terms, they established him as an accomplished Broadway composer and lyricist, with Company (1970), Follies (1971), and A Little Night Music (1973) receiving mostly favorable critical notices and multiple Tony Awards, including Best Original Score for each. Even if these shows did not enjoy exceptionally long runs,2 they launched his extraordinarily fruitful work- ing relationships with producer-director Harold Prince and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, and remained for many years the cornerstone of Sondheim’s career and reputation. Thematically, too, these musicals set the terms for Sondheim’s Broadway career. All three shows explore intricately interwoven sets of personal relationships while making anxious gestures toward an ever- receding past. Thus, Company’s not-so-young urban professionals cling to a
1 An earlier version of this essay, “Layered Temporalities in Sondheim’s First Maturity: From Company to Pacific Overtures,” was presented as part of “Time: Sense, Space, Structure: An Interdisciplinary Symposium” (The Claremont Colleges and Graduate University, February 22–24, 2007). A later version expanded the scope of the essay, “Bobby and Ben, Sweeney and George: On the Vagaries of Musical Control in Sondheim’s ‘Personal’ Shows,” presented as part of “Sondheim’s Musicals: A Lecture and Panel Discussion” (co-hosted by the Department of Music and the Department of Drama, University of California, Irvine, March 9, 2007). To a much smaller extent, this essay also draws on earlier work of mine, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, 2005), The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton, 2006), and “Marking Time in Pacific Overtures: Reconciling East, West, and History within the Theatrical Now of a Broadway Musical,” in Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary, eds. Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick (Aldershot, uk, 2008), pp. 163–76. 2 Of Sondheim’s shows, only A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Forum (1962) had an initial run of over two years. Among his other shows, only Into the Woods and Company had initial runs over 700 performances (but less than two years), the same level of success enjoyed by West Side Story and Gypsy, for which Sondheim wrote only the lyrics.
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1960s-styled sophistication; in Follies, aging members of an earlier generation of American urban sophisticates look to their pasts with rueful disappointment; and, in A Little Night Music, their Old-World counterparts from a still earlier gen- eration try with similar pathos to reclaim the lost opportunities of their youth. Sondheim’s progression backwards and outwards continued through the 1970s with Pacific Overtures (1976) and Sweeney Todd (1979), each distinctively steeped in regret for a past that cannot be overturned. Although Sondheim’s collaboration with Prince ended after the disastrously short run of Merrily We Roll Along (1981), regret over the past has since remained a consistent theme in his shows. Indeed, the fateful Merrily was itself a story of betrayed ideals, con- veyed within a Pinter-like reverse chronology.3 Sondheim’s next show, Sunday in the Park with George (1984), written and directed by James Lapine, returned from the far-flung nineteenth-century settings of Sondheim’s shows from the late 1970s to the American present in two big strides, starting in late-nineteenth- century Paris for the first act, but shifting to contemporary New York for most of the second, as part of a generational reconsideration of legacy. This restoration of a contemporary perspective on the past, expressed dramatically within a two- act structure, curiously foreshadows a similar shift in Sondheim and Lapine’s next collaboration, Into the Woods (1987), where a more oblique shift in dramatic sensibilities between the two acts again takes us from a temporally remote European outlook—that of the traditional fairytale—to something like the American present, when the first act’s linked fairytales go awry in the second. These musicals provided Sondheim with repeated opportunities to explore, lament, and sometimes challenge the oppressive sway of historical time, indulging a tendency that has continued with extraordinary dramatic success in his two original shows of the 1990s. Thus, Assassins (1990) brings together more than a century’s worth of American assassins and would-be assassins into the semblance of an alternative, disenfranchised community, whereas Passion (1994), through the shared singing of letters, overturns the tyrannies of time and space within a more personal sphere, thereby collapsing the writing and delivery of those letters into an experienced simultaneity.4
3 Merrily ran for only 16 performances, although the show—especially its score—has acquired fervent admirers. There have been many successful revivals, which often rearrange the plot in chronological order and/or include new songs. It has been especially successful in London, where the 2000 production won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, but it has never been revived on Broadway. Because of this complicated history, and because its success has come later than the period I am considering, I have not included Merrily in my discussion. 4 I discuss Into the Woods and Passion in The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, pp. 150–163, 303–309. I discuss Assassins in The American Musical and the Formation