Blood, soul, and tears flow through those melodies and lyrics. Finishing the hat is losing my mind, and losing my mind is being alive. In part, that may have been because, as early as the showstopper “Rose’s Turn,” some of Sondheim’s most memorable work involved characters who were in danger of getting permanently lost inside their own heads - Company’s emotionally self-entombed single guy, the connection-phobic Bobby, who stares at the entanglements of his closest friends as if they and he belong to different species, or the middle-aged former showgirls (and their husbands) of Follies, sifting through their phantasmagoric pasts and ruefully retracing the roads they didn’t take, or Sunday in the Park’s Georges Seurat, who accepts, as the fate of an artist, the understanding that his deepest relationship will always be with perfecting his own canvas, that people like him aren’t meant to partake of life so much as they’re meant “to watch the rest of the world/From a window while you finish the hat.” But Sondheim made the struggles of those characters vivid in songs that are anything but dry or cerebral they soar, they ache, they break you. Puzzles over passion, cleverness over heart. When Jerry Herman’s music and lyrics for La Cage aux Folles won the Tony over Sondheim’s score for Sunday in the Park with George (this has been fact-checked - it actually happened), Herman made a remarkable sore-winner speech in which, leaving little doubt whom he was trashing, he said, “There’s been a rumor around for a couple of years that the simple, hummable show tune was no longer welcome on Broadway.” The rap on Sondheim was that he was a composer of ideas, not of melodies - the Tom Stoppard of musical theater. There was no shortage of composers who felt that way too. So it’s shocking now to recall the long stretch of years when people insisted there was anything to argue about - that you could like either the cool-temperatured intellectual natterings of Sondheim or the operetta-ish swoops and swoons of Andrew Lloyd Webber that Steve, forever the smartest boy in the class, stroking his beard in his Turtle Bay townhouse as he frowned over a piano, was good for brainiacs with no emotional core, but if you wanted real feeling, real emotion, real songs, you had to look elsewhere. His own work remains omnipresent: A production of his 1990 musical Assassins is currently running at Classic Stage Company, the third Broadway revival of his 1970 musical Company is in previews at the Jacobs Theatre, and on Monday, Steven Spielberg’s film of West Side Story will have its premiere at Lincoln Center. He was his own list - and his measureless influence lives in the work of just about everyone who survives him. With Sondheim, there was no list of people waiting to move up one. If anything, it means that the question of who America’s greatest living musical-theater artist is can finally be asked and lead to an interesting discussion, because for the first time in decades, the answer isn’t obvious. If it is true that, when Marlon Brando died, Jack Nicholson remarked that every other living actor just moved up one place, the image seems inadequate to mark Sondheim’s passing, at 91, after a long and astonishingly productive life.
His writing for those two seminal shows was, in the context of his full body of work, a warm-up - a quick set of stretches before a career that would define and redefine an entire popular art. What if Stephen Sondheim had never written a word, or a note of music, after his thirtieth birthday? What if, grief-stricken at the death of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II in 1960, the young composer had simply decided that he had done his part for musical theater and was ready to try something new? Had that happened we would still, today, more than six decades later, be memorializing a man who had, via his lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story, made an indelible contribution to the history of American musical theater - specifically to modernizing it, to darkening it, to helping it burst what were then thought to be the boundaries of its form. Photo: Photograph by Richard Avedon/Copyright © The Richard Avedon Foundation Stephen Sondheim, New York, April 6, 2004.