It's A Hit? Sondheim & The New York Times (Part II)
Exploring every opening-night New York Times review of Sondheim's career (1971-1979)
A few weeks ago, we embarked on our journey through every opening-night New York Times review of Sondheim’s career. In Part I, we covered the period of time from West Side Story (1957) through to Company (1970). If you haven’t read that yet, you can do so by clicking here. Now, on we go:
Follies (1971)
Less than a year has passed since Company opened, and Clive Barnes is on hand once again to cover another op’nin’ of another show. He begins by writing that Follies is “the kind of musical that should have its original cast album out on 78s.” And nostalgia, perhaps unsurprisingly, is something Barnes continues to pay particular attention to throughout his review. Follies, in his view, “carries nostalgia to where sentiment finally engulfs it in its sickly maw.”
Barnes divides Sondheim’s score into two categories, “nostalgic” and “cinematic,” and neither seems to meet with his approval. He suggests that the “nostalgic” numbers lack genuine emotional resonance, noting that “the fun it makes of the past seems to lack something in affection.” “This non-hit parade of pastiche trades on camp,” he writes, “but fundamentally gives little in return.” And he describes the “cinematic” music as “a mixture of this and that, chiefly that,” which might be even more bruising—and is a particularly unkind turn of phrase.
The lyrics are a different matter. Barnes lauds Sondheim’s lyrics as “fresh as a daisy” and “some of the best I have ever encountered.” The high praise for Sondheim's wordcraft is a recurring theme in this review—although, as you can see here, even this acclaim arrives with a critical sting in its tail:
I know of no better lyricist in show-business than Mr. Sondheim—his words are a joy to listen to, even when his music is sending shivers of indifference up your spine.
Something else that is worth highlighting is that, in this review, we see some of the earliest signs of a critic forming expectations of “a Sondheim musical” that go beyond the specifics of any individual show. Look at the parenthetical note below:
Years ago, in 1941, Buddy loved Sally, Sally loved Ben, Phyllis loved Ben, and Ben loved Ben. Buddy married Sally, Ben married Phyllis, but their marriages are not working out. (They rarely do in Stephen Sondheim musicals.)
Interestingly, Barnes expresses some discomfort with his own reaction to the performances of Broadway veterans like Fifi D’Orsay, Mary McCarty, and Ethel Shutta. While acknowledging their show-stopping turns, he admits to feeling “a little uncomfortable at the nature of my admiration.” This is a particularly intriguing comment, echoing as it does this musical’s own complex relationship with ageing and the passage of time.
Barnes is generous as he sums up his reaction to Follies, more so than one might expect after reading some of his comments above:
There are many good things here — I think I enjoyed it better than the Sondheim/Prince last torn marriage manual Company, and obviously everyone concerned here is determined to treat the musical seriously as an art form, and such aspiration must be encouraged.
But Barnes does make a final point, one that seems prescient as we consider the waves of revivals and jukebox musicals that have at times dominated Broadway in the decades since Follies. “Before we know it,” he writes, “Broadway will be awash with nostalgia.”
A Little Night Music (1973)
“At last a new operetta! At last resonances and elegances in a Broadway musical.” So begins Clive Barnes’ glowing review of A Little Night Music. He goes on:
It is Dom Perignon. It is supper at Laserre. It is a mixture of Cole Porter, Gutav Mahler, Antony Tudor and just a little of Ingmar Bergman. And it is more fun than any tango in a Parisian suburb.
And that’s just the first paragraph.
Sondheim’s collaborators receive their fair share of acclaim in this review. Barnes describes Hugh Wheeler’s book as “uncommonly urbane and funny,” with “considerable surface depth.” As far as Hal Prince is concerned, Barnes sees A Little Night Music as a successful realization of Prince’s long-standing goal to bring “something of the sensibility of the serious lyric theater, specifically perhaps the ballet, into American musicals.” In Barnes’ view, Night Music has succeeded where Company and Follies failed in this regard. Tharon Musser’s lighting is praised for putting “all the soft and cold smiles into this particular summer night,” and he describes Florence Klotz’s costumes as “sumptuous and knowingly aware.”
But the most lavish praise is reserved for Sondheim himself. Barnes describes his music as “a celebration of 3/4 time, an orgy of plaintively memorable waltzes, all talking of past loves and lost worlds.” And when it comes to Sondheim’s “breathtaking lyrics,” Barnes waxes, well, lyrical:
They have the kind of sassy, effortless poetry that Cole Porter mastered. The mother announces grandly: “I acquired some position—plus a tiny Titian,” and this is coming from a lyricist who only seconds before has dazzlingly made “raisins” rhyme with “liaisons.” Grace is abounding—who but Mr. Sondheim would dare: “The hip-bath, the hip-bath, how can you trip and slip into hip-bath.” You have to be very hip, and Mr. Sondheim is.
There are some particularly nice descriptions of cast members here too. Barnes describes Glynis Johns (Desiree) as “all tremulous understanding,” Len Cariou (Fredrik) as “delightfully and jauntily battered,” and Laurence Guittard (Carl-Magnus) as “a splendidly stuffed hussar.” Victoria Mallory and D'Jamin Bartlett, as Anne and Petra, are described respectively as “all sugar” and “all spice.”
Barnes’ level of enthusiasm for this show, not for one moment in doubt, is nevertheless reinforced rather nicely in his final paragraph:
A Little Night Music is soft on the ears, easy on the eyes, and pleasant on the mind. It is less than brash, but more than brassy, and it should give a lot of pleasure. It is the remembrance of a few things past, and all to the sound of a waltz and the understanding smile of a memory. Good God! — an adult musical!
The Frogs (1974)
We travel next from New York to New Haven, and with a new critic too. You might know Mel Gussow from his series of “Conversations with…” books, which featured playwrights Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. His review of The Frogs captures the audacious spirit of a truly unique theatrical experiment: a Sondheim musical staged in Yale University's swimming pool. Gussow wryly describes this pool as looking “like an Olympic ocean next to the Yale Rep's usual churchmouse of a home.”
Gussow’s review positions The Frogs in interesting dialogue with Shevelove and Sondheim’s earlier collaboration, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The connection is established early when Gussow writes that Shevelove is “not satisfied merely to do to the Greeks what he did to the Romans.” And the resulting “extravaganza” receives a somewhat mixed assessment.
Gussow is clearly delighted by the show’s playful anachronism, Shevelove receiving praise for remaining “faithful to the spirit of Aristophanes while taking outrageous liberties with his text.” He describes The Frogs as a whole as “inspired nonsense,” but also as “adulterated fun”—and Gussow identifies several limitations in the production. He notes that “most of it is staged on a narrow edge of the pool” and laments that “too much of the time the pool itself remains an idle shimmering forestage.” His observation that “Carmen de Lavallade’s choreography is much too confined” further suggests missed opportunities.
Gussow finds Sondheim’s contribution lacking too. “Another week of effort from Mr. Sondheim,” he writes, “and the show might have the full score it deserves.” And Gussow’s closing remarks sum up his general impression well, of a promising show that has not yet lived up to its potential:
Yale’s Frogs runs only through Sunday, but a tour of out‐of‐town pools is very much in order before a Broadway theater is flooded.
Pacific Overtures (1976)
“It is a very serious, almost inordinately ambitious musical,” writes Clive Barnes of Pacific Overtures, “and as such is deserving of equally serious attention.”
Barnes provides in this review a useful overview of Kabuki theater, distinguishing it from the “more refined” Noh, from the puppet theater of Bunraku, and from the court theater of Gagaku. Pacific Overtures, of course, tells the story of Japan’s Westernization as if it were a Kabuki drama—“but,” Barnes notes, “it soon becomes much more complicated than that.” The “familiar Kabuki tricks” of Hal Prince’s direction, according to Barnes, include “voices screeching in the air like lonely sea birds,” “stylizations with screens and things,” and “stagehands all masked in black to make them invisible to the audience.”
Sondheim’s lyrics are labeled “devilish, wittily and delightfully clever”—and “totally Western.” His music, meanwhile, is described as “Japonaiserie,” which more generally refers to the depiction of Japanese subjects or objects in a Western style. Scholars tend to distinguish this term from Japonisme, the more profound influence of Japanese aesthetics on Western art. Barnes notes that “Leonard Bernstein quite often seems to be trysting with Madame Butterfly in the orchestra pit.”
And Barnes’ appreciation for this score gives rise to some of the most lavish praise for Sondheim we have seen in any of these reviews thus far:
Musically there is a disparity between Mr. Sondheim’s operettalike elegance and ethnic overlay, but even this succeeds with all its carefully applied patina of pastiche—that on demand can embrace can embrace Sullivan or Offenbach. Mr. Sondheim is the most remarkable man in the Broadway musical today—and here he shows it victoriously.
Barnes tempers even this praise with a caveat, suggesting it might be a “pyrrhic victory.” He finds fault too with the narrative balance of Pacific Overtures’ two acts. There is, he writes, “not only a break in continuity but also a sort of fracture tone” after the intermission. “Next,” meanwhile, “seems to have walked in from another musical,” although he does also hail that number as “surprising, ironic and certainly effective.” And John Weidman’s book, in Barnes’ view, “does not always rest happily within the conceptual format of the show”—although he does call it “strikingly original.”
In the final paragraph of this review, we get a good sense of Barnes’ admiration for the sheer ambition of Sondheim and his various collaborators—something he has articulated pretty consistently over the course of several years, even when his own reservations about the results linger:
There are generic and stylistic discrepancies in the musical that are not easily overlooked—but the attempt is so bold and the achievement so fascinating, that its obvious faults demand to be overlooked. It tries to soar—sometimes it only floats, sometimes it actually sinks—but it tries to soar. And the music and lyrics are as pretty and as well-formed as a bonsai tree. Pacific Overtures is very, very different.
Sweeney Todd (1979)
For those of us who have grown up with Sweeney Todd, who have known it only as an already established cultural phenomenon, it is particularly difficult to imagine it as an unknown quantity—to imagine ourselves taking our seats at what was then the Uris Theatre (now the Gershwin, home to Wicked since 2003) on March 1, 1979.
One person in the audience that night was Richard Eder. (Clive Barnes, king of the 1970s NYT Sondheim reviews, was hired by the New York Post in 1978). It is fascinating to view the brand-new Sweeney Todd through his eyes; so much of what he identifies is still discussed today. “It is in many ways closer to opera than to most musicals,” he writes. With that comment alone, Eder began a conversation that still rumbles on 45 years later: in essays, in Facebook groups, at dinner…
“There is more artistic energy, creative personality and plain excitement in Sweeney Todd,” writes Eder, “than in a dozen average musicals.” There is lavish praise for Sondheim’s “endlessly inventive, highly expressive score,” his “brilliant and abrasive lyrics,” and for pretty much every element of this show. Speaking of the source material, and in a particularly delicious turn of phrase, Eder writes that Sondheim and Prince “have taken this set of rattletrap fireworks and made it into a glittering, dangerous weapon.”
We are by now familiar with the sort of language used by reviewers when it comes to Sondheim’s lyrics. Here, they are labeled “endlessly inventive” (unsurprisingly, Eder points to “A Little Priest” to support this point), and he writes that they have “a black, piercing poetry to them.”
“Mr. Sondheim gives us all manner of musical strength,” writes Eder, as he praises the variety of this score, furnished with various examples. And, he adds, “He has strength to burn, in fact.” This comment acts as both supplement and caveat to the praise. He identifies here something of which Sondheim himself spoke so often:
Mr. Sondheim disciplines his music, insisting that it furnish power to the work as a whole and not function separately.
This, of course, is one of the aspects of Sondheim’s work most frequently lauded. But it is interesting to see Eder identify this feature as a potential limitation. He continues:
Sometimes we wish he would let go a little; the Green Finch song, so lovely, is imprisoned in its own activity.
This is emblematic of Eder’s central thesis about Sweeney Todd, that its flaws are tied to its greatest strengths—perhaps inextricably. This is a case he begins to make at the very outset of the review, writing that the achievements of the show are “so numerous and so clamorous that they trample and jam each other in that invisible but finite doorway that connects a stage and its audience; doing themselves some harm in the process.” Later, he expands on this notion:
There is very little in Sweeney Todd that is not, in one way or other, a display of extraordinary talent. What keeps all its brilliance from coming together as a major work of art is a kind of confusion of purpose.
Eder finds that Sondheim and Prince make the Grand Guignol subject matter work “excessively well,” that “what needs a certain disbelief to be tolerable […] is given too much artistic power.” Eder goes on: “The music, beautiful as it is, succeeds, in a sense, in making an intensity that is unacceptable.” It’s a fascinating contradiction to ponder—and is itself rather Sondheimian.
It is interesting, too, to consider the relative shock value of on-stage violence then and now. “Mr. Prince’s effects are always powerful, and sometimes excessively so,” writes Eder, in those halcyon pre-internet, pre-video game days. The throat cuttings, in his view, are not only “simply too bloody,” but “used on us like beatings.”
Eder doesn’t respond well to the “isn’t that Sweeney there beside you?” aspect of the show either. This particular point, he contends, is unproven, finding that “the effort to fuse this Grand Guignol with a Brechtian style of sardonic social commentary doesn't work.” More debatably (not least between Sondheim and Prince themselves), he declares that there is “no serious social message in Sweeney.”
But, he concludes, “these are defects; vital ones; but they are the failures of an extraordinary, fascinating, and often ravishingly lovely effort.”
Sondheim’s final words in Finishing the Hat, the first of his two volumes of published lyrics, are as follows: “And then I met James Lapine.”
In this survey of New York Times reviews, we have not yet quite reached the Lapine collaborations (which begin with Sunday in 1984). We can, however, look forward to the imminent arrival of a figure who, in this context, is similarly significant. We are about to meet Frank Rich.