It's A Hit? Sondheim & The New York Times (Part III)
Exploring every opening-night New York Times review of Sondheim's career (1981-1991)
Today we continue our survey of every opening-night New York Times review of Sondheim’s career. In Part I, we covered the period from West Side Story (1957) to Company (1970). Part II saw us through the 1970s, from Follies (1971) to Sweeney Todd (1979). Now, let’s keep rolling along into the 1980s:
Merrily We Roll Along (1981)
Enter Frank Rich. Rich joined The New York Times in 1980, but first became known to theatregoers through his essay on Follies for The Harvard Crimson. Sondheim was “absolutely intrigued” by that piece of writing—so much so that he invited the undergraduate Rich to lunch. Rich remained at The Times until 2011; he has also, thrillingly, served as executive producer for shows including Veep and Succession, and for the James Lapine-directed Six by Sondheim.
Rich, whose standing as an authority on Sondheim is clear from the outset of this review, opens with a remark that has become one of the best-known lines in all Sondheim criticism:
As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.
It is a clever opening gambit: it could begin either a rave review or an out-and-out pan. And Rich does indeed identify two types of heartbreak as he expands on this point: first, the pain of being moved by the “emotional force” of Sondheim’s music; second, the pain of seeing Sondheim’s “most powerful work” on full display in shows that fail. To illustrate this second point, Rich cites Anyone Can Whistle and, more intriguingly, Pacific Overtures.
“Both kinds of pain,” writes Rich, “are abundant in Merrily We Roll Along.” And here lies the tension at the heart of this review. The praise for Sondheim’s contribution is generous (though not without caveat); the show as a whole receives a shellacking. We read of “songs that are crushing and beautiful—that soar and linger and hurt.” “But,” Rich continues, “the show that contains them is a shambles.”
Rich’s criticisms are particularly interesting to consider today, more than four decades on, after the enormous success of Maria Friedman’s production of Merrily on Broadway. So much of what has been amended/tightened/fixed/solved (depending on your own perspective) can be traced back to this review. Have a read of this passage, for instance:
Mr. Furth blunts the shock effect of the original play’s structure by enclosing it within a conventional flashback, and, even so, he fails to solve its major dramatic failure. We never do learn why the characters reached the sad state they’re in at the outset.
Rich’s first criticism, then, is a structural one:
We keep waiting for some insight into these people—that might make us understand, if not care, about them—but all we get is fatuous attitudinizing about how ambition, success and money always lead to rack and ruin.
He develops this point further:
Act II is all anticlimactic plot exposition - an undramatized, breathless recap of the red letter events that first brought the friends to fame.
Rich takes issue, too, with the tone of the show—for which George Furth receives the lion’s share of criticism. Furth’s book “often seems as empty as its characters,” he writes. And the show’s one-line showbiz-related zingers are described as both “facile” and “laced with unearned nastiness.” Fascinatingly, Rich draws a comparison between Furth’s writing for Mary and his writing, 11 years previously, for Joanne in Company: he sees many of Mary’s lines as “labored retreads of the wisecracks he wrote for Elaine Stritch.”
But the comparison that most perturbs Rich is with the musical he wrote about in such depth as an undergraduate: Follies. This unfavourable juxtaposition is, according to Rich, “the libretto’s most unfortunate aspect.” “Follies,” he writes, “had everything the new version does not—most notably a theatrical metaphor that united all its elements.” And in Follies, Rich observes, “past and present could interweave at will to potent effect.” He writes this, too:
That 1971 musical also gave us bitter, middle-aged friends, disappointed in love and success, who reunite at a showbiz party, then steadily move back through time until they become the idealistic kids they once were. Forced to contemplate the aesthetic gap that separates these two like-minded shows, we see that not only the characters are rolling backward this time out.
That last line is particularly brutal. But it is interesting to consider a brand-new Merrily, in its original form, through the lens of a deep familiarity with Follies. To paraphrase words Sondheim will write just a few years later, in Sunday in the Park with George, “Frank Rich makes a connection, / That’s the thing that you feel…”
Hal Prince, who Rich praises for often finding “brilliant unifying concepts” for his shows, is said to have “come up with a flat one here.” Larry Fuller’s choreography is lambasted as “uninspired to the extent that it exists at all.” And “Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics,” writes Rich, “seem less airborne than usual.” Rich finds “Rich and Happy” and “It’s a Hit!” to be “glib”—and we might note that only one of those numbers features in the Merrily we know today. Rich does not seem to have enjoyed “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” either—which is a shame, given his own future in political satire (working with Armando Iannucci on HBO’s Veep).
The rest of Sondheim’s score, though, is labeled “sublime.” Rich singles out “Not a Day Goes By” for praise, again drawing a comparison with Follies. It is, he writes, “a relentless song of unrequited love that matches its equivalent, ''Too Many Mornings."” And Rich writes the following about “Our Time”:
At that point, Mr. Sondheim’s searing songwriting voice breaks through once more to address, as no one else here does, the show's poignant theme of wasted lives.
“But,” Rich concludes, returning to the second heartbreak he identified at the outset of this review, “what’s really being wasted here is Mr. Sondheim’s talent. And that's why we watch Merrily We Roll Along with an ever-mounting—and finally upsetting—sense of regret.”
Sunday in the Park with George (1984)
Frank Rich positions Sunday in the Park with George as a radical reimagining of what a Broadway musical can be—as revolutionary in its way as Seurat’s paintings were in their time. He calls it “an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching work.”
Sunday, Rich writes, “is not a bridge to opera, like Sweeney Todd; nor is it in the tradition of the dance musicals of Jerome Robbins and Michael Bennett.” Instead, in Rich’s view, it is “a contemplative modernist musical that, true to form, is as much about itself and its creators as it is about the universe beyond.” And this blurring of the line between art and artist is a theme that Rich develops throughout this review. He links the “no passion, no life” dismissals of Seurat’s work with comparable critiques levelled at Sondheim over the years. And there is this rather splendid passage, too:
Seurat, here embodied commandingly by Mandy Patinkin, could well be a stand-in for Mr. Sondheim, who brings the same fierce, methodical intellectual precision to musical and verbal composition that the artist brought to his pictorial realm.
Rich’s discussion of Sunday’s characters is fascinating. He points to another critique of previous Sondheim musicals (one he seems to share): that, often, “we don’t care about the characters.” But we see here that this is not necessarily a critique—merely an observation. “Here, more than ever,” Rich writes, “it’s clear we’re not meant to care.” Again, he emphasizes the link between Sondheim and his subject matter. The “silent and expressionless” figures of Seurat’s painting, “models for a meditative composition,” become, in Sondheim and Lapine’s hands, “little more than fleeting cameos” (Dot aside), according to Rich.
Mr. Lapine and Mr. Sondheim tease us with their characters’ various private lives - which are rife with betrayals - only to sever those stories abruptly the moment Seurat’s painting has found its final shape. It’s the authors’ way of saying that they, too, regard their “characters” only as forms to be manipulated into a theatrical composition whose content is more visual and musical than dramatic.
Writing about the end of Act I, Rich writes of the “magical order” of both the painting and the musical. He describes the fixing of the picture as “an electrifying coup de théâtre.” And in a single sentence, he gets to the heart of why Sunday’s Act I finale is so powerful:
As a result, when Seurat finishes “La Grande Jatte” at the end of Act I, we’re moved not because a plot has been resolved but because a harmonic work of art has been born.
Remember how Sondheim was not even mentioned by name in the opening-night review of West Side Story (and then only once, fleetingly, in Gypsy’s write-up)? In this review, “Finishing the Hat” gets a whole paragraph. It is, Rich writes, “the show’s most moving song”—“which, like many of Mr. Sondheim’s best, is about being disconnected.” And Rich uses the message of this particular number to make an observation of breathtaking insight about the show as a whole:
Sunday argues that the aesthetic passion in the cerebrally ordered classicism of modern artists is easily as potent as the sentimental passion of romantic paintings or conventional musicals.
It’s also intriguing to see how Rich responds to Sunday’s supposed Act II problem. He does not, like some commentators, find it to be redundant. He describes it as “daring,” and again links character and creator: “This protagonist is possibly a double for Mr. Sondheim at his most self-doubting.” “It’s Hot Up Here” is described as “a tour-de-force.” And he finds the “time-travel conceits” that link the two acts “charming,” but finds Act II “muddled,” and its story less rewarding:
When George finally learns how to “connect” with other people and rekindles his aesthetic vision, his breakthrough is ordained by two pretty songs, “Children and Art” and “Move On,” which seem as inorganic as the equivalent inspirational number (“Being Alive”) that redeems the born-again protagonist in Mr. Sondheim's Company.
But Rich describes the score as a whole as “wildly inventive,” and draws a stylistic comparison with those French composers “whose revolution in music paralleled the post-impressionists’ in art.” Sondheim’s lyrics, unsurprisingly, are lauded as “brilliantly funny” (the “knead” and “need” homonyms of “Everybody Loves Louis” mentioned here), and Rich takes care to note that “there’s often wisdom beneath the cleverness” (and here he cites lyrics from “Beautiful”).
Rich ends his review thus:
Look closely at that canvas - or at Sunday in the Park itself - and you’ll get lost in a sea of floating dots. Stand back and you’ll see that this evening’s two theater artists, Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine, have woven all those imaginative possibilities into a finished picture with a startling new glow.
Into the Woods (1987)
Three years later, Frank Rich was again on hand to review a Sondheim/Lapine collaboration for the New York Times. Rich immediately places Into the Woods within the broader Sondheim canon, noting how the musical’s characters, though drawn from fairy tales, embark on “the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past.” He mentions the “showbiz cynics” of Merrily We Roll Along, the George of Sunday’s second act, and A Little Night Music’s “lovers who court in a Scandinavian birch forest,” all characters venturing into metaphorical or literal woods to confront fundamental questions about identity and growth.
One of Rich’s most striking observations comes during his discussion of the “cathartic and beautiful” “No One Is Alone.” There is, he points out a thematic line that connects the number’s opening warning that “Mother cannot guide you” all the way back to Madame Rose’s “Mama’s got to let go!” in Gypsy. He describes Ethel Merman during that show’s finale as casting her children “into the woods of adulthood.”
There is a tension in this review—one that we have seen several times before in this survey—between admiration for the show’s ambitions and disappointment in its execution. Rich praises the “brilliant” conception of the two-act structure, where Act I delivers traditional fairy tale endings while Act II forces characters to confront “adult catastrophes” including “unrequited passion, moral cowardice, smashed marriages and the deaths of loved ones.” But he finds the show’s book to be “as wildly overgrown as the forest,” adding that “the characters are at such frantic mercy of the plot that they never gather the substance required to make us care.”
And Rich’s criticisms of Into the Woods are rooted in a deep knowledge of Sondheim’s works more generally:
What is harder to explain is why the show at the Martin Beck, though touching both of its authors’ past themes at their primal source, is less harrowing than, say, Sweeney Todd, which incorporated its own Sondheim variations on Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel, and less moving than Sunday in the Park, which made related points about children and art and gnarled family trees through similarly Pirandellian means.
Rich expresses concern that too many songs “bring the action to a halt,” focusing on didactic expressions of self-knowledge rather than dramatic development. His observation that this score makes “the mildest first impression of them all” among Sondheim’s works is particularly interesting to consider given this show’s subsequent popularity and influence.
And Rich takes issue with the character of the Witch in particular. He acknowledges Bernadette Peters’ star power and ability to “deliver her numbers with enough force to bring down houses (whether theaters or little pigs’)”—but he suggests her role feels somewhat grafted onto the plot, with a “sermonizing song in Act II for no apparent reason other than her billing.”
But Rich found much to enjoy in Into the Woods nonetheless. And his closing remarks have since proved to be remarkably prescient:
The result is unique to its composer’s canon - the first Sondheim musical whose dark thematic underside is as accessible as its jolly storytelling surface. Into the Woods may be just the tempting, unthreatening show to lead new audiences to an artist who usually lures theatergoers far deeper, and far more dangerously, into the woods.
Assassins (1991)
Responding to Assassins in January, 1991, Frank Rich is quick to establish the unsettling tone of the show’s opening number. He describes the “chorus line” of presidential assassins as a “striking image in a diffuse evening” that is “totally disorienting.” He likens the effect to removing “a huge boulder from the picturesque landscape of American history to expose to light all the mutant creatures that had been hiding in the dankness underneath”—a metaphor that neatly captures this show’s refusal to sanitize or sentimentalize its subject matter.
Like he did so comprehensively with Into the Woods, Rich situates Assassins within Sondheim’s broader body of work. He notes the composer’s penchant for “animating the passions of the certifiably insane” and giving “genuine, not mocking, voice to the hopes, fears and rages of two centuries’ worth of American losers, misfits, nuts, zombies and freaks.” And he sees the presidential assassins as warped inversions of the “all-American dreams of stardom” that Sondheim explored more than three decades prior in Gypsy:
These are the people who have “Another National Anthem” because they are too far back in line to get into the ball park where the official one is sung. These are the lost and underprivileged souls who, having been denied every American’s dream of growing up to be President, try to achieve a warped, nightmarish inversion of that dream instead.
While Rich praises the “extraordinarily original” potential of the concept, he ultimately finds the execution lacking, particularly when it comes to its book and direction. He suggests the show often feels “slender and sketchy,” with a “gap that separates Mr. Sondheim’s most acute contributions from Mr. Weidman’s jokey book and Jerry Zaks’s strangely confused production.” The staging, Rich contends, “has been far too busily designed” in a way that fails to resolve the “internal aesthetic conflicts” of the material.
And Rich argues that Assassins and its “intellectual ambitions unknown to most American musicals” should be held to a higher-than-usual artistic standard, invoking the work of Don DeLillo and Martin Scorsese as more appropriate comparisons than other examples of its own genre.
One of Rich’s most penetrating insights comes near the review’s conclusion, where he crystallizes Sondheim’s radical thesis about American violence and inequality. In discussing two of the production's most affecting performances, Rich articulates how Assassins functions not just as character study or historical pageant, but as a searing indictment of American society itself. His observation captures both the show’s political urgency and its uncomfortable resonance:
If Mr. Korbich’s burning Zangara, a Sweeney Todd-like avenger of the proletariat, and Ms. Golden’s fanatical Manson acolyte are the most touching figures, that may be because, as realized in the writing, their characters most demonically demonstrate Mr. Sondheim’s conviction that there is a shadow America, a poisoned, have-not America, that must be recognized by the prosperous majority if the violence in our history is to be understood and overcome.
Rich praises Sondheim’s ability to “rewrite the history of American music” by subverting various musical idioms. He highlights several standout numbers, commenting on the “eerie yet lovely” harmony of “Gun Song” and the “sumptuous ballad” that is “Unworthy of Your Love.” But, he adds, these individual songs “never cohere into a fully realized score.” Rich finds “The Ballad of Booth” to be “prosaic,” and “How I Saved Roosevelt” is, in his view, a number that “flatly burlesques the eyewitness-to-history theme of "Someone in a Tree."”
Ultimately, Rich sees Assassins as a valuable artistic provocation, even if its execution, in his view, falls short of its ambitions:
But Mr. Sondheim has real guts. He isn’t ashamed to identify with his assassins to the extreme point where he will wave a gun in a crowded theater, artistically speaking, if that’s what is needed to hit the target of American complacency. While that target is a valuable one, especially at this historical moment, Assassins will have to fire with sharper aim and fewer blanks if it is to shoot to kill.
In the fourth and final part of this survey, we will take a closer look at the opening-night reviews for Passion, Road Show, and Here We Are.
FINAL CALL: If you’d like to write a few sentences (no more than a paragraph) about the Sondheim lyric that means the most to you, please do so by replying to this email! You’ll be featured as part of a post in January. Please indicate how you’d like to be credited (or that you’d like to remain anonymous), and your location. Thank you!