What's Wrong With Superficial?
Surface and substance in Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim’s last word on superficiality was anything but shallow.
Early in the second act of Here We Are, a wealthy socialite named Marianne stands in an opulent embassy salon—the room that will soon become her prison—and sings a paean to surface beauty.
This unabashed celebration of texture and appearance stands as one of Sondheim’s most direct engagements with themes he had explored throughout his career: aesthetics as refuge, the tension between appearance and reality, and the gilded cages we build for ourselves. That he chose to confront these ideas so explicitly in his final work underscores their enduring significance to his artistic vision.
“Shine” establishes itself as both celebration and confession. “Are we not blessed?” asks Marianne, as her companions grumble about oversalted food and feeling bloated. Her enumeration of their blessings begins conventionally enough—“Blessed with carpets, cushions, flowers”—before it becomes clear what she prizes most highly. When she exclaims “All these books! All these polished leather books!” it’s not their content that interests her, as she makes clear with disarming directness: “I don’t mean to read— / No, no, not to read / No, I mean the way it looks!” This privileging of appearance over substance leads to her central claim: an unapologetic defense of surface pleasure itself. “Why can’t I be free,” she demands, “To like what I see / And not what I know?”
Marianne’s language becomes subtly more demanding throughout “Shine.” Her initial statements that she “like[s] things to shine” and “like[s] things to glow” evolve into the more insistent “I want things to gleam / To be what they seem / And not what they are.” By the end of the number, she is more emphatic still: “Give me what shines!” When she directly confronts her companions’ implicit criticism—“Oh, goodness me, how superficial / Well, what’s wrong with superficial?”—the question is more than rhetorical. It’s a genuine philosophical position, a defense of surface pleasure as valid in itself. For Marianne, no justification is needed; the gleam is its own reward.
That this celebration of surface beauty comes just before the discovery that the room’s occupants cannot leave transforms it from mere character detail into something more profound. Marianne’s rapturous appreciation of “these textures and these surfaces” takes on new meaning when those very surfaces become the boundaries of her confinement. Her earlier wish—“I’d like to live life, all my life / In this room”—becomes a dark prophecy, though the imprisonment that follows will have little to do with aesthetic pleasure.
This direct confrontation with superficiality finds a much earlier, more playful expression in “Lovely” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. There, the courtesan Philia celebrates her own surface appeal with disarming candor: “I’m lovely / All I am is lovely / Lovely is the one thing I can do.” Like Marianne, she makes no apologies for privileging appearance over substance—indeed, she explicitly acknowledges her inability to “sew nor cook / Nor read or write my name,” embracing loveliness as her sole attribute. Philia’s celebration seems at first merely comic—until her song is reprised by Hero in drag, transforming its simple celebration of surface beauty into something more complex. The reprise reveals the performance inherent in such superficiality, suggesting that “loveliness” itself might be less an inherent quality than something carefully constructed.
This tension between authentic and performed beauty would become a recurring preoccupation in Sondheim’s work. The opening number of Sunday in the Park with George presents Dot’s struggle with the physical demands of modeling, maintaining a perfect outward appearance while internally cataloging a growing litany of discomforts. Her relationship to being looked at is complex. She both performs and resists it, understanding that her role in George’s art requires her to become, however temporarily, pure surface.
Later in Sunday, “Beautiful” adds another dimension to these questions of appearance and permanence, as Georges distinguishes between what is merely “pretty” and what endures. “Beautiful,” which we explored at greater length in this essay, suggests that surface beauty might be transformed into something more lasting through artistic vision—an ironic counterpoint to the temporary splendor that will become Marianne’s prison.
From these intimate portraits of individual relationships with beauty, Sondheim’s lens widens to examine how superficiality operates at a societal level. In “Pretty Lady” from Pacific Overtures, surface appreciation becomes a lens for examining collective behavior. Three American sailors approach a passing Japanese woman, their every word betraying both cultural dislocation and personal loneliness. Their observations never progress beyond the superficial—they notice her bow, her flower, her softness—reducing her to a silent object of beauty rather than a person with agency.
Their entreaties expose a deeper isolation: “I ain’t heard a lady laugh in who knows how long,” “I been without it,” “I been away so long.” The number builds to a kind of collective desperation, with all three men collapsing to their knees in supplication. That she remains silent throughout their increasingly vociferous pleas only underscores how their fixation on surface beauty—their objectification of her—prevents genuine connection. We are invited, therefore, to consider how aesthetics can serve as both an expression of desire and a barrier to intimacy."
In both Company and A Little Night Music, Sondheim examines how superficiality becomes entangled with social ritual. “The Ladies Who Lunch” presents Joanne’s devastating portrait of various types of privileged women, each defined by their surface activities—their classes, their brunches, their careful self-presentation. The irony, of course, is that Joanne’s caustic observations come from within this world; her drinking is itself another form of social performance, another way of maintaining surface over substance. Through Joanne’s increasingly bitter toasts, we see how these carefully maintained surfaces fail to mask an underlying desperation.
“A Weekend in the Country,” the Act I finale of A Little Night Music, is a veritable orgy of surface concern and social performance. As it unfolds, we see how each character approaches the same social ritual through their own performative lens: Anne oscillates between social outrage and social obligation (“We’ll accept it! [...] Yes, it’s only polite that we should”), Charlotte plots tactical appearances (“Wear your hair down and a flower / Don’t use makeup / Dress in white”), while Carl-Magnus masks his jealousy with aristocratic pastimes (“And the shooting should be pleasant / If the weather’s not too rough”). As the various plots and counterplots weave together, the weekend becomes less about genuine pleasure and more about the manipulation of appearances for social advantage. Even Henrik’s puritanical rejection of these “shallow, worldly figures” becomes another kind of performance. His position of moral superiority (“The devil’s companions / Know not whom they serve”) is undermined by his own self-conscious performance of judgment (“It might be instructive / To observe”). He, too, maintains a carefully constructed surface, just one of spiritual rather than social refinement.
Follies offers perhaps Sondheim’s most layered response to Marianne’s question about superficiality, presenting a gallery of characters each wrestling differently with surface and substance. The show’s entire premise turns on the tension between past and present appearances, as its characters confront what happens when carefully maintained surfaces begin to crack.
Here, the interrogation of superficiality becomes both more personal and more painful. Phyllis’s “Could I Leave You?” systematically dismantles the surface perfection of her marriage through a catalogue of appearances maintained: “the evenings of martyred looks,” “the lies ill-concealed,” “passionless love-making once a year.” Her bitter inventory of material possessions—“the Braques and Chagalls and all that”—reveals how thoroughly surface has substituted for substance in her life.
Meanwhile, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie” explicitly thematizes this tension between surface and authenticity, presenting two women who each long for the other’s apparent attributes: “Lucy wants to be dressy / Jessie wants to be juicy / Lucy wants to be Jessie / And Jessie Lucy.” Through its portrait of two women perpetually dissatisfied with their own surfaces, the number suggests something universal about human desire. We are all, perhaps, forever “itching to be switching roles,” convinced that happiness lies in wearing someone else’s skin.
“One More Kiss” renders Follies’ preoccupation with surface beauty most explicit, as Heidi Schiller performs her signature number alongside her younger self. The duet structure dramatizes not just the passage of time, but the impossibility of maintaining appearances: “All things beautiful must die.” When both Heidis sing “One more souvenir of bliss / Knowing well that this / One must be the last,” they acknowledge the inevitable decay of idealized beauty. Their directive to “Never look back” becomes especially poignant in a show built around the contemplation of faded glamour. Our relationship with beautiful surfaces, Follies suggests, is always tinged with the knowledge of their impermanence.
This complex relationship between surface beauty and its transience brings us back to “Shine.” Marianne’s passionate defense of superficiality—“Why can’t I be free / To like what I see / And not what I know?”—resonates all the more potently when viewed through the lens of Sondheim’s career-long exploration of these themes. Her desire for things “to be what they seem / And not what they are” positions her within a lineage of characters struggling with appearance and reality, even as her situation gives that struggle uniquely immediate stakes. Unlike Phyllis maintaining social performance or the Heidis confronting beauty’s mortality, Marianne’s celebration of surface beauty becomes literally confining.
That Sondheim should choose to confront these ideas so directly in his final work feels significant. Throughout his career, his characters had posed variations of Marianne’s central question—“What’s wrong with superficial?”—and found different answers: in the sailors’ objectifying gaze in “Pretty Lady,” in the elaborate social choreography of “A Weekend in the Country,” in Follies’ devastating inventory of glamour’s cost. But never before had he and his various collaborators given us a character who poses the question so explicitly, who embraces surface pleasure so ardently—only to discover how quickly it can turn against her.
In this way, “Shine” serves as both culmination and warning, a defiant celebration of appearances that carries its own answer within it. The response to Marianne’s question comes not in words but in dramatic irony, as the very surfaces she celebrates become the boundaries of her confinement. Sondheim’s final statement on superficiality suggests that while we might defend our attraction to mere appearances, we ignore at our peril how thoroughly they can entrap us. The gleam may dazzle us, but it can just as easily become the light that blinds.