There are cultural giants who, if they live long enough, seem immortal. We’re so used to seeing brilliance cut down in its prime that when someone as monumental as Stephen Sondheim dies at the ripe old age of 91, it’s almost as if they haven’t left at all. Three weeks have passed since his death, and somehow, he feels more present than ever. The celebration of the man and his work seems to have outlived any lingering grief. Why grieve when there’s still so much of him here?
From his generosity as a teacher and colleague to his masterful command of music and lyrical forms, Sondheim’s legacy is as profound as it is long. In his 91 years, he was responsible for some of the 20th Century’s most important and form-shaking musicals. From the lyrics of West Side Story and Gypsy (which I think might be the most perfect musical ever written), to his complete scores for the revisionist fairy tale and crowd-pleaser Into the Woods, the full-fledged horror show that is Sweeney Todd, meditative pieces like Follies, Company, and Sunday in the Park with George, the romantic travails of A Little Night Music and Passion, the more experimental shows like Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, and Assassins, under-sung gems like Evening Primrose and Anyone Can Whistle, broad comedies like A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, the Madonna-led soundtrack of Dick Tracy, and the many more stray songs and writings he left us throughout the years.
I first heard Sondheim through a wall. For most of my childhood, my brother’s room was next to mine and I osmosed some interesting culture through that thin wall of plaster.
But when he discovered Sondheim sometime in high school, I could have murdered him. There was a time when he listened to the Company Original Broadway Cast Recording, and the song “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” in particular, on a daily basis. Its repetitive, shrill (to me at the time, anyway) chorus of doo-doo doo-doo’s made my uninitiated ears burn.
I didn't come around until we listened to the original recording of Sweeney Todd together over what I’m sure was a pathetically cutthroat game of Sorry! From the first, spine-tingling steam whistle to the horrific finale, I was hooked.
Knowing what I know about Sondheim now, it seems so appropriate that I first came to love his work over a board game.
A side effect to becoming a classic musical theatre fan is that your mind can sometimes become a dumping ground for all sorts of apocryphal stories that are truer to the idea of who someone is rather than the events of their life as they happened. It makes perfect sense somehow.
A lingering myth about the genesis of Anthony Shaffer’s mystery play Sleuth is that the homicidal writer in the piece, Andrew Wyke, was based on his friend, the writer-composer Stephen Sondheim. From Wyke’s preferred décor—like Sondheim, the character’s house is a treasure trove of antique games—to his love of elaborate mystery games, many who knew of Sondheim’s penchant for games and puzzles took this as fact.
Even the legendary actor who originated the role on stage and in the 1972 film adaptation, Sir Laurence Olivier, is said to have told Sondheim it was a great honor to meet him because he had “played” him.
This myth was confronted, and only somewhat dispelled, during a conversation between Sondheim and Shaffer in the 10 March 1996 issue of The New York Times.
S.S.: I don't know if you know it, Tony, but that's the rumor; because you came to my house and I had a roomful of games and we talked about games, especially a game called Camouflage. Then you wrote the play, which takes place in a house that is decorated with games, and which climaxes with a version of Camouflage. The manuscript I received of the play was flatteringly called "Who's Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?"
A.S.: I must tell you that I personally never called the play that.
S.S.: No, I think the producer Morton Gottlieb put the title on.
A.S.: He might have; I certainly didn't. But I'm sure you'll admit that the "Sleuth" character's obsession with games-playing accurately describes a certain aspect of your personality, Steve.
In the HBO documentary Six by Sondheim (directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator James Lapine), the composer describes the start of his famed game collection:
When I moved to my first apartment in Manhattan, I didn’t have enough money to buy prints and put them on the walls. But a girl I knew gave me an early 19th Century game, a weird one, called “The New and Fashionable Game of the Jew.” It was a dice-throwing, chip-betting game that taught kids to be anti-semitic. It was a hateful game, but it was really pretty to look at, and she had it framed for me. I went to the store where she bought it. It was a rare bookstore, and the owner had a lot of 19th Century games, and I bought a lot of them because they only cost two and three bucks a piece, and that’s what started my game collection.
Sondheim’s reputation as a game-master and puzzle-maker has fascinated me ever since I saw The Last of Sheila, a 1973 whodunit film he co-wrote with actor Anthony Perkins (who was also his one-time lover, according to an unauthorized biography of Perkins by Charles Winecoff).
The Last of Sheila concerns a group of disaffected Hollywood friends brought together for a week on a luxury yacht owned by a game-obsessed movie producer.
The motif of game-based décor is continued here. As the characters walk into a lounge populated by antique board games, one of them muses, “Who designed this room? The Parker Brothers?”
In the film, the producer, who doles out cruelty and epigrams in equal measure, puts his guests through a real-life mystery-game scavenger hunt that is meant to excite and, in a playfully twisted turn, relieve them of some rather embarrassing personal secrets. Examples include accusations of child molestation, alcoholism, and shoplifting.
The guests come to realize the game is not just the standard pettiness they’ve come to expect of their ghoulish and diabolical friend, but a real-life murder-mystery intended to out the murderer of his recently-dead wife.
Or so they think.
Sondheim and Perkins’ script is not just chock full of wit and deliciously affected dialogue, it’s also delicately intricate in its plotting. I’ve seen The Last of Sheila at least a dozen times and I still find something new—and face-palmingly clever—on each rewatch. For example, each character’s secret is hinted at in their very first scenes. A picture of two men standing with crossed croquet mallets is a particularly fun clue.
It makes me sorry the two never followed through with their planned projects in a similar vein.
In reading about the film’s genesis, I was thrilled to learn that Sondheim and Perkins based the script on a very real series of games the pair wrote and hosted for guests such as Lee Remick, George Segal, Herbert Ross, Roddy McDowall, and Mary Rodgers. These games involved clever clues and diversions that would send the players all over Manhattan in search of answers. It’s not hard to imagine Stephen Sondheim as he appeared in the early 70s, pushing his shining shoulder-length hair out of his face, cigarette in hand, wearing a black turtleneck and a nonplussed expression on his face, pulling his famous friends’ strings.
As the game collection makes the Sleuth comparisons inevitable, these real-life mystery games make it all the more difficult not to project some of Sondheim himself onto The Last of Sheila’s game-master Clinton Greene (played so brilliantly by James Coburn). Clinton is notable for his wit and his callousness toward his friends’ very humanity. He lords his intelligence and slickness with words over them and takes indelicate swipes at their insecurities at every opportunity. If it weren’t for their own cool indifference toward their own happiness, they might have the good sense to stand up to him. One gets the sense if they were even capable of such courage, Clinton would never include them in his circle.
Sondheim, as he appeared in interviews, was precise and intellectually rigorous. There is a precision in the way he speaks and in the way he engages in conversation. Interviews with him find him often, but respectfully, correcting people. Even if the point of contention is just one word. For example, an interviewer tried to compliment him by calling him a poet. Sondheim humbly accepted the compliment but took issue with the word itself.
Interviewer: “Do you call yourself a poet? Do you write poetry apart from your lyrics?”
Sondheim: “Never. No, and it’s a different medium.”
Interviewer: “Do you think you’re a different world?”
Sondheim: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “Really.”
Sondheim: “It’s mostly because—”
Interviewer: “You do write poetry!”
Sondheim: “Well, thanks, but—I think they’re poetic lyrics. It’s not a question of—and that’s not modesty in any way—it’s a description. Poetry, to me, seems to exist in terms of its conciseness: how much can be packed in. Lyric writing has to exist in time. The audience—the listener—cannot do what the reader of poetry does. He cannot go at his own speed. He cannot go back over the sentence. Therefore, it must be crystal clear as it goes on. That means you have to underwrite. You have to lay the sentences out so that there is enough air for the ear to take them in. […] The lyric must be, in that sense, simple. It can be full of complex thoughts and it certainly can have resonance, but it must be easy to follow. That is not true of poetry. Poetry need not, and probably often should not, be easy to follow.
In this clip, Sondheim is a middle-aged man, very generous in his description and manner. In some of his earlier interviews, there’s less of the eerie humility that marked his later demeanor. I say eerie because he’s seen as god-like by so many that one would almost expect a little buy-in on his part.
During these earlier interviews, especially ones near the time he co-wrote The Last of Sheila, he seems very different. I wouldn’t say he’s smug, although someone else might. I notice his disposition is cloudier, distant, less warm, and as disaffected as some of the characters in that script. Again, I could be projecting as much as any person who swore that the character in Sleuth was a one-to-one facsimile of him, but the difference in his persona is so marked that it’s at least worthy of a mention.
Comparing footage of him from the first part of his life to the second, it seems to me that age and experience made Sondheim more open. So often, the opposite seems true, especially for artists. One of his own shows, Merrily We Roll Along, is about a composer who foregoes meaningful connection and artistic integrity to satisfy his ambitions only to end up bitter and lonely.
In Follies, one of the characters describes the sad finality of life’s compromises:
You take one road
You try one door
There isn't time for any more
One's life consists of either/or
What if Clinton Greene and Andrew Wyke, these cruel men who have a knack for puzzles and bringing people to their knees, were behind one door and Stephen Sondheim chose another? The door where he used his intellectual superiority and talents with words as a tool to teach and a lesson to be learned rather than a weapon.
Maybe my reading is just bullshit armchair psychology trying to make meaning out of the public work of someone who was famously protective of his private life.
Somehow, though, it makes sense to me. Or at least, it comforts me. Sometimes, that’s the same thing.
Sondheim’s preoccupation with puzzles and games is not necessarily a theme of his work as a whole, although it makes a few appearances in individual works, it certainly informed his approach to writing.
In conversation with fellow composer André Previn, Sondheim provided an example of his “curious and perverted” talent with letters:
“When Cinerama was first invented, I passed under the sign that was being erected on Broadway and I immediately thought "American." American and cinerama are anagrams of each other.
His methodical relationship with words and letters apparently didn’t hinder his relationship to making meaning of them. Anyone who has listened to his work knows how profound and empathetic it is. However, this particular attention to letters and words, the basic units of writing, seems to have allowed him to find some rather unexpected and distinctive rhymes and groupings of words.
Using the lyrics of “The Miller’s Son” from A Little Night Music as an example, he described his methodical approach to lyrics in a 1987 60 Minutes interview with Diane Sawyer:
“You make lists is what you do. You start getting into the character and you start to make lists of what she would talk about. And you start to find that certain words are—if they don’t rhyme with each other, relate to each other. And things concatenate. It’s very much about serendipity. ‘Oh, I didn’t think! Pinch, paunch! Pension!’ Once you get the idea of… let’s say, jowls, and you think of 'pouch,’ you say ‘Wait a minute! Maybe we can make something out of the similarity of those sounds!”
Sondheim likened making art to putting a puzzle together. Whether it’s a show or a jigsaw, the job of the artist is to bring order out of chaos. As he writes in “Putting It Together” from Sunday in the Park with George:
“Bit by bit, putting it together
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art
Every moment makes a contribution
Every little detail plays a part.”
So much of Sondheim’s work was about making sense out of life. Even if you came to a conclusion about one thing, there was always something else to figure out. The meaning is in the searching, not in the finding. The art is in the making, not in the solving.
Maybe that’s why puzzles appealed to him. Puzzles are all about the discovery and arrangement of pieces. The “solution” is, often, not nearly as exciting or satisfying as the pursuit of the solution.
I imagine Sondheim as a detective. Writing a song while standing over a desk, wearing a brown slicker, black fedora, pipe in one hand and a pencil in the other, assembling lists of words like clues, matching rhymes like alibis, examining the suspects, imagining the possibilities, thumbing through his thesaurus like a book of poisons, using all the tools at his disposal to figure it all out.
I know it’s not true, but it makes sense to me.
Sources:
The Last of Sheila. Directed by Herbert Ross, Warner Bros., 1973.
Schiff, Stephen. “Deconstructing Sondheim.” New Yorker. 8 March 1993.
Six by Sondheim. Directed by James Lapine, HBO Documentary Films, 2013.
“THEATER; Of Mystery, Murder and Other Delights.” The New York Times. 10 March 1996.
What I’m Watching: It wouldn’t be Christmas without a James Bond marathon. Dr. No and From Russia With Love did not disappoint.
What I’m Reading: For this piece, I had to read through several really depressing message boards from the late Aughts, and those gays were not okay. I hope they found peace with the fact that some people still call cast recordings “soundtracks.”
What I’m Listening To: Fittingly, this Sondheim megamix I made on Spotify. Subject to change. <iframe src="
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The Red Sweater will be updated once per… let’s just say it’ll be updated once, periodically, until the end of time. It will cover developments in my life, work, and all the stupid little things I care about. More of my writing can be found at Medium and on my website.