Sondheim and Stoppard

Getting Past Clever

Elaine Stritch, Harold Prince, Jane Russell. Still from the Broadway set of Company, 1970-72

Dear Republic,

Today we have an in-depth reappraisal of two giants of 20th century theater.

-ROL

SONDHEIM AND STOPPARD

Giants in the Sky

“It’s … a word I don’t like, clever.” – Stephen Sondheim

In 1957 Stephen Sondheim made his Broadway debut at the age of twenty-seven as a lyricist for West Side Story, a retelling of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in the midst of two warring street gangs in New York City, featuring lush but edgy music composed by Leonard Bernstein. While songs like “I Feel Pretty” and “Tonight” linger in the romantics’ mind, Sondheim’s true debut of his lyrical dexterity comes in the rapid-fire explosion of “Dear Officer Krupke,” in which a gang of American boys depict the hot-potato culpability game of adults abdicating responsibility for a teen’s delinquency (the song, notably, was the closest a musical had gotten at that time to dropping the F bomb, with the final lyric being “Gee, Officer Krupke – / Krup you!” – this after Sondheim’s plan to have the boys yell “Fuck you” was vetoed by his collaborators). It’s clever. Tom Stoppard, meanwhile, was twenty-nine when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe nine years later. R and G is also a Shakespeare retelling, a virtuosic riff on both Hamlet and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Stoppard’s story of two minor and bewildered courtiers explores the absurdity of death and free will and the chance of a flipped coin turning up heads over and over, featuring dialog like “We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.” It’s clever.

So, despite Sondheim’s above documented resistance to the reductive descriptor, the general consensus is that both writers are clever, and they’ve always been: prodigies before they even hit thirty. But cleverness, especially when exercised as dexterously as Sondheim and Stoppard, invites other C words along: Cold. Cynical. Clinical. Calculated.

Sondheim went on to co-write twenty musicals and one play (plus five different revues cobbled from his various scores), while Stoppard wrote over forty plays and over twenty radio plays (including translations and libretti); both men also wrote for television and film. Both had great acclaim throughout their careers, with established legacies and numerous revivals of their works in their lifetimes. Between the two of them is a dragon’s hoard of awards and nominations for Tonys, Drama Desks, Oliviers, Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys, Lifetime Achievements, a knighthood (Stoppard), a Pulitzer (Sondheim), and a Presidential Medal of Freedom (also Sondheim). They are among the most revered writers for the theater of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

But. While their decades of theatrical work are praised for their ingenuity, deftness of wordplay, and a fondness for puzzle-box constructions, the writers themselves have also been dismissed by contemporary critics and theatergoers alike as writing emotionally cold, distant, and over-intellectualized shows. As too clever to allow for anything with a heart to slip in. I get it. But …

Intellectual Ambiguity: "Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in."

Midway through Sondheim’s (and, he would hasten to add, bookwriter James Goldman’s and producer/director Hal Prince’s) Follies, a concept musical about a reunion at a soon-to-be-demolished theater by its old Ziegfeld-era stars and dancers, the show leaves its nostalgic pastiche behind to mercilessly expose its four leads to the lies they’ve been telling themselves. Company‘s exploration of married life through the lens of five couples’ perpetually single friend Bobby is cynical in the extreme until the final turn in “Being Alive” (famously, Sondheim wanted to end the show with Bobby’s cynicism intact, with the lyric “Happily ever after ... in hell,” but was persuaded by director Hal Prince – as well as a negative audience reaction out of town – to offer instead a more hopeful alternative). Anyone Can Whistle wears its disdain for humanity on its sleeve. Merrily We Roll Along shows age and corruption poisoning the idealism of youth. Sweeney Todd is about baking people into pies. Assassins spotlights the men and women who tried to kill the American president. Running through so much of Sondheim’s oeuvre are a deliberate ambiguity and a resistance to a clean happy ending – not always to the commercial audience’s palate.

Sir Tom, meanwhile, isn’t accused of cynicism so much as he is of unapproachability. He builds puzzle box plays so intricately that audiences often struggle to keep up with him: many moving pieces, complicated family trees, stories spanning decades or alternating time periods, and characters waxing philosophical about unicorns or thermodynamics or free will, to say nothing of meta-commentary and obscure allusions to other works. Stoppard’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of, well, everything enables his characters to discourse on the overlaps of Leninism and Dadaism (Travesties, complete with a scene written entirely in limericks, which is just ... how?), the heat death of the universe (Arcadia), nine hours on Russian intellectualism before the revolution (The Coast of Utopia), and the question of consciousness and morality within psychological experiments (The Hard Problem). His work is called intellectual, which is about as damning as you can get in commercial theater.

So yeah, I get it. But. Go with me on this: I think Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard wrote some of the most achingly heartfelt and heart-piercing theatrical works of the past century.

Stephen Sondheim: “It’s the little things.”

For Mr. Sondheim, I don’t need to preach to the already-converted by defending his greatest hits. Those who know have already thought of them (but they’re worth mentioning because they reinforce my point that actually he broke and/or warmed our hearts a lot). We’ve got Into the Woods‘s “No One is Alone” and “Children Will Listen,” Sunday in the Park‘s “Children and Art” and “Finishing the Hat,” the title song from Anyone Can Whistle, A Little Night Music‘s “Send in the Clowns,” Company‘s “Being Alive,” and Passion‘s “Loving You.” Passion, of course, is the show that Sondheim wrote after, at the age of sixty, falling in love for the first time. The open, needy beating heart of Fosca is overwhelming in Passion, but focusing on this ignores the fact that Sondheim had been doing all of this all along, and in unexpected places. Let’s look where we normally wouldn’t.

Sondheim’s favorite song of his own is “Someone in a Tree,” from the 1976 musical Pacific Overtures, which examines the nineteenth century “Westernization” of isolationist Japan. He composes his score to evoke Japanese styles of music, offering a delicate poetry of lyric and melody. This arguably has the effect of erecting an emotional distance for an American audience, especially with orchestrator Jonathan Tunick’s heavy use of Japanese folk instruments traditional to Kabuki theater, like the three-stringed shamisen and narimono percussion. “Someone in a Tree” mixes traditional wood block accompaniment onstage with the Western orchestra in the pit (as with much of the show’s orchestrations, a nod to foreign influence on Japanese ways). Even still, it does not sound like your usual musical theater song – instead, the orchestra plays a recurring rhythm beneath the singers, that of a quick quiet step underlying the sung melody. As this scene-song begins, the Reciter declares that no Japanese record exists from this first treaty signing, only to be interrupted by an old man who declares he was there, and he knows what happened. As the Old Man tries to remember, his younger self as a boy runs onstage to climb the tree from which he watches the proceedings. The two become a trio when a warrior hiding below the floor reveals he is listening the entire time to the diplomats. The song is a slow build of tiny details, which ultimately seem to add up to nothing, rather like the parable of the blind men and the elephant: the Old Man/Boy remember that the diplomats drank cups of tea while the Warrior observes a creak and a thump, and “then they talk a bit.” The music beneath has been slowly expanding, growing fuller and lusher, reaching a kind of ecstasy as the three proudly declare that this day was not about the treaty house and its occupants but that:

It’s the fragment, not the day

It’s the pebble, not the stream

It’s the ripple, not the sea

That is happening!

Why is this Sondheim’s favorite song? Why not “Finishing the Hat,” his portrait of the artist which also served as the title for his two-part lyric compendium? Why not “Anyone Can Whistle,” the song everyone but him insists is autobiographical? Why is this the song that makes him cry when he hears it performed? There’s a joy filling these characters in this moment, a pride in having been there, a deep affection for the importance of even the tiniest details: not just someone in a tree, but someone in a tree. The pure love for that moment is evident in performer James Dybas’s face as he sings “I was part of the event!” With Sondheim’s well-documented particularity about the finest details of music and lyrics, coupled with Japanese poetry’s embrace of the small still moments, the composer’s favorite song is a love letter to both.

And now for something even more obscure: Sondheim’s 1966 collaboration with James Goldman on the TV musical Evening Primrose. This is a weird one that doesn’t age well: a poet retreats from the world to write in peace inside a department store (weird), only to discover that there is already a repressive community living inside the store (weirder). It is among this community that he falls in love with a nineteen-year-old woman named Ella, who hasn’t lived in the outside world since she was six years old. In her song “I Remember,” Ella tries to recall what that outside world was like, but all her comparisons connect to items within the department store: a sky as blue as ink, sheets of ice like vinyl, and trees “bare as coat racks.” The idiosyncrasy of these tiny details, delicately delivered over a melancholy accompaniment, are peculiar and charming and contribute to the infantilizing lens through which Charles views her. Ella’s lyrics sound like the tilting up of a chin to a sun she can’t see, with many of her descriptors lifting to a wistful interval almost unreachable from the things they’re describing. But then in the final verse, the true grief of what she has lost finally slips out, as she acknowledges that:

[T]he bluest ink

Isn’t really sky

And at times I think

I would gladly die

For a day of sky.

The seemingly benign whimsy turns into a void within her, a lasting ache, and a need for escape she can’t even articulate yet. Ella is in love with a world she barely remembers.

Tom Stoppard: “The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives.”

Stoppard’s emotional core often relies on what isn’t said, rather than what is (which means, unfortunately, that his works can be at the mercy of directors who don’t fully mine those depths). As with my Sondheim examples above, I want to eschew the better-known romantic writing of his — the ebullient film Shakespeare in Love, the oft-revived play about coupling and uncoupling The Real Thing, the profound heartbreak embedded within Housman’s unrequited love in Invention of Love, or the decimation of a family at the hands of the Nazis in Leopoldstadt — and focus instead on quiet moments in seemingly colder plays.

In Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006), a play about communism and the underground rock scene in Czechoslovakia prior to the Velvet Revolution, Jan and Esme’s love story happens with almost no onstage interaction and very little dialogue. The play opens with them in 1968: Jan is leaving Cambridge to return to Prague, and Esme gives him a vinyl record as he leaves. We learn later that she also propositions him this evening, but that he declines. Through the several decades of the play’s story we see the characters age but these two remain always at a disconnect of location, timing, and reticence. Esme continues to send him records, even as they both are in other relationships and she, unbeknownst to him, helps facilitate his release from prison. Toward the end of the play, Jan returns to Cambridge briefly and it seems it will be one more missed connection as he leaves again for Prague: Esme gifts him another record, but he leaves, forgetting it behind. But then he quietly returns and asks her simply, “Will you come with me?” Stepping upstairs to get her passport, Esme turns back to check, “Will you be here when I get back?” He replies, “Yes.” It’s nothing. It’s a few small sentences without ornamentation or sentimentality. But after two hours of spirited debate on the feasibility of communism, the failures of its execution, and the political dissent inherent in rock ’n’ roll music, this small exchange between Jan and Esme is the entire heart of the play. Hidden under all this noise are two people quietly finding each other after twenty years. And from a personal standpoint for Stoppard, it’s also worth noting that this is one of two plays in which he reckons with his own history: he is a Jewish refugee who left Czechoslovakia for Great Britain to escape the Nazis when he was a child, and then grew up with an English education. This play engages with his Czech identity; his final play Leopoldstadt engages with his Jewish identity.

Rather than discuss Arcadia next, I’d like to look at its more obscure sister play, Indian Ink (1995), which uses a very similar structure: two narratives in two different generations, told in alternating and overlapping scenes, with the present-day characters trying to unpack the unknowns about the characters in the past. In the present-day (well, 1980s) half, academic Eldon Pike, intent on publishing the collected letters of fictional poet Flora Crewe, interviews her surviving sister Eleanor to understand references and allusions within those letters that remain obscure. In the 1930s narrative, Flora journeys to India for her health, writing the letters to her sister that 1980s Pike is now mining. Pike is intent on tracking down a nude watercolor portrait mentioned obliquely in one of Flora’s final letters, but all Eleanor can supply him with is an oil painting done by an “Unknown Indian Artist.” But in the 1930s we watch Flora meet her artist, Nirad Das, a seemingly bashful man with strong convictions. The two form a quiet connection over art, though he is unable to finish her oil portrait before she must leave Jummapur. As we learn from Eleanor’s timeline, Flora would die within a month of leaving, the warm air of India insufficient to cure her lungs. But still the mystery persists across the two timelines: where is this watercolor, and when was it painted? It is only after Pike’s book is published with Nirad’s painting on the cover that Nirad’s son, Anish Das, recognizing his father’s work even without his name attached, finds Eleanor to share that very watercolor painting he found in his father’s old trunk. On Flora’s final night in Jummapur, she and Nirad consummate their connection before going their separate ways, neither ever telling anyone of that night. In the 1980s, Eleanor and Anish agree to keep the knowledge of the watercolor from Pike: it is not his story to tell. For Pike, who thinks his mystery is solved with the disappointing reveal of a nude painting of Hindu goddess Radha, this story has little poignancy beyond the tragedy of Flora dying so young. For Anish and Eleanor, their discovery is one not of loss but of return, a gift from the person they lost: a moment of connection and love, the knowledge that they had had that moment together. The watercolor is a gift to Flora, too: years earlier, Modigliani had painted her nude, but her then-fiancé destroyed the painting. Now, she has once again been restored in her watercolor portrait by Nirad Das. But not every story needs to be told, and Eleanor and Anish are content to carry theirs privately. The heart is in the things Eleanor and Anish don’t say, in the moments between Flora and Nirad we don’t see.

The Great Lights

I can’t speak for either writer (I just speak about them, a lot, to anyone who will listen), but I wonder if part of why the heart sneaks in where it’s least expected is because it’s also not necessarily intended. In the examples I cover here, Sondheim and Stoppard are juggling some complex torches along the way, and we know they both relish those sorts of challenges. But that makes these little moments, these quiet releases, all the richer for not overwhelming the rest: contrast is everything.

Sondheim, often and to his credit, cites his collaborators as being the true source of his shows’ characters, inner lives, and even particular lyrics. He does himself a discredit in the process, but a man that talented can downplay all he likes, I suppose. In Sunday in the Park with George‘s “Children and Art,” Georges Seurat’s illegitimate daughter Marie looks at his masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and sees her mother in every woman depicted:

There she is –

There she is, there she is, there she is –

Mama is everywhere,

He must have loved her so much.

Marie’s father, cold and distant, could not express his love in action or word, but could infuse it into his art (or at least, that’s how Marie interprets his painting). Marie’s mother was no artist, but she instilled in her daughter this important lesson: the two most important things one can leave behind are children and art. Sondheim had no biological children, so one could argue he focused on leaving art as his legacy. But do any digging, especially for testimonies posted in the wake of his passing, and you’ll see that many of today’s musical theater composers consider him their spiritual father due to his decades of mentorship and generous shepherding of young talent.

And for Stoppard, I think always of his love of ideas, of thought, of potential: in Arcadia, researcher Hannah says, “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.” Stoppard’s protagonists understand the importance of embracing life, now, because they know how quickly it can be cut short. I think, too, of Stoppard’s respect and affection for those who came before, in the way his work engaged with other writers’ creations. His protagonists in Arcadia research writers of the past because they love their work. The Invention of Love is a moving study of reticent poet A. E. Housman and his heartbreak as a young man, which would flavor his future work. In the introduction to his translation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Stoppard admits that he has “very occasionally fallen to the temptation of spot-the-Shakespeare.” This career-long habit and dedication to the Bard reaches full fruition in his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, which imagines a doomed love between Shakespeare and a noblewoman that inspires his writing of not only Romeo and Juliet but also Twelfth Night. When Stoppard passed, I thought immediately of a line from that film, said on the announcement of Christopher Marlowe’s death: “A great light has gone out.”

I speak of Sondheim and Stoppard in the present tense, though both have passed on. I speak of them in the present tense because their works travel with me wherever I go. Because their works live in our hearts. Our minds too, yes, but what sticks with you when you think of them? What makes you cry? Who do you hear? Why is the full harmonic chord on the lyric “Forever” in Sunday in the Park with George’s first act finale enough to give you goosebumps? There he is, there he is, there he is, both of them everywhere, they must have loved us so much. In 2021 and 2025, two great lights went out, but somehow still they shine on to light our way.

_{Section Title Sources:}

_{Giants in the Sky: Into the Woods, Sondheim}

_{“Audiences know what to expect ...”: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard}

_{“It’s the little things”: Company, Sondheim}

_{“The ordinary-sized stuff ...”: Arcadia, Stoppard}

_{The Great Lights: homage to Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard}

Zelda Knapp has been loving theater for thirty years, thinking analytically about theater for twenty years, and writing about theater for fifteen years. She therefore has many more opinions, and you can find most of them on aworkunfinishing.blogspot.com.