I finished “Finishing the Hat: Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes” right before starting “Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany” because I wisely knew I would want to read them all as one piece. It’s one of the handful of really smart things I’ve done this year.

The books make a sort of autocraftography – not really a life story, more of a discussion of his writing process and circumstances surrounding it. There’s little of his contentious relationship with his mother or his decades long struggle with his sexuality, but I’ve read other books that hash through that. This is just about the words he has chosen to put before people in song, and while he has flashes of bitchiness about luminaries as luminous as Oscar Hammerstein III, most of his venom is directed towards himself, particularly in his younger years. He all but ruins West Side Story (for which he wrote the lyrics at age TWENTY FIVE) for the reader with his lacerating self-critique:

“It’s alarming / How charming / I feel,” sings Maria, a lower-class Puerto Rican girl who has been brought up on street argot and whose brother is a gang leader, but who suddenly sings the smoothly rhymed and coyly elegant phrases of a character from Noel Coward operetta because the lyricist wants to show off his rhyming skills.

Jesus, Steve. Go easy. Did you hear the part where I said you were only 25? And if Maria’s precocious rhyming sounds out of character, just WOW, wait ‘til you see the movie version (pssst – the white girl from the Searchers plays the part).

But the book (and I’m calling both one book) is a delight, and it’s always nice to read someone talk about something they know a lot about. His enthusiasm for the craft of songwriting is contagious, and I’m dying to re-listen to not just Sondheim shows, but Porgy & Bess and On the Town and Oklahoma and all the others that he writes about fondly. 

I am often asked why I love musical theatre so much. The big reason? I was exposed to it at an early age and I was never told I couldn’t love it. Oh, sure, some punk rock kids in high school told me they “hate(d) Broadway,” but I liked a lot of other heretical things (Howard Jones, Simon & Garfunkel) I saw no reason why I couldn’t also like musicals. I’m a discerning fan – I don’t care for Andrew Lloyd Webber (although I’ll give it up forJesus Christ Superstar and I saw the original Broadway Cast of Evita) or Jerry Herman (with all due respect for his tireless work ethic, it sounds like manufactured boyband pop to me) and we really should never speak of Frank Wildhorn. But I love the old stuff, and I love a lot of new stuff (Adam Guettel’s work, some Jason Robert Brown) and I really, really love Stephen Sondheim. He is, hear me out, the most punk rock of composers. He is not interested in sending you out of the theater humming. He is not interested in congratulating you on stuff you already believe. He is not interested in yanking you out of your life for an evening of pure escapism. Of Company, his landmark non-linear meditation on modern marriage, he is often quoted as saying that he and director Harold Prince wanted the audience to “sit for two hours screaming their heads off with laughter and then go home and not be able to sleep.”  This was how the man spent the 1970s — doing that to paying customers. The Velvet Underground used to turn their backs to their audience.

Sprinkle over this defiance music that emphasizes harmony over melody – to hell with your need to hum during intermission – and you’ve got, well, I take it back. He’s not punk rock, he’s part of the stubbornly unclassifiable New York No Wave scene that brought us Television, Sonic Youth, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. New Yorkers who have broad ideas of what makes a pop song and what makes an enjoyable night out.

The 1975-76 Broadway season brought the arrival of the iconic A Chorus Line, heralded for its loose, not really story driven narrative which was cool but by no means innovative: Sondheim had done something very similar with structure 4 years earlier in Company. That year also saw a revival of My Fair Lady, three Gilbert & Sullivan operettas playing in Repertory, the all-black production of the perennial crowd pleaser Hello, Dolly! starring Pearl Bailey and the original, Fosse-directedChicago. A fun season to be sure. Oh, wait, totally forgot – it also included Pacific Overtures, the Sondheim / John Weidman collaboration that tried to create an original Japanese play, ostensibly written by a Japanese writer who was immersed in American Musical Theatre. It spends the first act – the act that Chorus Line spends introducing us to dancers who are just like us, only more so – it spends that first act introducing Kabuki, that most alienating of theater forms, to a Broadway audience. There’s an all-male cast and stylized, over the top acting, a glib disregard for western tonal scales. THEN it mournfully switches to a more Western approach as the American imperialists encroach upon the island of Japan in the mid-1800’s. There is a love story, but it ends badly before the 4^thsong. It is a bold, ballsy piece of work, that will leave an audience wondering how and if Japan benefits from American Imperialism, and if isolationism has its place in the world, if the alternative is the death of an indigenous culture. The same issues one deals with when watching A Chorus Line.

Pacific Overtures is one of those shows that is depressing only in its content – in its style, ambition and execution, it is incredibly inspiring. There is a real glee behind the show – what if Commodre Perry did a traditional Japanese dance to end Act One? What would happen? Pacific Overtures ran for just four months and it did not recoup its initial investment. It was nominated for 10 Tony Awards. 

Then there is Sunday in the Park with George, from which the books get their titles. It’s the old boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy flashes forward 100 years for a thoughtful meditation on the uneasy relationship between creativity and commerce. The song “Finishing the Hat,”is an artists lament that everyone thinks is about them (you probably know this if you’ve read this far). It focuses on that need to just fix one more detail before someone “return(s) you to the night / Dizzy from the height.” It’s clearly about creation, but in the book Sondheim wisely sidesteps elitism by comparing it to the passion that an accountant feels about numbers. It’s less about art than it is about obsession. But I use the phrase (quietly, to myself) whenever I finish making anything. A pancake. A Tweet. Everyone thinks the song is about them.

Though the first act of the show is set in the late 1800s, the score is decidedly contemporary, edgy and sometimes even atonal (I’m probably misusing that word, but Sondheim did use a grant to study atonal music under Milton Babbit, whose music is so dischordant he makes Sondheim look like, well, Frank Wildhorn). 

A moment on that harmony thing mentioned above, as there are some haunting, tremendous harmonies in the score to George – The opening chords of “Finishing The Hat” are not a singable riff, but I can hear them right now. Melody gets caught in your head, harmony gets caught somewhere else, somewhere elusive. You can’t hum a harmony to yourself, unless you’re one of those Tibetan throat singers (and if you are, how did you hear about my Tumblr?) A harmony has to be experienced and is harder to reproduce. When La Cage Aux Folles beat Sunday in the Park with George for the Tony in 1984, the former’s composer/lyricist Jerry Herman gave a speech wherein he exalted that the”simple, hummable tune” was still viable. It might have been a dig at Sondheim, but it didn’t really matter, as Sondheim’s show got the Pulitzer that year, one of only a half dozen musicals to do so in that Prizes history. But Sondheim gets knocked for the melody thing a lot, and regrettably, the books don’t cover that. “Music is a foreign language which everyone knows,” he says. “But only musicians speak.”  But what does come through is not just his iconoclasm, but also his exhausting craft. Listen to the man beat himself up for a joke that fell flat because he rhymed “eighteen” with “routine” – that’s called an identity rhyme, and its something of a cheat in Sondheim’s book. He’d have preferred ‘mean,’ ‘lean,’ maybe ‘keen.’

You might fancy yourself a Sondheim completist – as I did – and then be confronted with a set of lyrics he wrote to celebrate Harold Prince’s 75^th birthday, or every song from Dick Tracy. Sondheim will make you question your passion. And here’s the great thing: as the internet meme puts it, “Look at all the fucks he doesn’t give.” With Company, the man made you question your marriage and your entire pussy middle class existence. You think he gives a real fuck if you like him? He cares a great deal about story telling, he’s painstaking in his craft, but he’s not hear to satisfy anyone but himself. And he’s never satisfied. 

And so, back to the book. It’s exhaustive, exhausting, thrilling and funny. It is not for dilettantes. It is not for people who saw the film of Sweeney Todd because they never miss a new Johnny Depp movie. It is for people who want to know what kind of pencil Sondheim prefers to write with (you’re in luck! He tells you! And then further informs you that they don’t make them anymore, but fuck you, he bought a lifetime supply once! And then in the second book – it’s a miracle – they started making those pencils again!) It is for people who want to know how many drafts the Jet Song went through, and then read the misbegotten earlier versions.  It is for people (and this is me) who love every little rhyme in the misanthropic “If You Can Find Me, I’m Here” from Evening Primrose. And those people will be challenged and delighted, the same way some of us love it when Thurston Moore puts 6 E strings on his guitar … just to see what would happen. 

 Anyway — submitted for your approval (not really) is a fun Sondheim mix I made for you on Spotify