Stephen Sondheim

Not that people don't love Company, Sondheim's 1970 stinger that turned marriage, the traditional ending of musical comedy, into an open question. There was a ...

When a student noted that Gypsy, the title of Sondheim’s second hit, is an ethnic slur for Roma people, and is appropriated by a white striptease artist in the show, that wasn’t the end of the discussion. (“Tailor?” “Paler.” “Butler?” “Subtler.”) What those who wrote about the musical cherished, however, was hearing the romantic waltz form in that cannibalistic duet, “A Little Priest,” chopped away from a marriage plot into a declaration of class retribution, where, at last, “those above will serve those down below.” Quiescence in the face of complexity, however, they don’t. Is Gypsy thrilling, problematic, exploitative, sex-positive, a celebration of individualism, a critique of manifest destiny, a love letter to show business, and an excoriation of the pursuit of stardom? Sondheim, along with his scriptwriting collaborators, relentlessly challenged the institutions that had given stability to musical theater’s form: the satisfaction of marriage (undermined in Company), the radiance of stardom (tarnished in Follies), the benefits of American imperialism (inverted in Pacific Overtures), the fairness of the social order (cannibalized in Sweeney Todd), the idealism of youth (reversed in Merrily We Roll Along), the achievement of making art (needled in Sunday in the Park With George), the reassurance of fairy tales with happy endings (uprooted in Into the Woods), the founding myths of American self-making (curdled in Assassins). “I saw in the opening credits that the music was written by Stephen Sondheim, so I was excited,” a classmate wrote in a post to our discussion board about Sweeney Todd, which another student ranked as one of her “all-time favorite musicals.” The class relished debating the legendary composer’s lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy, and they beamed when I mentioned Into the Woods. As Cinderella sings to comfort Little Red, “ [No one is alone](https://youtu.be/lDXcGZHBiGo).” But what really drew them in—or, perhaps, what they drew out—was his preoccupation with people excluded from the dominant society, his critical eye toward those in positions of power, and his exploration of musical forms that give voice to outsider perspectives. While A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures were favorites of senior citizens auditing the course, Sunday in the Park With George was familiar to younger students who’d seen the recent film Tick, Tick … Company resonates [far beyond](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/company-sondheim-sexual-politics/508895/) the narrow slice of Manhattan that appears in the show, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that a 20-year-old Oregonian, especially one who’d elected a class on musicals, would be a fan. Well, not a sentence I expected to hear from an undergraduate during a seminar on the American musical. “I love Company!” was not a sentence I expected to hear this semester.