Sondheim’s America; America’s Sondheim

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
Anyone Can Whistle ◽  
Oscar Hammerstein Ii ◽  
Arthur Laurents

Although Stephen Sondheim has long been considered the leading writer for the American musical stage in his generation, and although many of his shows have become repertory fixtures, their original runs have tended to be relatively short, and his thematic engagements with conventional ideas of “America” have often been querulous. To understand better why “Sondheim” and “America” have thus often seemed not to map easily to each other, this chapter considers one of his famous flops,Anyone Can Whistle, in the context of his earlier collaborations with Arthur Laurents and as a show that set an agenda quite different from that of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II; this new agenda would sustain the remainder of his career to date.

as Experimental Theater

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Savran
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anyone Can Whistle ◽  
Cultural Contradictions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Liberal Individualism

Stephen Sondheim and his critics usually ascribe the failure ofAnyone Can Whistle, Sondheim’s most revered flop, to the volatile social and political context in the United States, claiming that it was ahead of its time. This chapter argues, in contrast, that it is very much of its time and that no other musical of the period epitomizes the social and cultural contradictions of the mid-1960s as vividly asWhistle. Attempting to bring the kind of theatrical and political provocation that was flourishing Off-Off-Broadway to Broadway audiences unfamiliar with experimental idioms,Whistlerepresents a determined hybrid: part satire, part romance, part musical comedy, part Broadway razzle-dazzle, part political polemic. It is also symptomatic of the contradictions inherent in the dominant political philosophy of the 1960s, liberal individualism, in its opposition to standardization and conformism and its inclination toward an arrogant egocentrism. ThatWhistlehad to wait decades to find an audience is a tribute less to Sondheim’s prescience than to his ascendency since the 1970s as his generation’s preeminent architect of experimental music theatre.

Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Self ◽  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
Musical Play ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
Rodgers And Hammerstein ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Oscar Hammerstein Ii ◽  
Conventional Systems

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of the American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim’s musicals in two contexts: the exhaustion of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical play that flourished after World War II; and the postmodernism that by the 1960s influenced all the U.S. arts. Sondheim’s musicals are central to the transition from the musical play that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical, one that reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge, the fragmentation of identity, and the problematization of representation. Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, bridges the span between the musical play and the postmodern musical and, in his most recent work, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim’s musicals; examines their dialogue, lyrics, musical themes, and structures; and finds in them their critiques of the operations of power, their questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and their explorations of contemporary identity.

Sondheim's ‘Sweeney Todd’—The Case for the Defence

Tempo ◽  
1984 ◽  
pp. 19-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carey Blyton
Keyword(s):  
West Side ◽  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Anyone Can Whistle ◽  
The Way

As both lyricist and composer, Stephen Sondheim has proved to be the most original and innovative force on Broadway since the late 1950's, when he first attracted attention as the lyricist for some of the songs in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957), including ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight’. Few composers for the musical stage have such a record of success as Sondheim. In addition to these lyrics for Bernstein, he also wrote all the lyrics for Jule Styne's Gypsy (1959); then, as composer as well as lyricist, he wrote a number of musicals over the next two decades: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Merrily We Roll Along (1981).

Stephen Sondheim

Show Tunes ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 264-282
Author(s):  
Steven Suskin
Keyword(s):  
Stephen Sondheim
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