‘You never need an analyst with Bobby around’: The mid-20th-century human sciences in Sondheim and Furth's musical Company

This article offers a case study in how historians of science can use musical theater productions to understand the cultural reception of scientific ideas. In 1970, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's musical Company opened on Broadway. The show engaged with and reflected contemporary theories and ideas from the human sciences; Company's portrayal of its 35-year-old bachelor protagonist, his married friends, and his girlfriends reflected present-day theories from psychoanalysis, sexology, and sociology. In 2018, when director Marianne Elliott revived the show with a female protagonist, Company once again amplified contemporary dilemmas around human sciences expertise—this time, the biological fertility clock. Through Company, Sondheim and Furth—and later Elliott—constructed arguments about modern society that paralleled those put forth by contemporary human scientists, including psychoanalytic models of the mind, the lonely crowd phenomenon, and shifting conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Because of their wide popularity and potential for readaptation, musicals such as Company offer a promising source base for analyzing the relationship between contemporary society and scientific expertise in specific historical contexts.

Colour and light: Colour theory and mechanization in Sunday in the Park with George’s Chromolume

This article explores how Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George conveys Seurat’s scientific influences, how the show’s Chromolume engages with Seurat and his modernist legacy, and how the 1984 and 2017 Chromolume designs reflect Seurat’s work and legacy. Using original oral history interviews, this article compares the 1984 and 2017 Broadway Chromolume designs to explore how production decisions inform the show’s engagement with pointillism, Seurat and colour theory. By analysing Sunday, this article sets out to provide a case study highlighting how science and technology inform and influence the book, music and theatrical design of a major American musical.

Religion and the Limits of Metatheatre in Our Town and Sunday in the Park with George

This essay explores theatrical drama alongside aspects of religious dimensionality David Tracy analyzes in terms of limit experience, limit language, and limit questions. The claim is that metatheatrical forms can correlate with limit dimensions, a correlation which may prove as pertinent as ritual for linking drama with religious experience, thought, and practice. Here, metatheatre and limit dimensions are further defined in respect to Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play, Our Town, and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1984 musical, Sunday in the Park with George. The essay identifies distinct though often overlapping forms of metatheatre: plays or performances that (1) explicitly refer to themselves, or (2) represent theatrical or theatre-like works within their stories and expressed worlds (e.g., plays within plays), or (3) dramatize theatre-like and performative aspects of ordinary life. Just as Wilder foregrounds metatheatrical relations to create an impression of the eternal, Sondheim and his collaborators reflect on their work’s ontological conditions of possibility by bringing to life another work, a painting, at distantly separated moments in time. Our Town and Sunday in the Park invite us to enter social and ritualized spaces inhabited by commonplace yet archetypal persons; they culminate in moments where the audience is to discern past, present, and future in simultaneous proximity; and with their different contents and forms, they prove good plays for elaborating relations among theatre, limit experience, and religious dimensionality.

Musical Theatre at Girls’ Jewish Summer Camps

In the summer musicals take place in the tiny, insular, homogenous culture of girls’ non-Orthodox Jewish summer camps in Maine. Each of these summer camps was founded by Jewish women—all early twentieth-century progressive educators—for socioeconomically privileged Jewish girls. Since the early 1900s, girls who attend the summer camps have participated in theatre as a required activity alongside swimming, volleyball, and arts and crafts, so musical theatre shapes their experiences in profound ways. This chapter visits four of these summer camps in the same state where Stephen Sondheim spent many summers at Androscoggin, an all-boys’ Jewish summer camp. Over the course of their years at camp, most girls perform in seven musicals and see forty more. In this consciously created community, the excitement, pressure, and camaraderie of musical theatre production creates an even more intense bubble in its midst.

High School Musicals and Into the Woods

Virtually every high school in the country—more than 26,000—hosts a theatre program and produces at least one play and/or musical a year. The Educational Theatre Association’s annual survey found that more than 37,000 high school productions took place in 2017–2018, with more than 46 million people in the audience. The chapter surveys the issues relevant to high school musicals and teachers’ engagement with the local community. Beauty and the Beast, The Addams Family, and The Little Mermaid were the most frequently produced high school musicals that year, but another, very different kind of show ranked fourth: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods. In part because its ensemble cast offers excellent performance opportunities for girls, this musically challenging and emotionally complex show sees thousands of high school productions each year. This chapter visits three public high schools in the Midwest—one small school in rural southwestern Minnesota, one tiny school in rural southern Ohio, and one medium-sized school close to Ann Arbor, Michigan—each with different racial and socioeconomic demographics and community issues. The chapter describes their dress rehearsals and performances and focuses on nine students—three at each school—who have different relationships to musical theatre onstage or backstage. The chapter documents why the students wanted to participate in the musical, what they experienced, and how their school and their community were changed because of it.

Into the Woods from Stage to Screen

This chapter addresses the production of the movie adaptation of Into the Woods. It exploits interviews with composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, director Rob Marshall, screenwriter James Lapine (also the stage librettist and director), orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, and musical director Paul Gemignani, most of whom were also involved with the original Broadway production, to offer insights into the process of putting the ultimate fairy tale on the big screen. The interviews reveal surprising aspects of the movie’s production, such as the fact that the songs were recorded three different ways: a full orchestra track for the singers to rehearse to, a studio recording with the singers and orchestra together, and live on-set recordings. The final soundtrack includes a mixture of these three options, providing a solution to the age-old problem of how to make singing in film musicals appear natural. The chapter also examines why some of the songs were cut, plus other intriguing and poignant insights into changes made for the film adaptation.