I have a friend who hates Sondheim...- Page 3

[Q]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 1:53pm

newintown - valid point.

I think I need someone to make a compilation of the grand, sweeping, romantic stuff just for me It's for that reason that NIGHT MUSIC is the one score I can listen to straight through with basically pure enjoyment.

[Mister Matt]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 1:57pm

Put it into perspective. Play everything you can by Ricky Ian Gordon. Then play Merrily We Roll Along or A Little Night Music and watch your friend cry with joy as her thirst for melody is finally quenched.

[GlindatheGood22]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 2:01pm

I don't think of Into the Woods as a good show for people just getting into Sondheim. I see it as part of his later work, of which I am not a huge fan. My introduction came when I was fourteen, with a very good high school production of Sweeney. I think it's undoubtedly his best work, and not just because it was my first.

On a side note, I was having dinner with my mother in the theatre district last week and she said, "Sondheim? I thought he was dead." People were staring.

[newintown]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 2:13pm

To satisfy a penchant for the romantic, Q, I would suggest (just off the top of my head) "We Do Not Belong Together" and "Move On" from Sunday, "So Many People" from Saturday Night, "Take Me To The World" from Evening Primrose, "Johanna" from Sweeney Todd, "One More Kiss" from Follies, "Not a Day Goes By" from Merrily, "Loving You" from Passion (not so grand, perhaps).

[Q]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 2:33pm

newintown - all familiar to me, and I agree. Now I just need to get them all on one CD (yes, I'm that kind of dinosaur )

[rjjn]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 2:45pm

I can definitely see where your friend is coming from. I was in a production of Into the Woods, and have seen Sweeney and Sunday, and even on repeat listens the songs strike me as cold most of the time (with some exceptions, like No One is Alone and Johanna)

[tommyboy]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 3:05pm

From the 2nd book of Proverbs:

It is useless to teach a pig to sing, it's impossible, and it pisses off the pig.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/6/11 at 4:18pm

I have loved Sondheim since I wandered into the Alvin Theater by myself on Saturday matinee when I was 14 and COMPANY changed my life.

I never found anything cold about his music at all, except for some deliberate choices he made later in his career.

On the contrary, "Someone Is Waiting," "Sorry/Grateful" and "Being Alive" seemed to be achingly emotional. The comedy numbers like "Getting Married Today" and "The Little Things You Do Together" defined sophisticated humor for me, then and for the rest of my life. And numbers like "The Ladies Who Lunch" and "Another Hundred People" were jaw-droppingly brilliant that I had to listen to them over and over and over, first to memorize them, and then to see if I could understand how such perfect creations could have come to be...the way art students can sit in front of the Mona Lisa and study it all day.

Then when Follies came out, I still couldn't figure out why people used that odd word "cold." Again, I felt throbbing emotion in "Too Many Mornings," "In Buddy's Eyes" and "Losing My Mind." And, again, the sheer brilliance of "I'm Still Here" and "Who's That Woman?" and "Lucy/Jessie" thrilled me beyond anything else in theater, film or books.

But "cold"? When I would sing along to the OCR to "Could I Leave You?" I was red hot, not cold.

As I got older, I reacted similarly to each show, although perhaps with less adolescent enthusiasm. Each show had at least one number that would make me tear up or weep or sob, connect emotionally to a degree much deeper than the most beautiful Rodgers and Hammerstein song: "Someone in a Tree"..."Nothing's Gonna Harm You"..."Not a Day Goes By"..."Our Time"..."Sunday"..."We Do Not Belong Together"..."Children and Art"...Move On"..."No More"..."No One Is Alone"..."Unworthy of Your Love"..."I Read"..."I Wish I Could Forget You"..."Loving You"...

It bewildered me how anyone could listen to even one of those and utter the by-now cliche condemnation of "cold." I would laugh at it, like the scene in Amadeus in which the emperor dismissed Mozart's music, saying "Too many notes."

If those songs I listed are cold, I guess I am too.

[~FloweryFriend~]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 4:55am

"There are legions of lyrics that I kind of regret. Particularly a number of the very purple-prose lyrics in West Side Story: 'It's alarming how charming I feel.' Coming from a Puerto Rican girl - what, is she studying Noël Coward?" - Stephen Sondheim

[A NIce Macaroon]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 6:46am

Tell your friend to **** off and find more complex friends who know what atonal music really is.

"Atonal" is the most easy and ignorant complaint about Sondheim possible.

[After Eight]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 11:20am

To Pal Joey:


"It bewildered me how anyone could listen to even one of those and utter the by-now cliche condemnation of "cold." I would laugh at it,"


Well, I'm going to give you a couple of laughs at my expense, free of charge, just because I like you.

Usually, when something is voiced long enough and often enough to become a cliche, more often than not, there's at least some grain of truth to it. And so I feel it is with Sondheim. Yes, I find his work cold, and, truth be told, mean, too. That means overall, not every specific song, or every piece of music, but overall in the tone and attitude of his work.

"Company" is my favorite Sondheim show, and some songs are dazzling. But I would call it overall, very cold. Bobby has emotion all right. For himself. He's selfish and self-absorbed. To me, that's chilling. And you think "The Ladies Who Lunch" is not cold? Well, not if the bitterness and nastiness that it reeks of are not considered cold. And "Could I Leave You?" If there's a meaner, nastier, more bitter song than that one, I can't think of it offhand.

Then there's the music itself. Many categorize it as cold. I see their point. Someone could say "Night Waltz" is sweeping and grand. And it is. But to me, the music is still cold. "The Embassy Waltz" and "The Carousel Waltz" are sweeping and grand. Their music is warm.

You obviously relate emotionally to his work. None of his songs make me cry. Plenty by Rodgers and Hammerstein do. I think they're a thousand times better. And so are Porter, Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Arlen, and the list goes on.

Not everyone responds the same way to his work. Nor is there a need for everyone to.

Hope you laughed well.

[themysteriousgrowl]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 11:56am

I agree with you After Eight, that it's silly to expect everyone to react to any art in the same way or that there are prescribed reactions, some of which are more acceptable than others. That said, however, I also understand Joey's bewilderment at people's use of "cold."

Even, AE, in your assessment, you've used some decidedly un-cold language -- selfish, self-absorbed, bitterness, nastiness, meaner. The difference in how people feel about the "cold" assessment seems to be semantic. What you're describing is not a lack of feeling, but a lack of warm feeling. Your reactions to what you yet qualify as some of his coldest songs are inescapably visceral, as evidenced by your strong descriptive language. They make you feel something -- and rather strongly, it seems -- but not sympathy.

(Which puts me in mind of "Nice is different than good.")

Now, what I bring to the table, interpretation-wise, when I heard the word "cold" is a lack of feeling of any kind at all, not just a warm or sympathetic feeling, but a distanced, detached quality wherein the characters' walls are so effectively built that you can't see into their psyche at all. That, to me, is cold. But when I hear the bitterness and resentments of "The Ladies Who Lunch," I sympathize with Joanne more than if she were bearing openly bearing her true soul because it's something very real, something that people do in life; even if I don't personally relate to it, I can recognize what a true mirror of the world it is.

Sondheim provokes very strong reactions in his admirers and detractors. What you've above described as "cold" I see as the dramatic antithesis of coldness, i.e., provocation of a feeling, any feeling, even dark feelings... which itself is the very coldness you feel. And I find the phrase "the coldness you feel" to be oxymoronic.

Funny, how people are.

Now, everybody laugh.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 12:26pm

Feh. So what? I don't want EVERYONE to love Sondheim. Many critics don't love Sondheim. Too cerebral and not enough catchy tune/soaring melodies a la Jerry Herman or Lerner & Lowe. Atonal is overstating things a bit but it does give a clue why it doesn't work for her. Big deal.

[After Eight]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 1:14pm

To themysterious growl:

Yes, you're right. The interpretation of the world "cold" is complicating the issue to a great degree.

"Cold" can mean both an absence of warm feeling, as well as an absence of any feeling. In Sondheim's case, I'm using it in the former sense, which I in no way see or feel as a positive trait. So yes, there is a great deal of visceral feeling in "Ladies Who Lunch" and "Could I Leave You?," but that doesn't mean that I should admire it, or react favorably to it, or like it. And I don't. And indeed, they are cold--- ice-cold ---- when you use the word in the sense of "absence of warm feeling."

There's too much "absence of warm" feeling in his shows for my taste. And a lot of his music leaves me cold as well.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 3:14pm

The reason those two songs seem "red hot" and not "ice-cold" to me is that--IF PROPERLY SUNG AND ACTED--the cold facades both women project at the beginning of the songs fall apart at the climax of the song, leaving the women open and vulnerable at the end.

So even though Phyllis is projecting sarcasm with the opening phrases ("How do you wipe tears away when your eyes are dry?") and mentioning unpleasant aspects of Ben, like his pills and the dull dinners, once she spits out the line about "passionless lovemaking," it becomes clear that she is not simply angry but also deeply in pain.

The anger in the rest of the song then becomes a mask, or a cover-up, for a throbbingly lonely woman who never dreamed that her life would end up so empty. The paradoxical question at the climax of the song, "How could I leave when I left long ago?" actually betrays a lie: She HASN'T left. She's still there. Which begs the question: Why hasn't she?

That question is answered at the end of the song--or, rather, NOT answered. There are a million ways for a good actress to play the final "Will I leave you?...Guess!" and a million ways to interpret how it's played, but I've always assumed that the reason the song ends with "Guess!" and not "Yes!" is that Phyllis still loves Ben. And that is her tragedy, her "folly": She loves a man who doesn't beat her, doesn't mistreat her, he simply doesn't care. And that I find inescapably moving.

I won't go on as long about "Ladies Who Lunch," but, again, the song starts off with Joanne passing judgment on the "ladies who lunch" and the "girls who play smart" and the "girls who play wife," but it ends with Joanne dissecting herself.

When it's well played, Joanne launches into that 4th group of girls, the penultimate group, the "girls who just watch," and starts to realize that she's describing herself: When she gets depressed, she's the one who opens another bottle and disapproves and jests and zings.

To me, that's what the growl on the "Ahhhhhhhhh-lll drink to that" always means: It's the cry of an animal whose leg is caught in a trap. In this case, a trap of her own devising.

So when she launches into the final verse and sings about looking into the eyes of these women and seeing that they know they will die, she is no longer passing judgment in a way that should be described as "cold." She is saying, "Everybody rise!" and pay respect to those of us who have wasted our lives. Pay respect to me. And to you. And to you and you.

It is what the French call a "cri de couer." And when it's played with that kind of depth, I weep.

Updated On: 1/7/11 at 03:14 PM

[newintown]

Posted: 1/7/11 at 3:36pm

Terrific post, Joey. Perfectly describes the passion ingrained in Sondheim's work. REAL passion.

[After Eight]

Posted: 1/8/11 at 12:08am

To Pal Joey:

"It is what the French call a "cri de couer.""

Actually, I think they call it a cri de coeur. :)

But thank you for your intelligent and impassioned analysis of these songs. It's clear why you feel so passionately about Sondheim's work, and also why you're one of the finest posters here.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 1/8/11 at 9:03am

Thank you.

Me and my lousy French. Instead of saying "cry from the heart," I probably said something like "cry from a prostitute" or "cry from the pancreas" or something like that...

[jv92]

Posted: 1/9/11 at 6:58pm

I didn't back up my rather snotty question, but I couldn't help but be snotty.

I mean, atonal is a type of music. People compose music that way. Just because the harmonies are complex, just because the rhythms aren't your "Um-pah, um-pah" show music rhythms, just because the structure isn't always AABA, doesn't mean the music is atonal. Sondheim composes tonal music.

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of people are stupid. They go to the theatre expecting to sit back and either A) See a pleasant story with some pleasant tunes and a happy ending or B) Sit back with their mouth agape staring at empty-headed spectacle. Sondheim's shows fall into neither category A or B, they fall into Category C- Good theatre...meaning, The Theatre of Surprise.

I've often wondered what it was like to be at Sweeney Todd's first preview, or Company or Follies first Boston preview, expecting Hello, Dolly!, and getting something completely different and completely jaw-dropping- whether you like jaw-dropping or not. Or to have at least seen some of these shows early in their runs, maybe before the reviews even came out (I'm sure PalJoey can tell us a story or two about times like this). I mean, it must have been really...shocking. And shocking is a word used too often nowadays. Shocking nowadays is nudity, the N word or swastikas- not a show without a plot, a show about a sympathetic mass murderer, or a show about imperialism. I mean, that's pretty shocking.

Edited because- Well, I can't believe I contradicted myself by mistake! LOL
Updated On: 1/9/11 at 06:58 PM

[My Oh My]

Posted: 1/9/11 at 8:08pm

"This "I feel Pretty" argument gives me a headache - it betrays an utter lack of imagination.

It's a musical. All theatre has conventions - it's not real life. Many plays and movies feature scenes in which characters speak in their native languages, yet we hear the dialogue (or lyrics) in our own.

Why not just imagine that Maria and her co-workers are singing in Spanish, and we're hearing the translation? Why be so leadenly literal when approaching a musical? They aren't talking, they're singing - it's already stylized, not real."

Can't agree more. I've long expressed the same thing. Why is it impossible to imagine she and the sharks are actually speaking Spanish when they're amongst themselves?

I guess one would have to understand Spanish to know the incredibly witty banter typical of native Spanish-speakers that is such a part of their culture.

My mother could totally think up and say something as simplistic as "charming. Oh so, charming" in her broken English, lol.