Is Stephen Sondheim Overrated??? — Page 2

While I think his songs worked well within the context of the piece, on their own, they're unmemorable to me. Outside the context of his shows, I never want to hear them. Not sure what you mean by overrated. Theater people adore him, so in that regard he is overrated. The general public is indifferent to him. His shows (and songs, for which he is sole composer, with the exception of SEND IN THE CLOWNS) have never enjoyed the financial success of Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Jerry Herman, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Lerner & Lowe, and many others. In that regard, he is probably somewhat underrated.

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Rock took over popular music in the mid 1960s, so a comparison of Sondheim's popular hit output to the likes of Rodgers & Hammerstein or Lerner & Loewe is really not a fair assessment. (And Herman didn't have a popular hit between Mame in 1966 and La Cage aux Folles in 1983). Sondheim came into his own in 1970 with Company, when popular music was a very different field than his predecessors. Still, "Being Alive," "Ladies Who Lunch," "Losing My Mind," "Send in the Clowns," "Pretty Women," "Not While I'm Around," "Good Thing Going," "Putting it Together," and "No One Is Alone" have all managed to find quite a bit a life outside of the shows they hail from.

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You can make excuses for Sondheim; but the fact remains that he never had a Jerry Herman-sized hit. Never.

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Life, and the human mind, being what they are, I would venture to guess that there are minds equally as brilliant as Sondheim's circulating in the world of musical theatre as we discuss this. We don't hear about them because the outlets for them to have their work exposed are, more often than not, closed to them.

Why are those outlets closed? It's my belief because of two reasons:

(1) the true decision-makers, those who actually decide what shows will be produced, are surrounded by the administrators who have their own opinions and agendas, and are compelled to act out a personal need to wield power by restricting access to the deicsion-makers based on their own lack of creativity; or

(2) the decision-makers are simply not risk takers, but are instead lemmings who only produce what someone else is already doeing elsewhere because if their production fails they can always fall back on "but it was successful in [name the city]," and their artistic taste is never actually put on the line.

My point is that there is room for Sondheim and his high-quality work, and there is equal room for other high level creative artists who write in their own style.

Art becomes boring, and a staleness sets in when it there is no variety.

To put it another way, "supposed all you ever had were bagels, and in walks an onion roll?"

Sondheim is great, but let's make room for more onion rolls.

He's so amazing that, if anything, he's underrated.

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Everyone is influenced by anyone who came before.

It's called life.

No.

I had a birthday party for Sondheim this year and one of the guests, who had no idea who he was, kept waiting for him to show up.

I think Sondheim is only overrated when each of his works isn't judged on their own merit. Overall, I think his career, talent and influence is undeniable. He is a legend. His place in musical theatre history is secured.

But I get irritated when every time he strikes a chord on the piano, or writes a lyrical phrase, or makes a statement, people automatically clap wildly before they actually listen to it. His works lately have been inferior, not just for him, but for anyone writing for the theatre today.

This happened to Richard Rodgers as well, later in life. There is a glimmer of the genius from decades past, and people cling to it for all sorts of reasons, but it isn't brilliant work. The man is past his prime. He continues to write, and sometimes it's very good and SOMETIMES IT ISN'T. That doesn't mean he isn't a legend or we shouldn't respect him, and it doesn't mean he didn't write Sweeney Todd (a masterpiece in anybody's book). But I try to take his work for what it is, not because it's him that created it.

EDIT: That's the "designer label" mentality... "Don't you just LOVE this??? It's a SONDHEIM, you know."

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Updated On: 10/22/05 at 10:24 AM

Not really.

But other composer's work which is equally as great at his - never got the praise he gets - and I am talking about Cy Coleman.

'His works lately have been inferior'

I'm not sure I agree with the plural. Of the later works of Sondheim (ASSASSAINS, PASSION and BOUNCE), only BOUNCE could be considered lesser. The other two, while certainly not perfect, are astonishing works that demand much of their audiences...maybe too much. It took until the concert staging of PASSION for me to appreciate just what it is...musically...structurally. It's, I believe, a masterwork. ASSASSAINS, while not a masterwork on the level of PASSION or SUNDAY..., is still a challenging, thought-provoking and (and this is important) entertaining work that incites strong visceral reactions in many, many people.

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I'm not making excuses for Sondheim, because frankly, he doesn't need my support. He writes what he wants to write, regardless of whether a song will live outside the show or not. (And he has recently said that he has made more money on "Putting it Together" than on any other song he's written, which sounded like it surprised him as much as it does me). He may not have had a Herman-sized hit, ConvinceMe, but my point was that several of the songs I mentioned have been covered by major artists and have had a life outside of their respective shows, far beyond just "Send in the Clowns".

Nor am I blaming rock music for Sondheim's reception into popular culture, OrangeSkittles, as your fairly hysterical response indicates. My point is that the days when a composer would write "I Could Have Danced All Night," "People Will Say We're In Love" or "Till There Was You" and the song would become a #1 pop hit were long over by the time Sondheim came to the fore, so to compare two different eras as a way to fault Sondheim's hit making ability is still an unfair comparison in my opinion. And even the rock shows that have been on Broadway in the last 25 years have failed to get anything on the radio. Why didn't anything from Rent or Hedwig get air play? No show tune since "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going" or "Memory" has burned up the charts. Musical theatre has just become irrelevant in the world of popular culture. To hold Sondheim up to the hit-making status of another time is impossible.

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He is considered by many to be a genius but as National Public Radio recently reported: Sondheim shows USUALLY do not make money--at least the later ones (this excludes the 1950s and 1960s melodic West Side Story and Gypsy). Some folks here need to remember that these threads are about OPINIONS but some posters continue to be what I have often called elitist and rude.