Book Review: “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life” by Richard Schoch

HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFEby Richard Schoch

In the early 1980s, librettist and director James Lapine asked composer Stephen Sondheim what kind of musical he wanted to write. The pair were still in the early stages of creating Sunday in the Park With George, their first collaboration of many, and the older man’s reaction to the younger man was very Sondheimian indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming collection of essays “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “i.e., not a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”

The Sondheim perspective is the subject of eleven essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that at least intellectually attempts to extract useful insights from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one about “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “how to deal with injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” etc. via the Sondheim playlist. This idea of ​​art as self-help is widespread – Jane Austen championed it in many cases, as did Shakespeare and the Russian writers of the 19th century – so at this point it is practically a subgenre in which publishers take on a topic you worry that it might be too nerdy or nerdy for a general audience and try to rephrase it in more popular terms. Trying to turn apples into bananas rarely works – there are a lot of helpful things to take away from Sondheim, but they don’t translate to “life lessons” in the way the book suggests – but that doesn’t matter . Aside from the headings and a few memoirs, the author largely ignores the title’s premise of moving on quickly and graciously to other things.

Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside, that is, as someone who has grappled with the way in which to perform and direct him. And what a joy it is to see how the author takes it all. I was just happy to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, accurate reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a certain range” that required “short phrases closed tightly with consonants.” That’s why Judi Dench – also not a singer – played the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s revival of A Little Night Music in 1995, and why Catherine Zeta-Jones in Trevor Nunn’s Broadway revival in 2009 did not. (I remember that when I heard the first few bars, Zeta-Jones adopted a shocked, torch song expression, as if something terrible was about to happen – which of course it was.)

Stritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home dejected and self-loathing by the cast recording of Company after the ninth flawed recording of The Ladies Who Lunch, and reminds us that Sondheim preferred cranky, brilliant leading ladies who were all in drove themselves crazy until they reached their goal. Taking us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, he writes of Gypsy Rose Lee: “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme by Sondheim and raises the question of where the composer is located in his characters. That Sondheim, a gay man who says he didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of heterosexual marriage remains strange. But while Schoch uses the example of the baker’s wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly about his own coming out in his thirties, he does not penetrate Sondheim’s life.