Stephen Sondheim strikes back at critics (’ignoramuses,’ he says)
As someone who has been offering my opinion in print about theater productions since Richard Nixon was our leader, I predictably zeroed in on what Stephen Sondheim has to say about theater critics in his delicious new book Finishing the Hat - Collected Lyrics (1954-1981). To paraphrase, summarize, and infantilize, he thinks they are dog doo. You'd think the guy never got a good review in his life, and if he ever read a critic whose viewpoint he respected, he ain't saying here.
But those scribes who dissed him, even decades ago, he remembers them well - and by name. But first an overview: "The sad truth is that musicals are the only public art form reviewed mostly by ignoramuses." The "mostly" provides the inkling of a hedge that a few sentences later he trims to the ground. "Musicals continue to be the only art form, popular or otherwise, that is publicly criticized by illiterates."
Guilty of perversity?
And then there are the specifics. New Yorker critic Arlene Croce, Sondheim recalls from 1971, misunderstood a lyric to one of his most innocuous songs to accuse him of perversity. "Beauty celestial/ The best you'll agree," from the opening number in Follies, entered into Croce's ears as "Beauty celestial/ The bestial will agree." "Disgusting," she wrote. Time has not tempered Sondheim's own disgust: "willful bitchery or natural stupidity."
When A Little Night Music was first revived in New York, it was by the New York City Opera. As noted above, Broadway musicals are reviewed by "illiterates." Now it fell to hear from serious music critics, who, according to Sondheim, "do not take well to this crossover from frivolous to serious art." He hasn't forgotten New York magazine critic Peter G. Davis for stating that Ingmar Bergman would have been "disgusted" by what Sondheim et al. had done to Bergman's movie Smiles of a Summer Night.
"When I wrote [Davis], asking him if he would be surprised to learn that Bergman had liked the show so much that he had asked me to collaborate with him, I suspect it will shock no one to learn that he didn't respond."
Death of the musical theater?
In the case of Sweeney Todd, notable theater essayist John Lahr also comes under the gun for claiming that Sondheim represented "the death of the musical theater, having taken all the joy out of this beloved, exuberant American art form." Sondheim might have rolled with that punch, if only Lahr has actually seen the musical instead of merely having read a rehearsal draft of the script.
Sondheim sent Lahr a letter to this point, and this time he got a reply. "The note was succinct, not to say dismissive of such a trivial objection. 'I guess you're right,' he replied." Sondheim said that he stopped reading reviews at that point, save for The New York Times, which he acknowledged can affect the box office.
"When I look back at the [reviews] I've encountered over the years, however, I have the dismaying thought that if, as the saying goes, a man is best measured by the size of his enemies, I'm in a lot of trouble." But, by golly, I've always thought Sondheim was aces, but I'm thinking my reviews didn't much blip on his radar.
To be fair to the book, it is mostly a collection of lyrics from his shows, with alternate and cut versions adding to the heft. And most of his analyses pertain to the process of lyric writing and production histories, and it's fascinating stuff. The tome does come with the subtitle With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes. Some of the grudges are highlighted above. The heresies, to me, are more shocking. Among the lyricists he disses are Noel Coward, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Ira Gershwin.
I nearly gasped when he took Ira Gershwin to task for one of my favorite lyrics of all time: "Into heaven I'm hurled," from "How Long Has This Been Going On." Convoluted phraseology, Sondheim says. Into heaven I'm now curdled, forever to think of Sondheim's knock when I hear Gershwin's words.