- ....getting through therapy with Stephen
- Reviewing Stephen Sondheim: A Life
by Meryle Secrest (Bloomsbury, £20)
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Meryle Secrest's Stephen Sondheim: A Life Today!
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 Sensible
biographers should make sure that their subjects are dead before
putting pen to paper. Happily, Sondheim is still with us. Sadly,
for me his talent dwindled after what must surely be his masterwork,
the darkly terrible Sweeney Todd. Nothing he has written since,
including Into the Woods and the frankly embarrassing Passion,
has challenged it. In England, he has survived being championing
by a coterie of professional performers who have made a little
industry about doing his stuff, sometimes well, sometimes not.
How strange that a gay writer-composer should, throughout his
writing life, have presented such an unhealthy fascination with
heterosexuality: witness the marriage angst of the hard-nosed
Company and the straight emotional wranglings of A Little Night
Music. It is surprising that a man so 'uncomfortable' about his
homosexuality (he undergoes therapy) should have attracted such
a strong gay following. There is probably more queerness in Rodgers
and Hammerstein: the sailors of South Pacific regretting the
absence of a dame, the mixed-up passion of Billy Bigelow, and
what was Poor Jud thinking of in his Oklahoma shack?
The thought seems not to cross Ms Secrest's mind in her lengthy
and conscientious book. Her research is obvious, painstaking
and thorough. It lacks only fireworks, a little critical obtrusion.
She must have listened for months to Sondheim's associates exercising
their egos on her, and has typed them up verbatim, using half
a page when two lines would have told us all we need to know.
She even reproduces 'witty' first-night telegrams sent to Sondheim,
exposing the fact that she must have a low humour threshold.
She sticks in compliments when she should be stirring things
up. She should be told that criticism does not weaken its subject,
but gets the reader exercising his brain.
Pacific Overtures, she tells us, was the most uncommercial musical
ever. Really? Happy woman, she has never heard of The Fields
of Ambrosia or Pochahontas, but she doesn't seem to have too
much idea of what else is happening in the world besides the
works of Stephen Sondheim. The lack of context that permeates
the book will probably not matter to Sondheim fanatics, some
of whom will not accept that their hero's lyrics have none of
the ageless romanticism of Oscar Hammerstein, the natural wit
of Lorenz Hart, and his music none of the sheer musicality of
Richard Rodgers. Ah well…
Does the man himself emerge from Secrest's opus? Does the real
Stephen Sondheim stand up? Perhaps so. He is probably the most
charming of men, but here he seems to be strangely unappealing,
part ardent creative artist, part mixed up kooky. It seems to
me that in listening to his musicals it is us who have been going
through therapy.
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