Sondheim The Magazine

“The Road You Didn’t Take,” a song which falls early in the first act of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies, is sung by the character Benjamin (Ben) Stone and is the first solo of the main characters in the show. In the scene which leads into the song, Ben is with his old friend Sally. They have found themselves alone and away from the other guests at the reunion party. There is a romantic history between them, but, at this early point in the evening, it has not yet resurfaced.

Sunday in the Park With George is all about ‘the art of making art’. But nowhere is the frailty, fragility and impossibility of making art more accurately depicted than in the lyrics of the song ‘Beautiful’. This stunning and often overlooked song is one of Sondheim’s most overtly poetic and fragmented, a minimalist and expressive lyric that has only a few words per line and only a few spare rhymes in its entire length.

Time collapses. Sondheim’s favorite. Or so he told me at a masterclass back in 2010 when I was an eager young doctoral student at UCLA. I was writing a dissertation (now a book!) about how song and dance in musical theater can warp time, enabling marginalized and semi-marginalized fans to imagine new ways of being in the world and to establish communities in difference.

There was no love lost between Alan Jay Lerner and Stephen Sondheim. At least, it seems that way. The older lyricist and librettist known for his successful collaborations with composer Frederick Loewe on shows like My Fair Lady and Camelot, also managed to write a “history” of the artform he toiled in over his career, the posthumously published, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration. He doesn’t find much to celebrate in his younger colleague’s work, though.

The story of how Stephen Sondheim replaced the opening number of A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM — trading “Love Is in the Air” for “Comedy Tonight” toward the end of the show’s out-of-town tryout has been often told and I’m not going to belabor it here, except to say that it seems, single-handedly, to have saved the show from certain doom and turned it into a resounding hit — the show that Sondheim once said was his “desert island musical” among his own works.