Studies in Musical Theatre - Current Issue

Stephen Sondheim’s kindness and enthusiasm for the emergent artistry of others made him musical theatre’s ‘encourager-in-chief’. This article spotlights Sondheim’s distinctive generative geniality. It centres this aspect of Sondheim by looking at the ways in which people remember his role as a mentor who often wrote positive notes of support. It also spotlights his appearance (or representation) in two films – Camp and Tick, Tick…Boom!, alongside an episode of the The Simpsons – as himself to highlight his generosity of spirit and willingness to help (and be an inspiration for) others.

This article attends to what emerges as, however unlikely, Africanist musical practice in the work of Stephen Sondheim. My analysis considers Sondheim’s use of instrumental vamps as the threshold of song, the articulation of character and the means to dramaturgies of transformation and mood. I hear Sondheim’s vamps as Africanist musical practice, resonating with the African pianism articulated by Akin Euba and J. H. Kwabena Nketia, the appropriated structures of Ghanaian drumming in works by Steve Reich, and the function of African American gospel vamps theorized by musicologist and theologian Braxton D. Shelley. I linger with moments from recent Broadway revivals of Company and Into the Woods, and with feedback I received from Sondheim on my own work as a composer/lyricist and musical dramatist creating songs for West African characters.

A family shares their recollections and insights regarding Into the Woods and their engagement with Sondheim and with musicals more generally. Recalling that their parents were on the brink of divorce when Into the Woods appeared on American television in March 1991, sisters Rachel Knapp and Jenny (Zelda) Knapp dialogue 31 years later with their father Raymond Knapp about their separate and mutual involvements with the musical’s themes – including broken families, separation and connectedness, responsibility and consequences, learning, mistakes, disappointment, tragedy, leaving home, absence, forgiveness, repair and just growing up – and how the show fostered and sustained their shared love of musicals over the decades.

This article reflects on the allegorical queerness of one of Stephen Sondheim’s most popular and celebrated musicals, Sunday in the Park with George. The author recalls his first experience of the musical – the televised version of the original Broadway production in the mid-1980s – at a moment when his own adolescent queerness was beginning to find voice, and examines Sondheim’s subtle and typically unmarked incorporation of queerness into his work. Against popular commentaries that have criticized Sondheim’s lack of explicitly articulated queer content in his work (and in his public life), the author argues that Sondheim invites and invokes space within his musicals for queerness that can thrive without necessarily being named.

An exploration of two decades of (queer, trans, Jewish) cultural work within justice movements, drawing on Stephen Sondheim’s work – banners, backpatches, rewritten lyrics, etc.

The Asian American Broadway musical continues to be a limited category in which many of its most commercially successful titles have histories mired in stereotype, mockery and erasure. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Pacific Overtures, however, stands apart from most other Broadway musicals written about the Asian and Asian American experience. The positioning of an Asian narrative in a serious and legitimate manner, the effort to incorporate Japanese aesthetic authenticity and the resolve to cast all Asian American talent were central to the creation of Pacific Overtures and were historical firsts for the Broadway stage. Stamped with Sondheim’s incomparable quality seal, Pacific Overtures initiated a new and necessary step towards Asian American Broadway inclusivity. But the show’s original Broadway run in 1976 was unsuccessful, both critically and commercially, and closed after 193 regular performances. In 2004, a highly anticipated Broadway revival gave the New York theatre world a chance to revisit Pacific Overtures. The revival production also offered a company of Asian American actors, whose community had historically been sidelined on Broadway, the opportunity to deliver a high-profile show about the Asian experience that resisted clichéd gestures of Asian-ness. In this article, I share my personal recollections of my time with Pacific Overtures as a cast member of the 2004 Broadway revival and reflect upon the production as it pertains to a grander collective memory of the Asian American Broadway experience. Cautiously optimistic about the critical and commercial outcome of this new production, our 2004 Pacific Overtures cast took great comfort in an ever-present Sondheim, whose constant proximity and participation during the run of the show served as a reminder that even this lesser-known Sondheim piece is still a Sondheim masterpiece.

I have always been intrigued by and enamoured of fairy tales. However, no Black person can ever have an uncomplicated relationship to these stories, which, due in large part to Disney, now are almost entirely identified with Western Europe. Fairy tales – highly adaptable and designed to speak to fundamental concerns – reflect, reinscribe and sometimes create societal ideals. As a Black girl, fairy tales are at once a reminder of everything you are told you are not by wider society – beautiful, desirable, worthy of status, admiration and often supernatural blessing. They also reinforce our notions of purity and justify dehumanization, and this is why James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods has always been particularly fascinating to me. Sondheim and Lapine take the fairy tale as a text and dissect it – taking a variety of tales in their older, darker iterations as retold by the Brothers Grimm and showing the way they navigate complicated dynamics of purity and corruption. The first time I watched Into the Woods, I found, rather surprisingly, that I identified most closely with the Witch and the Giantess, the villains of the story and those categorically revolted and feared as ‘Other’. Whereas the other characters in the musical – the ones who are attached to the notion that they are, in fact, good – ignore or justify their own terrible (and very human) behaviour in the name of righting injustices and obtaining their desires, the Giantess and the Witch are not accorded the same humanity.

This article examines how Stephen Sondheim persistently and profoundly probed the second act of life, especially the years of middle age. I didn’t know it when I began discovering Sondheim’s works as an adolescent, but his lyrical insights prepared me for ageing. He proffered a map and showed the risks of ‘the road you didn’t take’, while also evincing the profound ambivalence that accompanies the examined life. Time registers itself anew – through its disappearing act – in one’s sinew and memory alike. Ageing variously enables some things and disables others; it forces one to grapple with various kinds of deaths – material and metaphoric – from small to shattering. Sondheim’s musicals stage these forays into ageing, and in what follows I explore how his works offer a prismatic view of middle age and beyond. Sondheim evinces how part of ageing deals with consequences – it is less about the road you didn’t take than the one that you did. And while a character in Follies (1971) implores us to ‘never look back’, much of Sondheim’s canon is about the wisdom gleaned from looking back, usually from the gimlet-eyed perspective of age and experience.

The author considers her experience as the lighting designer for John Doyle’s production of the Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Road Show at the Public Theater in New York City in 2008. She reflects on the experience of her life and career as an immigrant designer in the American theatre in relationship to the story of the musical, and relates her experience of the rehearsal and technical process of the production. The author considers her relationship to the American musical through the experience of designing this one particular Sondheim musical and explores various relationships to America, to the musical and to theatre in capitalism in the context of particular songs from the musical.

This piece of autoethnographic writing analyses its author’s coming of age as a scholar and connects anecdotes to the history of Black actors in Sondheim’s musicals. From Reri Grist and Elizabeth Taylor in West Side Story (Winter Garden Theatre, New York City, 1957) to Francois Batiste, Adante Carter and Amber Gray in Here We Are (The Shed, New York City, 2023), Black actors co-create Sondheim’s musicals on and off official theatrical stages even as Sondheim studies as a field erases their labour. By building on Brent Staples’s experience of racism and Claude M. Steele’s theory of stereotype threat, the offensive mechanisms visited on Black men and boys are considered alongside Sondheim’s notable works throughout. Attention is also paid to what musical theatre studies scholars can learn about epistemology and historiography from Black people’s experiential knowledge and lived experience.

Stephen Sondheim’s 1994 musical Passion is rarely discussed or deconstructed, more often relegated to a footnote within his collected works. However, it poses many important questions about disability and sexuality, which remain largely unexplored as themes within the musical theatre canon. In this article, I consider my own readings and reactions to this text from two moments in time: 2014 and 2023. My approach to this text is framed by my intersectional understanding of the labels I use to identify myself: asexual, disabled and female-presenting. I explore my own response to the musical in relation to these labels, and discuss how my growing understanding of myself was aided by my first viewing and complicated by the second viewing.

This article explores Stephen Sondheim’s ‘A Weekend in the Country’ from A Little Night Music, and details how, for two musical theatre queens on a weekend getaway, this song became our road map and rallying cry. As we examine the way that our lives mirrored the characters’ lives, we also rewrite Sondheim’s lyrics as a mode of updating them to explicate our specific twenty-first-century contexts, needs and desires. Our cheeky adaptation, we suggest, matches the cheekiness of the song on offer from Sondheim, and answers Sondheim and A Little Night Music’s invitations to play. Though some may cry sacrilege, we see our rewrites as requiem, as a fitting tribute to Sondheim, as we sing with, through, in lieu of and after his characters. Ultimately, we contend there is sustenance and knowledge for audiences through such appropriation. Our play is serious, and Sondheim helps us see how things become just a little bit better each time we attune ourselves to life’s musical possibility.

This article explores how Jewish American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in his musical theatre works, engaged in a distinctly Jewish lyrical style that resembles a Talmudic dialectic. The author argues that Sondheim’s argumentative, self-referential, quick-moving, pitter-patter lyrics and music, a writing style that values the performance of ambivalence and repeated questioning, resembles contemporary Jewish discourse as influenced by Talmudic dialogue. The author explores Sondheim’s work through a reflection of his experience piloting a new two-week musical theatre specialty programme at Ramah Darom, a Jewish summer camp in Clayton, Georgia, in July 2023. The programme, called Ramah Bamah (bamah is a Hebrew word that translates in this context to ‘stage’), aimed to teach campers valuable performance skills from professional theatre-makers, while simultaneously encouraging campers to explore their identities as Jewish artists. Ramah Bamah presented Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods JR. as its premiere production, as programme leaders used Jewish texts, thought and values to help campers connect emotionally and thematically to Sondheim’s play-text. This article considers the relationship between Jewish text study, Jewish education, storytelling, youth/amateur theatre-making and Stephen Sondheim.

How would the plot of Assassins shift if Squeaky Fromme was singing to Jodie Foster in the song ‘Unworthy of Your Love?’ Or if Bobbie from Company does not want to get married because her girlfriend, Rifkele, is waiting for her offstage? Marvin Carlson’s concept of ghosting explains how an audience’s previous experience with a person or object can carry a trace into subsequent roles, which explains how these readings were possible for a certain portion of those watching Erin Markey as Squeaky Fromme in the 2017 City Center Encores! production of Assassins and Katrina Lenk as Bobbie in the 2022 production of Company. Although there was nothing inherently queer about these two characters within their respective Sondheim productions, Markey’s performance history and Lenk’s well-known role as Manke in Paula Vogel’s Indecent ghosted prior performances of queerness onto Markey’s Squeaky Fromme and Lenk’s Bobbie. This reading provides a way for a queer viewer to find representations of queerness in Assassins and Company that live outside of the gay male experience, which ends up being particularly inclusive for bisexual and lesbian women audience members and performers. By following the author’s phenomenological experience of reading these two roles as queer women within their specific musicals, this article posits that spaces for queer women, non-binary people and trans people can and should be explored in the works of Stephen Sondheim.

‘No More’, one of the lesser-known songs from Into the Woods, is the launching pad for this personal article that explores both Sondheim’s lyrical legacy and his direct impact on the author’s understanding of her relationship with her father over a 30-year period. The article uses ‘No More’ to trace the author’s journey from 16-year-old encountering Into the Woods for the first time to 46-year-old deciding to leave an academic career while witnessing a complex father in slow decline. It examines the ways a ‘quest musical’ can help us craft (and recraft) stories about our lives as we are living them, and it explores how Sondheim’s songs unveil themselves in new, surprising ways over time – how his work speaks to multiple audiences at once. This article is also a homage to a life lived in academic theatre and a fond (partial) farewell to the cradle that world creates.