SOS

With Sondheim On Sondheim just opened, there's a short essay by Stephen Holden in The New York Times on America's greatest living Broadway composer, but I'm not sure if he gets Sondheim (or I get Holden). For example:

The pastiche songs of “Follies,” particularly, recycle the styles of classic show tunes, matching or outdoing their antecedents in quality while subverting their escapism.

I realize Holden comes to praise Sondheim, but this is going too far. It's true in Follies Sondheim's imitating styles while trying to create great works of his own, but his tunes in that show did not surpass Gershwin, Kern, Porter, etc.--I'd guess not too many people outside Holden even make this claim.

Then we get this:

In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.

"But"? There's no reason for a "but." Even if you accept that Hammerstein writes sunny material, while Sondheim is fundamentally cynical, so what? Hammerstein taught him how to write lyrics--how they have to be understood on first hearing, how they have to fit the character, how they have to sit on the music, etc.--he didn't teach Sondheim what attitude to have. Sondheim took what he learned from Hammerstein and created the content he saw fit.

Holden seems to feel the need to beat up on Hammerstein, all the better for the contrast:

Hammerstein’s lyrics are synonymous with America’s post-World War II “Father Knows Best” ethos of moral rectitude, in which confident breadwinners and their perfect little wives are busy multiplying and building a safe new world of peace and freedom.

Really? Looking at Hammerstein's shows--Oklahoma!, Carousel, The King And I--I see male leads who are seriously flawed and have a lot of learning to do, and some fairly feisty women around to teach them.

While Holden wants to separate Sondheim from his Broadway antecedents, he does see other connections:

...it was Mr. Sondheim’s 1970 show, “Company,” that codified the Manhattan sensibility — a radically unsentimental, emotionally realistic honesty that found its pop-record equivalents in Paul Simon in New York, and in Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman on the West Coast.

I'm not seeing it. Doesn't Holden think because this trio is more "sophisticated" than most pop music songwriters that that makes them siblings to Sondheim? I can maybe see a slight amount of overlap with Mitchell, but even there it's strained. The others' content tends to be very different from Sondheim's.

Near the end, Holden has a flourish that veers into science fiction:

An emerging technological view of humanity and its discontents that largely bypasses the post-Freudian model proposes an unsettling new ideal of the human being as a perfectible machine that through cloning is theoretically immortal.

Antidepressants and performance-enhancing drugs, from steroids to mental stimulants to Viagra, are modifying human behavior. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery and gender re-assignment are undermining the traditional idea of the individual as a being with a singular identity and destiny. Hand-held devices have turned us into robotic mobile power stations continually transmitting and receiving information in computer language that has seeped into pop songs.

What this gobbledygook has to do with Sondheim, I still can't figure.

As we lunge [lunge?--time proceeds at the same pace it always has] into the 21st century, there is no next Stephen Sondheim waiting to step into the master’s shoes and perpetuate the tradition that he carried to its pinnacle.

Whether or not there'll be another "Stephen Sondheim" no one knows. I'm guessing, though, there are plenty of people "waiting" to take his place as the leading composer of smart shows. Maybe it's pointless, though, since, according to Holden, Sondheim's already raised the tradition as high as it can go.