Man Of Many Words

Wow! Stephen Sondheim will appear on The Colbert Report tonight.  Stephen, meet Stephen.  A weird choice, but I'll take Sondheim where I can get him.

I jut finished Finishing The Hat, a collection of all his lyrics up to 1981, including songs cut from shows. (Looking forward to volume two where he really does finish the hat, though--sorry, Steve--I think most of his best work is in the first volume.) It does double duty, as Sondheim adds notes and anecdotes along the way.

I found almost everything about the book a delight.  We get many famous stories told, sometimes for the first time, from Sondheim's point of view.  A lot of my favorites deal with his apprenticeship years:

--demonstrating "Maria" for Jerome Robbins, who demands to know what Tony is doing during the song, and when all Sondheim can say is he's declaring his love, Robbins, disgusted, says "you stage it."

--playing the score to Gypsy for an old, sick Cole Porter.  When they get to the unexpected, and very Porteresque quadruple rhyme of "amigos" in "Together, Wherever We Go," the old master is delighted.

--learning the hard way that Oscar Hammerstein wasn't kidding about the importance of an opening number.  Out of town with Forum, the show is failing but miraculously works after Sondheim writes "Comedy Tonight" (and Robbins stages it).

Then there's Sondheim's defense of good lyrics.  He explains that they exist in time, so must be understandable as they're first being heard.  They should fit the dramatic requirements of the situation and the character.  They have to be compact, so every word counts.  He quotes an anonymous lyricist (almost certainly Carole Bayer Sager) who puts down rhyme as being too studied and not natural, and Sondheim explains how and why it works.  He's also tough on his own stuff.  He goes over his first show set for Broadway, Saturday Night, and points out how he makes almost every mistake one could make.

In perhaps the most controversial part of the book, he takes on a bunch of famous lyricists (all dead--he leaves contemporaries alone) and finds many wanting.  He thinks W. S. Gilbert and Noel Coward overrated (I agree).  He thinks Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, two of the most beloved Broadway lyricists, fall short. (I agree that Gershwin goes in a bit much for verbal gymnastics, and Hart is often slapdash, but I still love them.) He even takes on mentor Oscar Hammerstein, noting his odd obsession for birds--"a lark who is learning to pray"--what the hell is that?  It's not all negative, of course.  He likes Frank Loesser, Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter and others.  We find out his favorite show is Porgy And Bess, that he was highly entertained by My Fair Lady but has misgivings about Alan Jay Lerner, and that his favorite Broadway tunesmiths are Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen.

There are also a lot of nice photographs.  Definitely the must-buy of the decade for anyone interested in lyrics.