Since Stephen Sondheim passed away in November, tributes have continued to pour in from those who knew him and those whose lives were touched by his musical theater work. Friend of the show and director of Flying Carpet Theater Company Adam Koplan joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to share reflections on the musical theater giant and the story of his rise to prominence in a field he’d forever change with his contributions.
Interview highlights:
Sondheim, the central figure of the last 50 years in musical theater:
“He both embodied and epitomized almost all of the wisdom and ideas of the first and second generation of American musical theater writers coming out of the thirties, forties, and fifties. He understood all of their ideas. He was able to create those sorts of musicals and do it brilliantly, and he also experimented and took the genre further. He both fully stood on their shoulders, saw a horizon, and went there.”
“Sondheim, in terms of taking a leap, wanted musical theater to take on more contemporary subjects, to be very much of the moment and be dealing with the concerns of the urbane urbanites that he was around. So one of the ways in which he was revolutionary is by creating a success for things like ‘Company,’ which are very sophisticated, with very smart, sophisticated urbanites, talking about very contemporary issues… their angst and their sex lives and their marital discontent, et cetera, fears of commitment. These were not perceived as subjects for a commercial musical back at that time.”
On Oscar Hammerstein II, the illustrious mentor:
“Sondheim said the most important relationship in his life was that of Oscar Hammerstein the second, who famously was the lyricist and conceiver of musicals like ‘South Pacific’ and ‘Carousel’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Oklahoma.’ And so Hammerstein gets a lot of credit for essentially being one of the inventors of the modern musical, and a young Sondheim falls under his wing and tutelage. And he said things like, you know, ‘I became a musical theater person because that’s what Oscar did. If Oscar had been a physician, I would have been a physician.’”
“Hammerstein treated him like an adult and said, ‘If this is really something that you’re thinking about, seriously, let’s go through this together,’ and starting from the first page and the first line, he criticized the lyrics, the music, the conception, and in doing so, gave Sondheim a language, a bunch of categories, and a way of thinking about writing musicals that he kept on going and iterating through his early twenties.”
The audacious brilliance of Sondheim’s lyricism:
“He wanted to write in a very idiomatic way but use a phrase that actually wasn’t in the idiom. So he invented this phrase, ‘Everything’s coming up roses,’ as if it were a cliché that had lived in the language forever. And he said he knew he’d really done something when he saw a headline about Vietnam in the New York Times, and the author, in the lead, had said something about, ‘Everything’s not coming up roses.’”
“Mandy Patinkin, one of his great interpreters, said it was always, when he worked with him, like being in the room with Shakespeare, and in the way that Shakespeare was so inventive with language, so, too, was Stephen Sondheim. And some of the things that he invented then became a part of our language.”
