SOURCE: Van Leer, David. “Putting It Together: Sondheim and the Broadway Musical.” Raritan 7, no. 2 (fall 1987): 113-28.

[In the following essay, Van Leer elucidates the reasons for the mixed critical and popular reaction to Sondheim's musicals.]

It may be hard these days to care much one way or the other about the Broadway musical, but people care passionately about Stephen Sondheim. Both ways. By most accounts he is the finest lyricist and composer now writing for the American musical theater. He has received more Tony awards than any composer. His last production—Sunday in the Park with George—won a Pulitzer Prize for drama, one of the few ever given to a musical. Perhaps more to the point in the commercial world of song writing, Barbra Streisand's highly successful Broadway Album used Sondheim songs or lyrics in seven of its eleven selections. And at the recent Grammy Awards, in a year when he staged no new work, the awards for best album, best musical, and even best opera went to records to which he contributed.

These triumphs are matched, however, by equally remarkable failures. Though famous, Sondheim has had relatively little popular success. Of all the shows for which he wrote both lyrics and music, only the first—the bawdy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—was a huge success; the first production of Sunday in the Park lost $600,000. None but Forum had an initial run of even two years. Although his songs are often acknowledged as modern standards, they are less often recorded; and the wistful “Send in the Clowns” is his only commercial hit. Nor is he even a critical favorite. Ignored for his first contribution, the lyrics to West Side Story, Sondheim has always been applauded by a few critics, dismissed by the rest. For every affirmative voice, two allege that he is self-consciously arty, and a third that he is a nihilist who celebrates desolation. This tension came to a head over his last show, when the Tony competition between Sunday and the more traditional La Cage aux Folles took on the tone of a crusade against elitism and immorality: the crusade was a success; despite its other awards, Sondheim's show won no Tonies for music, script, direction, or even performance.

That the problem involves issues other than talent is most clear in the mixed reactions to the gala 1985 concert version of his 1971 Follies. This star-studded performance of the difficult-to-stage musical was widely praised by the critics. The theater critic of The New York Times listed it as the best musical of the year, even though it ran, as scheduled, for only two sold-out concerts at Lincoln Center. The subsequent album won one of the three Grammies awarded last year. At the same time, some people wondered what all the fuss was about. Though all agreed that it was good to hear one of Sondheim's most inventive scores, the stateliness of the occasion seemed excessive. Brilliantly orchestrated for a small theater orchestra emphasizing wind and brass instruments, the score hardly required the full string complement of the New York Philharmonic used at Lincoln Center. The quickly rehearsed cast, however talented, was not at all points better than the original performers, for whom the songs had been written. And to the extent that the concert set itself up in opposition to the original production and recording, and was therefore said to have done an injustice to the complex work, Sondheim seemed almost to be fighting himself.

Clearly something is wrong, and the problem goes beyond the difficulty any experimental artist might have in winning over a conservative public. Sondheim's audiences don't simply like or dislike what they hear. Reading him as a cultural barometer, they love him as they love truth, hate him as they hate inconstancy. The argument can seem incoherent, since the same characteristics are offered as evidence by both sides. And less partisan outsiders, who see Sondheim neither as Broadway's last hope nor as the apostle of the new barbarism, wonder what they would hear if, for a moment they could forget his importance.

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Part of the issue is Sondheim's celebrity: more people recognize his name than know his shows (just as conversely more people have heard of Evita and Cats than of their creator, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the English composer who is Sondheim's only real competitor). Although not given to public appearances, Sondheim is, from media coverage, as famous for his personal traits as for his music. Especially emphasized is his intelligence, epitomized by his love for puzzles and games. And few reviews, let alone interviews, fail to mention his academic credentials—his training at Williams College and later under Milton Babbitt, the leading American composer of twelve-tone music.

These observations are pertinent, for these is in his work both great intelligence and the intricacy of a gamesman. But the unstated implications are less fortunate. The same man who for a year wrote crosswords for New York magazine did compose the complicated musical structures of Follies and Sunday in the Park. Yet Sondheim is not Nabokov, and his gamesmanship does not make his work notably difficult. It is often said, for example, that all the music for his operettalike A Little Night Music is in waltz form. The claim is not literally true: although much of the accompaniment is characterized by the triple meter associated with waltzes, at least three of the show's most popular moments—including the hit “Send in the Clowns”—are more nearly in a traditional four-four meter. More simply, the critics' emphasis on the metrical component makes prospective audiences reject the score beforehand as unappealingly repetitive. Sondheim's triumph in Night Music, as in much of his work, is his creation of a traditionally lyrical score within his arbitrarily set limits. Overprepared for the gamesmanship, audiences don't always hear the song.

Similarly, claims for his very real, educated intelligence can as easily alienate audiences as attract them. Sondheim often draws on a wide range of literary sources, most obviously Plautus for Forum and Ingmar Bergman for Night Music. But this hardly makes his work inaccessible. His rhyming of sophisticated words like “accrue” and “misconstrue” is a mere preference, not qualitatively different from Berlin and Hart's preference for intentionally flat rhymes (dumb/from or laughable/unphotographable). Whatever its source in Roman drama, Forum is experienced in the theater as a sophisticated update of vaudevillian jokes, with which Plautus shares a clear affinity. Similarly, the Bergman of Night Music is not the murky Freudian of Virgin Spring or Cries and Whispers but a lighthearted sentimentalist, strongly influenced by Viennese operetta (which in fact Bergman had been directing shortly before filming Smiles of a Summer Night, the source for the musical). Overattention to a work's literary depth can, in popular theater, mask its theatricality. As the merchandizing of a recent production by another composer has shown, Sweet Charity does better as a Bob Fosse dance version of a Neil Simon script than as a Fellini movie set to music.

Something of this sort of misrepresentation may account for the ambivalent public reaction to Sunday in the Park. The show tells in the first act of the hostile response painter Georges Seurat encountered to his pointillistic technique, especially in his masterpiece Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte; and in the second, of the similar difficulties of a modern artist, perhaps a descendant of Seurat. Innovative in structure and staging, the show nevertheless is a recognizable variation on the theme of the difficulties of art, though in film and on stage the art form is more usually music or theater than painting. Moreover, in focusing on the conflict between the demands of art and of a personal life, the show recalls more traditional accounts of this conflict in A Chorus Line or 42nd Street.

In some senses, then, Sunday merely explores and expands traditional topics and themes. Yet descriptions of the show tend to emphasize instead its experimental qualities. The pointillism of Seurat is often associated with the musical technique of the score itself: the eleven basic colors that Seurat combined to create a range of shadings are related to the twelve tones of the musical scale. And in this context we are frequently reminded of Sondheim's debt to Milton Babbitt's use of the twelve-tone system (although Sondheim did not study these techniques with Babbitt, but focused on more traditional problems of structure in tonal music). Whether true or not, these descriptions make the show sound less appealing to the average theatergoer. By emphasizing Seurat's intellectualism in his color system the reviews obscure the fact that Seurat is now a very popular painter and his Grande Jatte one of the most accessible of “modern” paintings. Though Seurat's use of light may be related to the scientism of modern twelve-tone techniques and the reductionism of musical minimalism, Sondheim's score shows no such influence, being itself more clearly indebted to the romantic melodic tradition of Ravel and Poulenc. Few would want to hear a score constructed from Babbitt's fiercely intellectual dodecaphonic principles or even musical comedy in the style of Philip Glass; and, much to his credit, Sondheim does not offer one.

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Part of the reason for the misrepresentation of Sondheim is surely simple miscalculation. In their enthusiasm (virtual relief) at having the opportunity to write about shows that bear intellectual discussion, critics tend to make the scores sound too exclusively intellectual. And yet, as with the responses to the Follies revival, more seems at stake here than two good concerts or twelve good shows. The intensity of the reaction, however, has less to do with Sondheim than with certain basic misconceptions about the history of the American musical theater.

Whatever their particular focus, however, all histories identify fundamentally the same stages of development. Whether drawn from an English tradition (a combination of the music hall with Gilbert and Sullivan) or a continental one (a mix of Offenbach and Viennese operetta), early musicals merely showcased the singing (or dancing) talents of the performers, and to a lesser extent the songwriting talents of composer and lyricist, with little concern for dramatic unity. Starting with Showboat, however, the interrelation between song and story became increasingly important, until Oklahoma! marked the birth of the modern American musical, in which the songs grew out of a fully-developed story. Starting in the mid-fifties, and especially with the work of director-choreographer Jerome Robbins in West Side Story, dance became an ever more important element in storytelling. In the late sixties and seventies, the director's role became increasingly central, both in the concept musicals, especially those of Harold Prince (Company, Cabaret, Evita among others), where setting and mood were as important as plot or performers, and the pure dance musicals of Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls) and Bob Fosse (Pippin, Dancin'). The history most often ends with a xenophobic plaint that this American tradition is rapidly being destroyed by a pop revolution, of which the plotless musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, especially Cats, are the best example.

At all stages of this history, Sondheim is a central figure. Growing up in Pennsylvania next door to Hammerstein, he studied the tradition of the book-oriented musical from the man responsible for the lyrics of its most famous examples, including both Showboat and Oklahoma!. His theatrical debut as lyricist was in the landmark dance-musical West Side Story. His own most famous shows—Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd—were also among those in which Harold Prince defined the concept musical. And in the first two of these, especially Follies, Michael Bennett was experimenting with the intertwining of story and dance which would result, four years after Follies, in the groundbreaking Chorus Line.

It is understandable, given this history, that Sondheim should assume an almost iconographic importance. He has been associated with so many of its key moments, that the fate of the American musical seems, especially in these bleak days, to hang on his success or failure. The only problem with this interpretation, for both Sondheim and the theater in general, is that the history is not fully accurate. For one thing, it remains oddly silent on works, like My Fair Lady, whose fame far exceeds any formal innovations. Moreover, it ignores those formal experiments, like Hair, that do not advance the so-called “great tradition.” But most importantly, it denies certain realities—about the nature of both performance style and the recording business—that significantly influence the future, and the past, of musical theater.

Take, for example, the relation of book to song. The beginnings of the history in Gilbert and Sullivan might itself suggest that the progression is not simply one of increasing interconnection: any Savoy operetta is more unified than any musical (as indeed are most operas, however sappy their libretti). Nor conversely are the book musicals all that unified. In Oklahoma! the title song does nothing to advance the plot. “People Will Say We're in Love” and “If I Loved You” could switch shows without disrupting the story (the frugal Lerner and Loewe did actually recycle in Gigi a song cut from My Fair Lady). And “Younger Than Springtime” might appear in virtually any show from The Red Mill on down, though it is in fact from the very complex book of South Pacific.

Moreover, many show tunes are performed as set pieces in their respective shows, allowing them a distance from the specifics of the plot. This tradition of performed songs—which accounts for such Rodgers and Hammerstein standards as “You'll Never Walk Alone,” “Dites-Moi,” “Edelweiss,” and even “Shall We Dance?”—reached its height in Bob Fosse's movie version of Cabaret, which eliminated entirely the book songs, leaving only the cabaret numbers as an ironic commentary on the book, itself performed largely by nonsinging actors. Sondheim himself in Company, the first of his shows we now think of as characteristic (and produced like the original Cabaret by Hal Prince), employs a similar technique, in which the songs are sung by characters outside the scene who comment on it only indirectly. Thus in some sense Company is less in the great tradition of the book musical than is Hair, the anarchist pop musical from which Sondheim is sometimes felt to have saved Broadway; in Hair, whatever else they do, the characters still sing directly of their emotions.

The point is not to attack the grand tradition but to realize that integrating song and script is only one of its goals. An equally important consideration, though one more commercial than artistic, is to find a place for generally singable songs which can be lifted out of context for the hit-forming singles on which shows depend for both royalties and ticket sales. In the early days, as the traditional account implies, there was no real problem. Songs were so tenuously connected with their theatrical vehicles that all they mentioned, for the most part, were generalized emotions that could apply to any character, virtually to any show. In The Boys from Syracuse the hero's opening song of longing for “dear old Syracuse” too often refers to the show's classical setting to be performed out of context; but once the stage is set, the characters are more generally concerned with “falling in love with love” or “singing for their supper” in a manner suitable to any popular singer.

This situation was not substantially altered when songs became more fully linked to their books: a popular singer of the forties simply imagined himself riding in a fringed surrey, and up through the fifties was willing to sing in cockney dialect that something might be “loverly” or she “could have danced all night” or even that his friends should “get him to the church on time.” Only when the popular tradition moved in one direction and the musical in another did the book-bound aspect of the songs become a financial liability. In the sixties and after, the commercial triumphs of specialized musical styles (rock, r&b, country) weakened the generalized appeal of the “popular” singer. Not only did no one sing Sondheim ballads like “Losing My Mind” or “Not While I'm Around”; few even recorded “My Funny Valentine.” It is in this context that the rock-oriented Hair triumphed. But more traditional scores of the period showed similar influences, and increasingly musicals were written by pop writers who had done little previous work for the theater.

The change in the relation between pop singing and musicals affected performance traditions as well as the scores. So long as the theater was the primary source of pop songs, generations of singers found careers there. These singers combined dramatic ability with other more purely vocal talents, like voice projection and range. Sometime in the late fifties and early sixties, however, such talents proved to be less marketable. The limits of Julie Andrews's emotional range as an actress were increasingly evident once her powerful voice became less valuable; so that what was sufficient for Mary Martin or Doris Day could not sustain Andrews's career in either theater or film. Her contemporaries Barbara Cook and especially Barbra Streisand, similarly unable to find a theatrical outlet, had to move into other musical fields with ambiguous results. Streisand's voice, in particular, has seemed wasted in the undemanding rock music she sings—a fact that she made the subject of her “return” to Broadway in her recent album. And since that generation, not only have there been no fully trained Broadway singers, but even those singing actors best equipped to deal with an intricate score—Len Cariou, Elaine Paige, Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone—have trouble finding material.

Ironically, the book musical, intentionally or not, accelerated this decline of the Broadway singer. As books became more involved, the book musical often divided the performing chores, so that the more difficult acting roles had lighter vocal requirements. Whatever else it represents, My Fair Lady marks the beginning of this shift; the musical demands on the male lead are minimal, and three of the four supporting roles scarcely sing at all. The division of labor was taken even further in subsequent musicals like Camelot and Cabaret, where almost all singing is done by secondary characters, so that King Arthur and Sally Bowles need only serviceable voices. At the same time, musicals like Mame, that required extensive singing from their lead, scaled down the vocal demands of the role to well within the range of any actress who could carry a tune. Increasingly, musical Broadway turned to Hollywood, not the Met, to fill its biggest roles. Gone are the days of the treacherous octave leap that opens “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and one reason we have no new Oklahoma!s is that it is hard enough nowadays to cast the old one.

Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line epitomizes the changing nature of Broadway. The only fully successful musical of the past fifteen years, Chorus Line nevertheless represents the contradictions as well as the strengths of the modern musical. It is a curiously conservative backstage musical, celebrating not individualism, but conformity: “Cassie, you're going out there a star, but you've got to come back a youngster.” Moreover, it bears an uneasy relation to the show for which it pretends to be an audition. It deifies the faceless performers of the old-fashioned chorus, even while making them obsolete: Bennett's individualized use of dancers is very different from the group movement he eulogizes. Chorus Line rings the death knell for chorus lines. In the show itself, the audition piece—“One”—is marvelously resonant, comparing the supposed glamour of the star to the dance movements that the chorus really idolizes. But it is impossible to imagine the shadow show in which this song serves to introduce the lead. That sort of relation between chorus and performer is just what Oklahoma! made impossible. Chorus Line virtually requires that we understand the irrelevance of the show being cast: we are only reconciled to the final cruel rejection of the appealing Paul and Sheila (he sprains his ankle, she is simply too old) by the recognition that they have had the big parts all along and the real show is already over.

The double-edged nostalgia of the script extends to the show's form as well. Considered apart from Michael Bennett's brilliant contribution as director-choreographer, the script is a string of engaging clichés, and the score, by a Hollywood film musician, bland. The show cleverly parcels out the performing chores: some must sing, some dance, some deliver climactic speeches, and only one character must do all three with any proficiency. But that solution depends on the show's decision not to tell a story; and despite Bennett's fluid direction, Chorus Line, a situation without a plot, is structurally indistinguishable from Cats, the epitome of theatrical hollowness. For what really is the difference between a loosely structured audition in which dancers sing of their hopes and fears and a formless Jellicle Ball, where cats sing of their identities?

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My Fair Lady and A Chorus Line are not of course to be blamed for their clever solutions to performance problems: the function of theater is to entertain, not to advance the course of theatrical history. Yet the changing character of the Broadway musical, and especially its shifting relation to the world of popular music from which it derives economic support, explains the two aspects of Sondheim's shows that most trouble audiences—their alleged lack of lyricism and their excessive cynicism. And, although critics emphasize the witty words, it is clear that Sondheim's responses to these changes in Broadway are musical not verbal.

The cliché of Sondheim's tunelessness is slowly being eroded. Although only “Send in the Clowns” became “instantly” famous (even that took a year), Sondheim's shows of the seventies are full of singable music, as Barbra Streisand has shown. But simple melodiousness is not really the issue. The unspoken assumption is that since Sondheim writes in the great tradition of the musical, his music should sound like Rodgers and Hammerstein or even Gershwin. Sondheim's apparent lack of lyricism is more precisely his adjustment to current performance conditions and audience expectations. His are not, for the most part, songs of sweeping long lines and wide ranges: the kind of voice used in West Side Story by Sondheim's collaborator Leonard Bernstein is not readily available on Broadway, and even some opera houses have trouble casting Bernstein's Candide. Nor is it clear that anyone wants those days back: lyricism itself seems almost a pastoral affectation nowadays.

Adjusting to these changes, as have other composers, Sondheim tends to write for small ranges and limited breath control. Forbidden the upward modulation of pitch through which previous songwriters expressed elation, Sondheim's songs emphasize instead the wistfulness and melancholy most easily portrayed in short phrases of small range. At his best, he uses these practical restrictions to reinforce characterization: in “Send in the Clowns,” the vocal limitations of the actress define the character's emotional exhaustion. When dealing with a stronger singer, like Mandy Patinkin, for whom Sunday in the Park was written, Sondheim happily exploits the upper range for both comic effect (in the dogs' dialogue) and dramatic sweep (in the impassioned “Finishing the Hat”). And as Barbara Cook showed in the Follies concert, transposing back up into soprano range can uncover unsuspected lyricism in even a traditional book song like “In Buddy's Eyes.”

Sondheim's debt to the great tradition lies less in his musical line than in his fierce integration of his songs in the plot. A popular songwriter can no more write “Lady Be Good” today than a classic composer can write Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or Brahms's First. To write songs true to the psychological complexity of modern scripts, yet still marketable in the traditional world of popular music, seventies musicals tended toward a double focus: they revitalized traditional forms by using them ironically. Thus “What I Did For Love,” a love song that might seem old fashioned in a contemporary musical, works in Chorus Line because the love is not for a person but for performing itself. Though the equation of passion and theater is essential to that particular musical's theme, the piece can, when taken out of context, be sung popularly as a traditional love song.

Cynicism, if it should be called that, is Sondheim's personal variation on this ironic stance. Although Sondheim's scripts suggest the difficulty of sustaining personal relationships, this does not really distinguish his work from Chorus Line or even Carousel. What makes his skepticism seem deeper is a structural irony whereby a character's innocent thoughts are often undercut by our knowledge of the self-deception involved. Thus in Sweeney Todd the protagonist can sing sweetly of “Pretty Women” as he contemplates murder. More famously, Follies, a reunion of former chorus girls, can present as memories songs written in earlier vocal traditions, and, in the fantasy sequence, even offer the characters' very contemporary thoughts in the musical styles of their earlier performing days. In all cases, the outmoded musical tradition in which a character sings indicates that character's confusion or duplicity. But this anachronistic style serves a practical purpose as well: Streisand can later record the numbers as simple ballads, comparable to the showbiz standards they parody. If such parody creates a cynical context in which characters rarely understand their own emotions, the cynicism is at least more honest than the Broadway tradition which allows a transvestite to sing of his liberation in words so neutral as to be acceptable out of context to the most moral of majorities.

Yet as with the double focus of Chorus Line, there is something unsettling about such ironic lyricism. It raises the question of any parodic art: is it possible simultaneously to experience the joy of a form and to negate that joy by declaring the form outmoded? In “Too Many Mornings,” for example, a couple sing of their unrequited love. The psychological depth of the situation depends on our realization that this love is an illusion; at best the characters love only the memory of what they once were. Yet the music, perhaps Sondheim's most moving, repeatedly enchants us, until it is difficult to doubt their love: the intensity of the illusion makes it true. Thus Follies anticipates a dilemma that postmodernism will only claim to discover ten years later. Regularly those ideological biases that postmodernism means to attack seem esthetically appealing. Rather than examining the political implications of Chippendale scrolls, we are happy that our buildings have tops again. So, too, we find the self-deluding lyricism of “Too Many Mornings” simply beautiful.

But even while postmodernism is catching up with Sondheim, he has moved on. Though still best known for his portraits of modern alienation in Company and Follies, his subsequent work has been both less contemporary and less cynical. A Little Night Music idealizes love, while admitting the difficulty of knowing it when it appears; and the only character who denies its power is quietly but firmly rejected as too smart for her own good. The period musicals Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd locate the sources of evil in social oppression and greed. Still more important, his most recent shows resolve the tension between lyricism and dramatic intensity not through parody but through structural complexity.

The shift in technique was first evident in the short-lived Merrily We Roll Along. Merrily, a commercial and critical flop and (to date) his last show with Hal Prince, is sometimes seen as the end of the line for Sondheimian cynicism, an esthetic dead-end from which he redeemed himself with Sunday in the Park, his first collaboration with writer-director James Lapine. Yet this harsh judgment ignores the fact that it was in Merrily that Sondheim first experimented with the new musical structure so essential to Sunday. The show tells backwards the story of a young songwriter's capitulation to commercial pressures, from his sell-out, back through his years of struggle to his beginnings in youthful optimism. The inverted narration is not successful, in part because the book never says enough about the younger man's virtues to overcome the unattractiveness of his first appearance as a middle-aged studio hack. Yet the score is satisfying, both in its tunefulness and in its backward movement. Unlike the script the songs become enriched by a process that presents us with “earlier” versions of them later in the score. Thus the ballad “Not a Day Goes By,” angrily hurled by a wife at the husband she is divorcing, becomes even more poignant when we later hear the song's first performance—at their wedding.

More important, these songs are not ironic, but “modular.” Although the movement back through two decades offered an easy opportunity for a Follies-like survey of earlier styles, the show avoids pastiche. In the earlier shows psychological complexity arises from the difference between what a character sings and what we know to be true—dramatic irony as self-deception. In this new “modular” structure, however, the simplicity of each individual emotion is portrayed unironically: at any given moment a character honestly expresses his emotion in a relatively simple melody. Dramatic complexity results from the interrelation between those modular melodies, the shifting relation of tunes to each other in the world of the score. A melody that serves as a transitional “release” in one song will be the main theme in another. The hack's unsympathetic sense, in the release section of “Rich and Happy,” that “it's my time coming through” is musically identical to his younger self's highly attractive optimism in the main theme of “Our Time.” The quotation suggests that the main theme of “Rich and Happy” (“Life is swinging”) is simply a more restricted version (vocally and morally) of the soaring theme of “Our Time” (“It's our time, breathe it in”). Such modular use of melodies often makes the individual numbers long and complex, like two or three shorter songs interwoven. But it also softens the relation of the songs to the characters; just as one is not held accountable for the unforeseeable consequences of innocent acts, so the characters are not criticized for their failure to know in advance the whole score.

The greater success of Sunday in the Park rests more with advances in this modular technique of songwriting than in any supposed changes in characterization or world view. The theme of the show—the conflict between work and life—is common enough in Sondheim: the lead characters in Follies and Night Music are similarly torn; and the protagonist in Merrily is simply a George who burned out early. Moreover, too much has been made of the extent to which the characters in the musical represent positions, not people, though George and Dot are obviously simpler than some of Sondheim's neurotics. Earlier in Sondheim the tension lay within the characters; in Sunday it rests outside them, in the situation. But this simplification of character psychology is very conventional indeed; George and Dot represent an artist and his mistress at about the same level of complexity as Curley and Laurie in Oklahoma! represent a cowboy and his girl. And despite certain modern twists, the plot is the most traditional love story in any of Sondheim's musicals.

The impact of Sunday (apart from its imaginative staging by Lapine) lies in the complexity of its score. Sondheim uses modular songs within larger units in part to sketch in the minor characters, especially in the first act, where a song like “The Day Off” not only provides the male lead with his dog duet but also gives briefer solos to the figures that Seurat is painting. Other reworkings of these units serve to unify the two acts. Dot's discomfort while posing in the opening number “Sunday in the Park with George” is echoed, at the beginning of the second act, when the figures in the painting claim that “It's Hot Up Here.” And the “Gossip” music in Act 1 serves for the cocktail party chatter of “Putting It Together” in Act 2. Most of the focus, however, is on George and his mistress Dot, and most of the repetitions clarify their relation. The five-note theme, which represents both Seurat's use of connected colors and more general forms of interpersonal connection, becomes the basis for the song Dot and George sing whenever discontented (she with her figure, he with his painting) and more distantly for the song they sing when trying to connect (she with him, he—in his modern guise in the second act—with the art world around him).

But the most obvious example of this continuity, and its practical value, is the reconciliation scene which ends the musical. The song “Move On” is itself an example of traditional Broadway optimism, similar to Sondheim's own “Being Alive” at the end of Company and, more distantly, “What I Did For Love,” “I Am What I Am,” or even “My Way.” As such it can be recorded out of context by popular singers. Yet its place in the musical structure saves it from the kind of middle-class complacency that often harms such songs. In the first act, Dot tells George that “We Do Not Belong Together,” a song that ends with her need to “move on.” This reconciliation song (“Move On”), takes the melody of “We Do Not Belong Together” and adds to it the musical interval of the phrase “move on” to construct a new melody. At the conclusion of “Move On,” both characters reprise the earlier song with the altered lyrics “we've always belonged together.” The effect, though uplifting, is not that of simple reconciliation. Although one character has earlier praised the rewards of “Children and Art,” the show itself remains skeptical about the likelihood of getting both: George's hope for future art is musically built out of his failure at love; and the final reunion is an imaginary one between great-grandson and ghost.

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It is unclear that Broadway wants Sondheim's structural solution to the twin demands of the book musical and the commercial market. His are not difficult musicals: modern ears have long since adjusted to the slight atonalities of Sondheim's scores; and songs like “Losing My Mind” and “Move On” are harmonically conventional. More likely, disappointment will come from another direction. As the shows become more preoccupied with structure and the overall effect, the brittleness and intellectualism which drew many to the seventies shows have largely disappeared. Though Mandy Patinkin and Barbra Streisand in their energtic performances of “Putting It Together” both emphasize the dishonesty of art-world politics, the show itself accepts the need for cooperation, which is after all the essence not only of love but of Seurat's theory of color and light. And those who turn to Sondheim's new fairy-tale show Into the Woods for more cynicism and neurosis—“Fractured Fairy-Tales” or tuneful Bettelheim—will be surprised by both the fidelity of the treatment and the emphasis on the social, not psychological implications of the stories.

For Sondheim is moving away from his earlier irony and individualism. Always aware that “Alone is alone, / Not alive,” he now insists that in some more cosmic sense (and despite the verbal paradox) “No One Is Alone.” Just as songs now exist as part of the unified world of the score, so the shows have turned to a new social consciousness. This unification may please Broadway audiences no more than the earlier cynicism, for it does make demands on our memory for melody. But whether or not Sondheim remains a cult figure, it is clear that after a career of individual moments of great brilliance, he too is now concerned with putting it together.