SOURCE: McLaughlin, Robert L. “‘No One Is Alone’: Society and Love in the Musicals of Stephen Sondheim.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 3, no. 2 (spring 1991): 27-41.

[In the following essay, McLaughlin examines the theme of love in contemporary society in West Side Story, Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods.]

The cliché about Stephen Sondheim's musicals is that the critics cheer them while the audiences stay home. This generalization, however, hides more truth than it reveals. Although his shows have never achieved the popularity of Phantom of the Opera or Les Misérables, their life on Broadway, in London, in National Tours, in regional and community productions, and in television versions indicates an ever-growing audience for his work. Conversely, although his shows have frequently received awards from the New York drama critics, they have rarely been enthusiastically embraced by the critics.¹ Critics and audiences find Sondheim's musicals difficult to deal with not simply because of their intellectual depth but because of their defiance of the conventions of the musical theatre developed during the Rodgers and Hammerstein years. There are two main areas in which Sondheim has consistently defied these conventions. First, musicals, like Shakespearean comedies, have traditionally served the purpose of reaffirming certain positive values: virtue winning out over evil, order winning out over chaos, and love winning out over any obstacles or misunderstandings that come in its way. But for Sondheim, such reaffirmation, particularly of love, has never come easily.² Second, Sondheim's characters are ideologically situated. They are products of and participants in social forces. These two areas come together in Sondheim's convention-defying treatment of that most traditional of musical-theatre situations, the love story. Sondheim places his lovers in sociopolitical contexts which affect the love relationship and problematize the possibility of happily ever after. His shows suggest the difficulty if not impossibility of love in the contemporary world because of social pressures, divisions between individuals, and fragmentation within the self. Through much of his career, his lovers have been thwarted by sociopolitical forces too powerful to be overcome, but recently a guarded optimism has crept into his shows: love relationships must be successful if individuals are to have any chance of changing a society determined to destroy itself.

But before beginning, we need to remember that a musical play, perhaps more than any other art form, is the result of collaboration and compromise: between the composer and the book writer; between the authors and the director; between the director and the choreographer; between the choreographer and the star, etc.³ Consequently, it would be unrealistic to claim that the play resulting from these collaborations and compromises is representative of any single person's vision. This is especially so in Sondheim's case because he has worked with many strong artistic personalities: Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Prince, Michael Bennett, and James Lapine, among others. This does not mean, however, that we as theatregoers cannot be aware of and find significance in what seem clearly to be Sondheim's continuing concerns; by these I mean themes that return in various forms throughout his career regardless of his collaborators. I will be studying the theme of the possibility of love in contemporary society in four plays from various stages of Sondheim's career: West Side Story, Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods. In each of these plays, various love relationships come under pressure from powerful social forces; the lovers' reactions, failures, and victories serve as critiques of a society that has become increasingly inhospitable to human life.

In West Side Story, Sondheim's first show, Tony's and Maria's love is defeated on the most literal level by the bullet that kills Tony.⁴ But the events that lead up to this gunshot are shaped by the combined and self-perpetuating pressures of a rationalized and dehumanized society. This retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story is set in the social context of New York youth gangs in the 1950s. The young people here have been alienated by a society more interested in ordered (and orderly) streets than in human concerns. They are frustrated at every turn by adult rules, rationalizations, and prejudices. This frustration is illustrated in “Gee, Officer Krupke,” where the Jets satirize an overly specialized social-welfare bureaucracy which, despite its ostensible purpose of helping deprived youth, treats its clients like objects, specifically mirrors in which a police officer, a judge, a psychiatrist, and a social worker all see reflected their own theories of what is wrong with society. Significantly, the few adults in the play, Krupke, Shrank, Glad Hand, and Doc, are antagonistic, ineffectual, or both.

The young people have responded to this alienation in two ways. First, they have turned for companionship and protection to various groups: the Puerto Ricans especially place a great importance on the inviolability of the family; the youths all take pride in their ethnic or national heritage; and most importantly, they have formed street gangs. But while these groups provide connectedness for the youths, they necessarily create antagonism as well, since their society is now defined by group members and non-group members. This dilemma is seen in the play's first song, “Jet Song.” Riff, the gang leader, stresses the community advantages of gang membership: “You got brothers around, / You're a family man! / You're never alone, / You're never disconnected!” (13). But in the second verse, the gang as a whole chauvinistically expresses their superiority to non-gang members: “Here come the Jets: / Little world step aside! / Better go underground, / Better run, better hide! / We're drawin' the line, / So keep your noses hidden! / We're hanging a sign / Says ‘Visitors forbidden’” (15). Ironically, the gangs in their urge to connect with each other repeat the adult world's methods of division and objectification. The youths' second response to their feelings of alienation from the adult world is the philosophy of “cool.” This is the belief that emotional detachment is necessary for survival in society. To show emotion is to be vulnerable and to give one's antagonist an advantage. As Riff explains in his introduction to the song “Cool,” “No matter who or what is eatin' at you, you show it, buddy boys, and you are dead. You are cuttin' a hole in yourselves for them to stick in a red-hot umbrella and open it. Wide. You wanna live? You play it cool” (63). But such an attempt to deny emotions is equally deadly. Periodically, as in “The Dance at the Gym” and “The Rumble,” the repressed emotions burst out violently, destroying indiscriminately. As Anita explains to Maria, the gangs dance and fight to get rid of “Too much feeling” (75).

Such a social context necessarily destroys Tony's and Maria's love. Through their love, Tony and Maria try to deny the artificial divisions by which their society has ordered and alienated people. In their love duet, “Tonight,” they see past these divisions: they sing that “the world was just an address,” a number arbitrarily assigned to a house or building to create order, but when they met, “the world went away” (42). Their love allows them to see only each other; Maria begins the song with “Only you, you're the only thing I'll see …” (41). After dismissing the world's divisions, Tony and Maria are able to experience a unity through love. They spiritually merge, saying over and over that they are joined, that they are the same. This is most clearly expressed in their symbolic marriage ceremony where they sing “Make of our hands one hand, / Make of our hearts one heart. … Make of our lives one life …” (82). And later Maria tries to explain to Anita, “I love him; I'm his, / And everything he is / I am too” (126). Where the gang members have joined together in antagonistic response to a hostile world to which they feel, by virtue of their gang membership, superior, Tony and Maria join in a mutual love that tries to deny the outside world. They speak repeatedly of being “out of the world” and “untouchable” (76). The stage directions emphasize that when they meet and when they sing “Tonight,” the city set and the other characters fade into the background. But such a denial of the world is, of course, impossible. Their violent society continues to intrude into their relationship. The divisions they try to see past, though artificial, are still powerful. The “Somewhere” ballet illustrates the impossibility of flight. The lovers imagine a vague “somewhere” where they can exist happily and innocently, free of the violence which the divisions in their society cause. But even in fantasy such happiness can't last. The stage directions read: “The harsh shadows, the fire escapes of the real, tenement world cloud the sky, and the figures of Riff and Bernardo slowly walk on. The dream becomes a nightmare: as the city returns, there are brief reenactments of the knife fight, of the deaths” (108). The power of love isn't strong enough to propel the lovers beyond the pressures of their society. In addition, Tony and Maria violate the philosophy of “cool” and so make themselves vulnerable to the hate of their society. Even though a romance between a white boy and a Puerto Rican girl is apparently unusual in this neighborhood, Bernardo, Anita, Doc, and Chino all easily guess their relationship because Tony and Maria are unable to hide their feelings for even a few moments. This openness contributes to the deaths at the rumble and to Tony's death at Chino's hands. Viewers wishing for a happy ending can't help but wish the lovers were more discreet.

West Side Story ends with a vision of hope. After Tony's death, the young people from both gangs join together in a procession, mirroring their actions in the “Somewhere” fantasy and leaving the adults behind, “bowed, alone, useless” (143). But unlike the reconciliation in Romeo and Juliet, which indicates that the families have learned from the deaths of the lovers, everything in the musical suggests that such unity can be only temporary. Society's pressures encourage division, not unity, and surviving in society requires conforming to the denial of emotion, even if that denial leads to violence instead of love.

These same social pressures are at work in the 1970 concept musical Company.⁵Company analyzes the idea of marriage in contemporary society through five couples and one bachelor, Robert. The play is made up of a series of vignettes in which Robert and the audience observe the couples in particular and marriage in general and the audience observes Robert and his lifestyle. What the audience sees is that the characters here are no more successful than Tony and Maria in defining a relationship between themselves and their society and less successful in creating love relationships.

Company shares with West Side Story the geographical setting of New York City, but Company's New York is a workplace and playground for the privileged class. This New York society has two defining characteristics, activity and alienation. The activity is seen in the world of the busy signal, representing the many things people can do to entertain themselves and fill their time. This is best heard in the play's repeated “Bobby Baby” theme in which the couples implore Robert to join them at a concert, to go to the beach (12), to take the kids to the zoo (16), and to spend an evening at the opera (17). Similarly, in “The Ladies Who Lunch” Joanne lists the various activities different kinds of wives engage in to keep themselves busy: “Off to the gym, / then to a fitting. … Rushing to their classes in optical art. … A matinee, a Pinter play, / Perhaps a piece of Mahler's” (106). Robert, a manifestation of the world of the busy signal, says of his apartment, “I just seem to pass through the living room on my way to the bedroom to get to the bathroom to get ready to go out again” (87). But this constant motion and absence of a home suggest the same problem the lovers in West Side Story faced. Paradoxically, a society of never-ending activity discourages contact between people and encourages alienation and withdrawal into the self. Boris Aronson's set for the original production, a sanitized and mechanized steel and plastic structure, with carefully defined living spaces for the couples, illustrated the separation and isolation of life in this society.⁶ In “Another Hundred People” Marta sings of the “city of strangers” where human contact is frustrated by numerous interpositions: “the crowded streets and the guarded parks,” “the friends of friends,” and various answering services (55-56). Activity, the busy signal, cuts off communication and discourages human connections.

Robert's character represents the dangers of assimilating completely to this social setting. Robert wants to define himself as a social creature; that is, his self-identity is based on his actions and relationships in society. Thus, he immerses himself hedonistically in the world of the busy signal. But his activity, his pot party with David and Jenny and his sexual intercourse with April, for example, seems devoid of meaning. At the same time, he is unable to make contact with others. He is frequently confused by the couples and his girlfriends and often makes pseudosincere speeches rather than engage in conversation. He senses that something is missing in his life, but his attempts to connect with others fall short because he is unwilling to give up the world of the busy signal. For example, in “Barcelona,” he begs April to stay with him rather than report to her stewardess assignment and then is horrified when she agrees. And in “Someone Is Waiting,” a song as hopelessly unrealistic as Tony's and Maria's “Somewhere,” he concocts an ideal combination of all the wives, whom he then contradictingly implores both to “Hurry” and to “Wait for me” (54). Robert refuses to give up his social identity, but since society's activities are empty, he is, too.

Since Robert wonders if marriage is the answer to the problem of how to function in society, the play gives us five married couples to observe. Marriage offers the human connection the world of the busy signal denies, but this connection entails a different kind of self-identity problem. Trying to talk herself out of getting married, Amy sings, “we'll / Both of us be losing our identities” (64). In marriage one's social identity is lost, because one no longer functions in society independently; instead, one is defined in relation to one's spouse. In “The Little Things You Do Together” Joanne and the couples define marriage as a series of things you do, not alone, but together, as a couple: “The concerts you enjoy together, / Neighbors you annoy together, / Children you destroy together” (31). The couples all seem to long for the world of the busy signal which is denied them unless they participate in it vicariously through Robert. In “Have I Got a Girl for You” the husbands lasciviously try to fix Robert up with the latest wild women they've come across, women they can't legitimately pursue. They sing, “Boy, to be in your shoes what I wouldn't give. / I mean the freedom to go out and live …” (52). Similarly, the wives in “Poor Baby” sing that “Robert ought to have a woman” (88), each barely concealing that she is the woman he ought to have and reacting with mean-spirited jealousy when he proceeds to have April instead. Marriage, then, may provide human contact or “company,” but it also means the end of one's identity as an individual social entity.

In the play's problematic climax, the song “Being Alive,” Robert admits his need to connect with another. He is willing to let his social identity and the freedom that goes with it be curtailed. He sings, “Somebody hold me too close. / Somebody hurt me too deep. / Somebody sit in my chair, and ruin my sleep …” (115). He recognizes that his life of empty activity is not really living: “But alone is alone, not alive” (116). But this admission is not action. Although the relationship he describes here seems more realistic than the one he envisions in “Someone Is Waiting,” the “somebody” he calls to here is no more tangible than the “someone” he called to before. Further, the play questions the efficacy of his epiphany as it leaves him isolated on stage, ignored by the couples assembled for his surprise birthday party. The couples have lost their vicarious connection to the life of society and Robert's situation seems unchanged.⁷

So, like West Side Story, Company presents a society where love relationships are difficult if not impossible to maintain. But in Company the characters are not blatant victims of powerful socioeconomic pressures. Instead, they have been seduced by the superficial pleasures of their society, pleasures that alienate them from one another. They have the option of rejecting the crowds and the bustle of their world and concentrating on one other individual, but they do not seem to want to. Society's activity may be empty, but it is attractive and pleasurable, and Company's characters don't want to be left out. As Joanne sings, they want to “keep in touch” (106). Society may isolate and dehumanize, but human relationships isolate too; they separate one from society. For the characters here, human contact cannot make up for the feeling of missing something. Placed in this social setting, these characters cannot be satisfied with just love.

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, like West Side Story and Company, presents characters who are victims of societal forces, but unlike the other plays, it defines and explores responses to these forces.⁸ These forces are manifested in a historical setting with obvious connections to contemporary society. Set in nineteenth-century England, the play is acted out in the shadow of a rigid social hierarchy/bureaucracy and the industrial revolution. In Eugene Lee's set for the Broadway production, this shadow was literally present. The superstructure of the set was a reconstructed nineteenth-century iron foundry, complete with working machine parts, and the opening curtain depicted the “English Bee Hive,” the social hierarchy with the queen on top and descending levels of power and importance. These two social forces, the social hierarchy/bureaucracy and industrialization, share several traits. Both tend to separate the powerful from the powerless and then to perpetuate the relationship; that is, these systems keep the powerless in their places at the bottom of the heap and make sure all power and profits flow upward. Sweeney imagines London as a huge hole, and “At the top of the hole / Sit the privileged few, / Making mock of the vermin / In the lower zoo, / Turning beauty into filth and greed” (9). Here Sweeney points to another characteristic these systems share: they tend to become corrupted. As Max Weber argues, bureaucracies inevitably begin to stress their own survival and augmented power over any real purpose they were meant to serve. In an industrialized capitalist system, profit becomes a more important motivation than the manufacture of a product, worker conditions, or the public welfare. Obtaining and keeping power and profits are the primary goals of the society presented here. The necessary result of these goals is the objectification of people; people become tools to be used and discarded by those with money and power. The Beggar Woman haunts the play as a reminder of our tendency to dismiss and deny the humanity of others.

Sweeney is a victim of these social forces and their corruption. He, his wife Lucy, and his daughter Johanna formed a happy and loving family. But in the first indication that this kind of love cannot exist in this society, the corrupt Judge, with the help of the Beadle, disrupts the familial relationship, transporting Sweeney to Australia on a trumped-up charge, raping Lucy, and then adopting Johanna. Years later, Sweeney escapes from his exile and returns with a goal of revenge against the Judge and Beadle. But when this specific revenge is thwarted, the insane Sweeney decides to revenge himself on the entire system that has victimized him, one person at a time. In his thinking, the powerless are as guilty as the powerful because they are all participants in the system. Explaining his philosophy of revenge to Mrs. Lovett in his “Epiphany,” he notes the dyadic relationship between victimizer and victim: “In all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, / There are two kinds of men and only two. / There's the one staying put / In his proper place / And the one with his foot / In the other one's face …” (87). Each deserves his death sentence, “Because the lives of the wicked should be—/ Made brief. / For the rest of us death / Will be a relief …” (87). The vehicle for this revenge, Sweeney's partnership with Mrs. Lovett, is a macabre parody of their industrialized society. Sweeney says of society's noise, “It's man devouring man, my dear, / And who are we / to deny it in here?” (92). Their enterprise has a clear division of labor: Sweeney provides the supplies by slitting the throats of the customers in his barber shop and transporting them to the cellar via his mechanized chair; Mrs. Lovett then uses the bodies as ingredients for her meat pies. They objectify people, first denying their humanity by using them for their own purposes and then literally turning them into objects: meat pies. This process is comically illustrated in the first act finale, “A Little Priest,” where Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett imagine their pies having the same qualities as the types of people they were made from. The appropriateness of their enterprise for a dog-eat-dog society is evidenced by its great success; where before Mrs. Lovett had barely any customers, her new improved meat pies draw more than she can serve. People can't get enough of a product made from other people. As Gordon writes, “The exploitation and abuse at the core of [Sweeney's] society is given a concrete form in Mrs. Lovett's plan, the perversion of the social contract and the breakdown of all fellow feeling fittingly symbolized by the capitalistic cannibalism she proposes” (237).

Even in such a competitive and dehumanized society, the characters seek happiness through love relationships. But as in West Side Story and Company, society discourages love relationships: Sweeney is separated from Lucy in the years before the play's action begins; and Anthony and Johanna, the play's innocent lovers, are kept apart until the very end by the separate machinations of Sweeney and Judge Turpin. The play's other “couples” are mismatched, pursuing the wrong person for the wrong reasons. Mrs. Lovett loves Sweeney but desires him as an acquisition, just as she desires new clothes, a cottage by the sea, and her harmonium. She sees Sweeney as a vehicle to a better kind of life than she has had alone. Sweeney is still in love with Lucy, whom he imagines dead. Toby, the symbolic child of the Sweeney-Mrs. Lovett relationship, is in love with Mrs. Lovett, his “mother,” and increasingly jealous of his rival Sweeney, his “father.” The Judge's lusting after his ward Johanna suggests incest since the Judge has filled the role of father to Johanna and had sexual relations (through rape) with her mother. Interestingly, Anthony's and Johanna's love, the only traditional relationship in the play, seems unusual, while nontraditional relationships predominate.

As products of social forces, these relationships become excuses for greed, lust, dehumanization, hatred, and death, all in the name of love. Mrs. Lovett operates from a position of pragmatic amorality. Any action can be justified if it leads to something she wants. She easily rationalizes the lie she tells Sweeney about his wife dying, the lie that sets much of Sweeney's revenge in motion: “Yes, I lied 'cos I love you! / I'd be twice the wife she was! / I love you!” (171). Her love is her excuse for lying to Sweeney and for participating in his deadly revenge. The Judge's love is his excuse for raping Lucy, for wanting to wed Johanna, and, when she refuses, for separating her from Anthony and committing her to an insane asylum. Sweeney's love is his excuse for plotting to kill the Judge and Beadle and, when these plans go awry, for revenging himself on all of humanity. In the context of the rape and murder that have occurred earlier in the play, Sweeney's and the Judge's sung admission “What we do for / Pretty women!” (165) drips with irony. In Sweeney's case the perversion of love is most clear. His need to kill outpaces any specific revenge and any specific reason for the killing. After finally slashing the Judge's throat, his ostensible goal throughout the play, he sings to his razor, “Rest now, my friend, / Rest now forever. / Sleep now the untroubled / Sleep of the angels …” (166-67), but interrupts himself to scoop the razor up again to look for and kill Toby. Moreover, in his eagerness to clear his shop for the Judge's arrival, he quickly kills the Beggar Woman, who, he later discovers, is his wife, Lucy. His desire for revenge has become so overwhelming that he kills the love that supposedly motivated it. Sweeney, who rose from the grave at the beginning of the play, is an antichrist, come to destroy love through hate.

The play's darkest and most frightening message comes at the very end of the play as the actors drop their characters and sing to the audience the evening's refrain, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.” But here, strangely, the song changes to the present tense, suggesting that Sweeney is still with us. In fact, Sweeney is all around us: someone we pass on the street, “Perhaps today you gave a nod / To Sweeney Todd …” (176), someone we interact with every day, “Sweeney waits in the parlor hall, / Sweeney leans on the office wall” (176), or perhaps someone we know intimately, “No one can help, nothing can hide you—/ Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?” (176). Then the actors accuse us all of being Sweeney, pointing to the audience and singing, “There he is it's Sweeney! … / There! There! There! There!” (177). Finally, the resurrected Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett tell us “To seek revenge may lead to hell, / But everyone does it, and seldom as well / As Sweeney. …” (177). This is Sondheim's darkest statement of the problem of love in contemporary society: like Sweeney, we respond to the forces that victimize us by becoming like them, by victimizing others. We kill what we love through selfishness and greed, and we isolate ourselves by objectifying and dehumanizing others, by seeking love as something for us rather than for others.

Into the Woods, Sondheim's 1987 musical based on traditional fairy tales, also explores individual responses to dehumanizing societal forces.⁹ Society continues to have a debilitating effect on individuals and couples, but this effect has become deadly: the entire second act is played out under the threat of imminent total destruction analogous to the threat of nuclear-tipped ICBMs we live under every day. Change is imperative and just possible if individuals can reestablish human contact, understanding, and sympathy.

Act One of Into the Woods presents the psychological growth of several fairy tale characters to the point where they can achieve love relationships. The play begins with the characters going into the woods on quests to solve certain problems caused for the most part by disjointed families. Cinderella is abused by her father's new family; her quest is to go to the king's festival. Jack (of Beanstalk fame) and his Mother are poor because his father has left them; Jack's quest is to get money by selling his best friend, his cow. The Baker and his Wife are unable to have children; their quest is to obtain the items for the Witch's potion and remove the spell. The Witch is an old and ugly mother to her adopted (seized?) daughter Rapunzel; her quest is to drink the potion that will make her young and beautiful. To bring order to these chaotic familial relationships, each character must not only achieve his or her quest but also mature psychologically. Two of the Act One quests present challenges in love relationships similar to ones in Company. Cinderella gets her wish to go to the festival but confronts there a new dilemma: the undivided attention of the Prince. Considering her cruel treatment at home and the potential wealth and luxury that come with being a Princess, we, the Prince, and even Cinderella have a hard time understanding why she runs away from him each night. Like Robert (and more significantly from a feminist point of view), she sees commitment as limiting since any definite decision destroys all other possibilities. Running away from the Prince, she thinks that her best course of action is to go home: “You'll be better off there / Where there's nothing to choose, / So there's nothing to lose” (63-64). In addition, she fears that the Prince would not want her if he knew who she really is and that the Prince, in pursuing her like an animal in a hunt, is objectifying her just as her family does. In leaving him the clue of her shoe in the pitch, she tests his commitment in two ways: first, to see if he will use the slipper to try to find her; and second, to see if, once he sees her in ash-coated rags, he will still want and love her. Of course, the Prince passes both tests and Cinderella answers with her own commitment. She agrees to marry him, giving up all other possibilities with the hope she will be happy in this one. The Baker and his Wife begin the play like the couples in Company: they are together but each bristles at lost independence. The Baker, relishing his autonomy, at first refuses to let his Wife help in the quest: “The spell is on my house. / Only I can lift the spell …” (18). The Baker's Wife longs for the more handsome, wealthy, and glamorous Prince. But in the woods the Baker and his Wife learn a new interdependence. In “It Takes Two” they realize that their marriage demands a loss of independence, but in return they gain the positive qualities and love of the other person. The Baker sings, “I thought one was enough, / It's not true: / It takes two of us” (54), and his Wife describes him the way she had previously described the Prince: “You're passionate, charming, considerate, clever—” (55). The Baker sums up their new interdependence, “… I'm becoming / Aware of us / As a pair of us, / Each accepting a share / Of what's there” (55). Cinderella and the Baker and his Wife, then, face the problems the characters in Company couldn't resolve and through their learning experiences in the woods become part, at least temporarily, of interdependent love relationships.

However, after Act One shows that such love relationships are possible, Act Two, like West Side Story, asks if they can survive in their societal context. The widow of the giant Jack killed comes down from the sky to seek revenge. The giant can be seen as symbolic of any type of societal crisis that intrudes on the private lives of people and forces them to respond in some way to save their way of life. Faced with this crisis, the characters bicker and divide themselves. The wealthy royal family flees the country, leaving behind the lower class characters. Those remaining can't agree on a plan to deal with the giant, and while they bicker, more and more of them are crushed. The futility of their divisiveness climaxes in “Your Fault,” where they desperately try to blame each other for the calamity. The Witch leaves them at this low point, when they are isolated and dehumanized: “Separate and alone, / Everybody down on all fours” (122). Eventually, however, the remaining characters, the Baker, Cinderella, Jack, and Little Red Ridinghood, are able to transcend their pettiness through two important steps. First, each loses the person on whom he or she was dependent. Cinderella loses the guiding spirit of her mother when the giant crushes the tree in which she resided. Little Red Ridinghood loses her mother and grandmother when the giant steps on their houses. Jack loses his mother when the Prince's steward kills her to keep her from provoking the giant. And the Baker loses his Wife when the giant crushes her after her dalliance with the Prince.¹⁰ Although this seems to be another instance of outside forces destroying love relationships, these characters must lose the people who support them so that they can continue to grow psychologically. They need to become independent so that they can come to understand their interdependence on a wide range of people, not just one person. This is the second step to their eventual triumph. Although the outside forces encourage division and isolation, to accept such isolation is a mistake. When the Baker abandons the others after the death of his Wife, he meets the Mysterious Man, his father, who years before had abandoned him after the death of his mother. In “No More” the Mysterious Man counsels the Baker that such isolation, while physically possible, is mentally impossible and spiritually damaging: “Trouble is, son, / The farther you run, / The more you feel undefined / For what you have left undone / And, more, what you've left behind” (124). When the Baker returns to the others, they pool their ideas and their abilities to defeat the giant, and as they put their plan into action, they sing, in “No One Is Alone” what they've learned: that as individuals they are helpless. They need to connect with others and understand how their actions affect others in the human community in order to accomplish anything.¹¹ They dismiss their previous divisions and isolation: “People make mistakes, / Holding to their own, / Thinking they're alone” (131). Instead, one's actions touch many others: “You move just a finger, / Say the slightest word, / Something's bound to linger, / Be heard. / No one acts alone” (130).

The play's finale, the last reprise of “Into the Woods,” is an antithesis to the end of Sweeney Todd. There we saw a vision of people thrust apart by their own hate and greed. Here, all the characters return in a final dance, not divided, as the Act One finale was, by class lines, but homogeneous and joyous. And instead of singling us out as Sweeneys, the cast points out our interdependence: “The way is dark, / The light is dim, / But now there's you, / Me, her and him” (137). Our awareness of and willingness to act on this interdependence is necessary for the creation of the kind of society where love relationships, like Tony's and Maria's and the Baker's and the Baker's Wife's, can flourish.

Sondheim's current work-in-progress, Assassins, a musical about people who have tried to kill U.S. Presidents, reportedly continues the theme of confronting the worst in our society so that we may be able to change it. Frank Rich says that the characters “demonstrate Mr. Sondheim's conviction that there is a shadow America, a poisoned, have-not America, that must be recognized by the prosperous majority if the violence in our history is to be understood and overcome” (B4). Such understanding must begin in the kind of self-understanding that can lead to interdependence in human relationships and human communities. And such interdependence, if extended far enough, can bring the world back from the brink of self-destruction.

Notes

1. To get an idea of the wildly varying reviews Sondheim's plays have received, see the summaries in Zadan 25-26, 92-94, 107, 126-27, 145-47, 190, 219-21, 256-60, 279-80, 312-13. For example, while Time gushed, “Into the Woods is the best show yet from the most creative mind in the musical theater today” (Henry 96), The New Yorker griped, “What it adds up to, though, is little more than a hodge-podge of clichés” (Kramer 147). But schizophrenically, the critics and the theatre community have made Sondheim one of the most honored dramatists. The Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical of the Year was given to Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, the 1974 Candide (for which Sondheim wrote the new lyrics), Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, and Into the Woods. The Tony Award for Best Musical was given to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. (Sondheim, incidentally, won the Tony Award for Best Music and Lyrics for Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods.) In addition, Sunday in the Park With George won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (See Zadan's Appendix A [369-80] for awards won by Sondheim's shows.)

2. Sondheim explains he will never have smash hit because “what makes smash-hit musicals are stories that audiences want to hear—and it's always the same story. How everything turns out terrific in the end and the audience goes out thinking, that's what life is all about” (quoted in Zadan, 52).

3. Harold Prince agrees that “The musical is the most highly collaborative form there is” (32).

4. West Side Story, with book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, opened in 1957. The play was conceived, directed, and choreographed by Jerome Robbins.

5. Company, with book by George Furth and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, was directed by Harold Prince with musical numbers staged by Michael Bennett. Gordon defines the term “concept musical” as indicating “that all the elements of the musical, thematic and presentational, are integrated to suggest a central theatrical image or idea” (7). As a term it differentiates musicals in which all the creative elements, especially the music, are justified by the theme of the play from the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-type musical plays in which the creative elements, especially the music, are justified by plot advancement and character development. In other words, concept musicals are artistically unified around an idea that is to be explored rather than around a set of characters' progress. For example, A Chorus Line is an exploration into why Broadway dancers do what they do.

6. Gordon writes: “The sleek set, sterile and cold, reflected the detachment of a society whose goals are fixed on upward mobility, both spatial and social: crowds struggling upward to nowhere. These elevated empty spaces expressed the essence of the city, all bustling efficiency, glittering surfaces, and emotional sterility” (41).

7. Prince writes that he doesn't understand the confusion about the musical's message: “we regard it as a fervent plea for interpersonal relationships” (149). In her discussion of “Being Alive” Gordon, too, argues that the play endorses commitment (72-73). I agree that the play is critical of Robert's life and his lack of commitment, but it is also critical of the couples and their lives. I think the play refuses to give an answer to the problems it develops in its analysis of society and interpersonal relationships. This refusal is underscored by the play's alternate ending. In the pre-Broadway tour Robert chose the world of the busy signal in his final song, “Happily Ever After,” in a similarly ambivalent conclusion (see Sondheim, “Theater Lyrics”).

8. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened in 1979 with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh Wheeler, and direction by Harold Prince.

9. Into the Woods has music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book and direction by James Lapine.

10. The implication of the Baker's Wife's death as punishment for her adultery caused Kramer in The New Yorker to accuse the authors of misogyny (148).

11. As Sondheim puts it, “All fairy tales are parables about steps to maturity. … The final step is when you become responsible for the people around you, when you feel connected to the rest of the world. … ‘No One Is Alone’ is about how we are all interconnected” (quoted in Holden).

Works Cited

Furth, George, and Stephen Sondheim. Company. New York: Random House, 1970.

Gordon, Joanne. Art Isn't Easy: The Achievement of Stephen Sondheim. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

Henry, William A., III. “Some Enchanted Evening.” Review of Into the Woods, by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Time, 16 November 1987, 96.

Holden, Stephen. “A Fairy-Tale Musical Grows Up.” New York Times, 1 November 1987.

Kramer, Mimi. “The Theatre.” Review of Into the Woods. The New Yorker, 16 November 1987, 147.

Laurents, Arthur, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. West Side Story. New York: Random House, 1957.

Prince, Harold. Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theater. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974.

Rich, Frank. “A Cast of Killers Made in America Sings Sondheim.” Review of Assassins, by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman. New York Times, 28 January 1991, National Ed.: B1+.

Sondheim, Stephen. “Theater Lyrics.” Playwrights/Lyricists/Composers on Theater. Ed. Otis Guernsey, Jr. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974. 61-97.

Sondheim, Stephen, and James Lapine. Into the Woods. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989.

Sondheim, Stephen, and Hugh Wheeler. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1979.

Zadan, Craig. Sondheim & Co. 2nd ed. updated. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.