Sondheim Confessions: Five Fascinating Tidbits from the New Book Look, I Made a Hat
Check the bookcase of any musical theater fan, and you’ll almost certainly find a copy of Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim’s best-selling collection and discussion of the lyrics he wrote from 1954 to 1981. Just in time for holiday gift-giving, volume two of his opus, Look, I Made a Hat, is set for publication by Alfred A. Knopf on November 22. Both books provide a master class in writing for the stage, plus a compelling peek inside Sondheim’s brain—the part of it, at least, that he wants to share with the public. Broadway.com recently received a review copy of Look, I Made a Hat, and we immediately started combing the 400+ pages for choice revelations. Here are five tidbits to tide you over until you get your own copy!
Sondheim Hails Hip-Hop! Citing the work of In the Heights composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sondheim declares, “Of all the forms of contemporary pop music, rap is the closest to traditional musical theater.” Who knew Harold Hill’s patter in The Music Man qualified as rap, as well as the witch’s chant in the opening number of Into the Woods? Although Sondheim makes a point in both books not to discuss the work of living lyricists, he goes out of this way to praise Miranda, who tipped his own “Latin hat” to the master in his 2008 Tony acceptance speech and translated West Side Story lyrics into Spanish. “Rap is a natural language, and he is a master of the form,” Sondheim writes of Miranda, “but enough of a traditionalist to know the way he can utilize its theatrical potential.”
But Rock Musicals and Opera? Don’t Ask. As readers of his New York Times takedown of the forthcoming Porgy and Bess revival will recall, Sondheim is especially entertaining when he doesn’t like something. After admitting that “rock and contemporary pop are not part of my DNA,” he opines that somebody might write a satisfying rock score “someday.” But not yet: “The ones I’ve heard seem to me to be rhythmically and emotionally restricted, earnest to a fault and, above all, humorless except when they’re being ‘satirical’ (that is, sarcastic).” As for opera, Sondheim offers this ho-hum assessment: “I have successfully avoided enjoying opera all my life.” If he must listen to a good one (Carmen, say, or the aforementioned Porgy and Bess), he prefers a recording to a live performance “because they strike me as way too long.”
His Own Songs Make Sondheim Weep. “Once during the writing of each show, I cry at a notion, a word, a chord, a melodic idea, an accompaniment figure,” the composer reveals. Two examples: the word “home” in “The Right Girl,” sung by Buddy Plummer in Follies; and the word “forever” in “Sunday,” sung by the subjects of Seurat’s future masterwork in Sunday in the Park With George. In the latter case, Sondheim explains that he was “moved by the contemplation of what these people would have thought if they’d known they were being immortalized, and in a major way, in a great painting. I still cry when I think about it. But then I cry at Animal Planet. Often.” Aww!
One of His Shows Is Practically Perfect. Guess which musical “comes the closest to my expectation for it,” according to Sondheim? Bet you didn’t say Assassins! After a bumpy 1990 off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons, this unusual depiction of presidential murderers won the Best Revival Tony Award for Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2004 production at Studio 54. Although the show might not make most fans’ “best of” list, Sondheim says there’s only one brief passage, “Family,” that feels a tad academic. “Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, the show is perfect. Immodest that may sound, but I’m ready to argue it with anybody.”
Making Those “Hats” Never Gets Easier. The epilogue of Look, I Made a Hat strikes on a poignant note, as the composer muses, “Most jobs get easier over time, or at least less stressful…. Writing, or at least writing songs for the theater, is different…. Technical facility gets easier; invention does not.” And yet Sondheim has never lost his love of “scribbling on a pad, tapping on a computer, thumbing through a rhyming dictionary, riffling through a thesaurus and jumping up sporadically to bang at a piano.” Aren’t we lucky that he still feels that way, 60 years after he began writing songs as a student at Williams College? Congratulations on your new book, Mr. Sondheim!