"Into the weeds" with a slim new Sondheim book (today's FREE Weekly Blast)
"Careful the Spell You Cast" muses on the Master’s collaborations
Shalom, Broadway lovers! In today’s FREE Weekly Blast: a review of a new Sondheim book and a Last Blast about Ragtime. PREMIUM subscribers also get a review of a production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; a Peter Filichia video about Finian’s Rainbow; a video conversation about Evan Hansen and his challenges with a young Broadway fan with autism; and Broadway Blasts about Wicked and Company.
No, Stephen Sondheim didn’t write Into the Woods. Nor did he write Company or Sweeney Todd.
As Sondheim would underscore any time the claim came up, none of his musicals were solo efforts. All were collaborations with book (script) writers who created the characters he wrote music and/or lyrics for. (For the shows above, that’s James Lapine, George Furth, and Hugh Wheeler.)
So a new book about Sondheim’s collaborations adds a welcome perspective to the growing literature about The Master and his work. Ben Francis’s Careful the Spell You Cast is a delightful 158-page book that in nine chapters manages to tell the story of Sondheim’s career through individual sections about each of his book-writing collaborators.
I asked Francis, a UK-based writer and teacher, about his favorite contrast between two book writers, and he chose John Weidman and James Lapine. His answer demonstrates well the wide-ranging, thoughtful, formal nature of the book itself:
They each wrote three shows for Sondheim.
In all the John Weidman shows (Pacific Overtures, Assassins, Road Show) the characters are not able to escape from their situation: Kayama and Manjiro in Pacific Overtures cannot prevent Japan's corruption by the West, none of the assassins take responsibility for their actions, and Addison and Wilson Mizner waste whatever talents they had.
In the shows with Lapine, however, (Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Passion) the main characters can take responsibility of their lives, albeit at a price: the two Georges don't waste their talents, the surviving characters band together to defeat the Giant in Into the Woods and Giorgio and Fosca affirm their love in Passion, even though Fosca dies and Giorgio goes mad. It is as if Weidman represents the pessimistic Sondheim, while Lapine represents, as Sondheim said, his “inner Hammerstein.”
In addition to careful attention to the plots that form the scaffolding for Sondheim’s œuvre, Francis’s book gives close readings to both dialogue and lyrics that make these shows so multilayered and nuanced.
Now, if you’re looking for a balanced history of Sondheim’s career, you won’t find that here. The organization is by collaborator, not chronology, and not all musicals get proportional treatment. Follies was an important show; but did it deserve 18 pages when West Side Story only got two? Well, comprehensiveness is not this book’s goal; instead it presents a multi-part argument that “Sondheim was not the cynic that some writers make him out to be, but in fact is a romantic in the tradition of the Broadway musical, albeit with a more modernist sensibility.”
Unfortunately, there’s one big caveat: the book costs $115. Writers absolutely deserve fair compensation for their work, but it’s a shame when most readers are priced out of acquiring a good book. If you’re loath to spend about a dollar a page, I don’t blame you. Francis told me he’s asked his publisher to consider a paperback, which will hopefully make this excellent volume much more accessible. If so, maybe fewer people will claim Sondheim wrote Into the Woods.
Note: links to register for ALL classes are always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.
Coming up in November (registration opens in October):
• On Sundays, a new survey course on The Golden Age of Broadway with Broadway Maven David Benkof and music educator Mateo Chavez Lewis
• Tuesday, November 7: Gail Leondar-Wright on Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
• Tuesday, November 14: Mateo Chavez Lewis on the musical motifs of Sunday in the Park with George
• Tuesday, November 21: Peter Filichia on Hello, Dolly!
• Tuesday, November 28: David Armstrong on The King and I
In Ragtime, Henry Ford’s Model T symbolizes the American ideal of success, particularly for Black men like Coalhouse Walker, Jr. And in the appropriately named song “Henry Ford,” we learn that it takes an assembly line to make a Model T, each worker doing his own part: “One man tightens, and one man ratchets.” So the way the fire department destroyed and defiled Coalhouse’s automobile was a devastating reversal of Henry Ford’s process: a group of men each attacked a different part of the car. It was an assembly line in reverse, which only propelled Coalhouse’s radicalization and alienation from the American Dream.