Sondheim and Stoppard

Elaine Stritch, Harold Prince, Jane Russell. Still from the Broadway set of Company, 1970-72

Dear Republic,

Today we have an in-depth reappraisal of two giants of 20th century theater.

• ROL

SONDHEIM AND STOPPARD

Giants in the Sky

“It’s… a word I don’t like, clever.” – Stephen Sondheim

In 1957 Stephen Sondheim made his Broadway debut at the age of twenty-seven as a lyricist for West Side Story, a retelling of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in the midst of two warring street gangs in New York City, featuring lush but edgy music composed by Leonard Bernstein. While songs like “I Feel Pretty” and “Tonight” linger in the romantics’ mind, Sondheim’s true debut of his lyrical dexterity comes in the rapid-fire explosion of “Dear Officer Krupke,” in which a gang of American boys depict the hot-potato culpability game of adults abdicating responsibility for a teen’s delinquency (the song, notably, was the closest a musical had gotten at that time to dropping the F bomb, with the final lyric being “Gee, Officer Krupke – / Krup you!” – this after Sondheim’s plan to have the boys yell “Fuck you” was vetoed by his collaborators). It’s clever. Tom Stoppard, meanwhile, was twenty-nine when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe nine years later. R and G is also a Shakespeare retelling, a virtuosic riff on both Hamlet and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Stoppard’s story of two minor and bewildered courtiers explores the absurdity of death and free will and the chance of a flipped coin turning up heads over and over, featuring dialog like “We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.” It’s clever.

So, despite Sondheim’s above documented resistance to the reductive descriptor, the general consensus is that both writers are clever, and they’ve always been: prodigies before they even hit thirty. But cleverness, especially when exercised as dexterously as Sondheim and Stoppard, invite…