Getting To Know Sondheim

I first met Paul Salsini in the 1960s when I started working at The Milwaukee Journal. We both left for very different reasons in 1995 when it was the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In all that time he had profound impact on his colleagues as the quiet excellent reporter and copy editor who became staff development director, then writing coach and in effect ombudsman explaining what journalism should be to readers, as he was also doing for journalism students at his alma mater (and mine), Marquette University.

Knowing him as a journalist to emulate (though I never succeeded) and the cleanest of writers, I fully expected that his new memoir on a topic we both loved, Sondheim & Me: Revealing a Musical Genius, would simply speed along at 205 pages. As a reviewer I found it actually is a quick and absorbing read. As a Sondheim student, I kept pausing and savoring every chapter because I was learning so much, getting inside a mind that I had admired for decades.

The first surprise in Sondheim & Me is that Stephen Sondheim, the most prolific and influential creator in American musical theater, would give equal intellectual weight and commentary to a Milwaukee writer, Salsini, who in 1994 started a quarterly magazine known as The Sondheim Review. He edited it for 10 years.

It was hardly a fan magazine but chock full of journalistic inquiry, special interviews, probing and skeptical reviews of his output from around the world, impressive timelines, dating back to his birth in 1930 and how he burst into the musical world in his teens, historic photos and interweaving Sondheim’s own views with those of many notable sources.

Mainly there were “dear Paul” letters (excerpts) to the editor about the Sondheim Review magazine, which Sondheim seemed to read fastidiously four times a year.  The book reprints key phrases in streams of letters to Salsini, often raising what Sondheim called “emendations” (letter to the editor corrections). In one case he showed his outraged testy side over a London review of his stage opus Passion.

Sondheim, through Salsini’s choices, was revealing himself and his work methods. Somehow, Sondheim saw in Salsini what his newspaper colleagues had seen over the years – a passion for the topic, a clearness of intent and quiet dignity. In every chapter, without intruding on his own opinions, Salsini shows a side of Sondheim reacting to how others saw his work or adding his own comments.

Sondheim has seldom been this easy to understand, since his intellect was formidable. (I recalled how in the 1960s as a young theater critic I was fascinated by his word games and crossword puzzles in New York magazine and later struck with how little notice he got as an active movie buff and screen composer.)

He was generous in his advice to established famous performers and fledgling talents (who later became the heart of the new Broadway). He even analyzed Hamilton better than many critics did. But he was also notorious for knowing his own worth and showing a grumpy prickly side.

Let’s put this in historic perspective. Sondheim died at age 91 in November 2021, just after he advised, saw and praised Steven Spielberg’s movie remake of West Side Story and while he was still actively contributing to a gender-changing revival of Company and a star-studded revival of Into the Woods, which continues its Broadway run even as Salsini’s book comes out in October of 2022.

His death led to major tributes and fresh evaluations — performances on Zoom, TV and in concerts — but those were mainly expanded tributes and accolades that had started more than three decades ago and grew into an avalanche on his 70th and 80th birthdays as American culture caught up with his impact. (How prescient was Salsini to start his magazine when Sondheim was a mere 64!)

Sondheim’s early almost boyhood fame was as a lyricist (West Side Story and Gypsy) and even his words rather than his composing remained the draw in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). “Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone” could almost be the motto of his life.

But then the dam broke, and he insisted on both words and music in all his works. His output became the most influential presence in the progress of musical theater. It is not, as some famous colleagues griped, that he did away with the boffo song so many musical comedies relied on. It was that his melodies were intricately about characters, moment and dialogue, lending themselves to theatrical showstoppers but hardly attuned to the Top 40 world of Tin Pan Alley. His dramatic themes were all grown up compared to the wave of musicals before him.

Yet in fairness his mentors and early collaborators (Oscar Hammerstein, Jule Styne, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, writer Arthur Laurents) are equally difficult to pigeonhole as people have attempted to do with Sondheim for decades.

I’m a huge fan. But I have actually seen less full Sondheim than I would like – though I caught Company and Sweeney Todd in their initial Broadway runs. But the need for incredible performers both musically and theatrically and the difficulty of themes have prevented many of his shows from enjoying national tours (though London and Australia have always been welcoming).

In fact, it took revues built out of his compositions – such as “Side by Side by Sondheim” or the HBO 2013 documentary “Six by Sondheim” — to help audiences everywhere understand the rigorous details of his theatrical work.

And yet there are still hits everyone knows. “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music dominated the pop charts. “Being Alive” from Company and “I’m Still Here” from Follies have become cabaret anthems and some of Sondheim’s most haunting love songs stem from some of his darkest musicals.

The most famous work may well be Into the Woods, which mashes favorite fairy tales together and then shifts the mood to a darker and then perhaps more illuminating place. But it became accessible because of a much-performed high school version that emphasized its first act and not its more provocative whole. Even a movie musical that tried to do justice to the full worth of Into the Woods was ensnared in the Disney family fare vision on its 2014 release, to the detriment of its artistic endurance.

Absorbing the depth and breadth of Sondheim has become difficult when you consider how many only know his output in bits and pieces, or through those revues. Works like Passion, Pacific Overtures and Assassins (thematically still too gloomy for many in our gun-crazy culture) resist staging without fully rounded production, though some experimental versions of Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music have proven quite attractive.

The difficulty is emphasized when you look at the full 2022-2023 schedules of major Milwaukee theater companies. Musicals abound, including several by composers and lyricists who regard him as their inspiration. But none by Sondheim.

The chance to understand and appreciate Sondheim should send sales for this book far higher than small independent Bancroft Press expects. (Salsini will host a talk-back at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., October 18 with a publication date of Oct. 7.)

I think celebrities who have worked with him, performers who want to work with his material and theatergoers who, like Salsini, grew to be fascinated will flock to this book, its historic photos, its fascinating timeline and storytelling prose, always moving Sondheim forward in time and space.

Sondheim & Me is available for pre-order with an October launch date.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.