Move On

This chapter returns to the larger context of the American musical in the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. It surveys other musicals of the 1970s and 1980s that, like Sondheim’s, explore postmodern themes through postmodern techniques. It also looks at several musicals of the 1990s and 2000s—such shows as Parade, Floyd Collins, A Man of No Importance, Rent, and See What I Wanna See—influenced by Sondheim’s body of work, that, like his recent work, wrestle with the problem of acknowledging our immersion in language while seeking to point to a reality beyond language.

With So Little to Be Sure Of

This chapter examines Sondheim’s musicals of the 1970s, all concerned with the problematization of narrative as an epistemological and ontological structure and the possibilities for detaching knowledge and identity from narrative. In Follies time and space break down, identity is fragmented, and narrative ceases to function. A Little Night Music is about the resolution of identity crises caused by the characters trying to live through contradictory fantasies. Pacific Overtures makes problematic how we know the past and critiques the colonial process. Sweeney Todd synthesizes the desire for conventional narrative closure and a capitalist desire, one that must never reach closure. The result is an enterprise in which the population of London serves simultaneously as labor, product, and consumers. Merrily We Roll Along studies the dreams of three friends, but does so in reverse chronological order. It calls into question both the anticipatory and retrospective strategies for structuring a life story.

Instructions to the Audience

This chapter establishes the overlapping contexts of the exhaustion of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical and postmodernism and places Sondheim’s work within them. It begins by offering a definition of postmodernism, focusing on self-referentiality, intertextuality, and performativity. It then provides an aesthetic overview of the American musical with special attention to the musical-comedy era and the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. In the musical comedy, narrative is simultaneously central and irrelevant, a contradictory aesthetic communicated by proto-postmodern characteristics. In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! the songs are justified by the narrative and the characters. The musical comedy’s proto-postmodern characteristics are repressed in favor of realism. This chapter then offers a brief biographical sketch of Sondheim, showing his mentoring by Oscar Hammerstein and examines two of his works from this period: Do I Hear a Waltz? and Evening Primrose.

Take Me to the World

This chapter examines Sondheim’s plays from Sunday in the Park with George to Road Show. While still engaging in the postmodern interrogation of knowledge and the limits of representation, these plays suggest a desire to find a direct experience of the real. Sunday in the Park explores the creation and purpose of art. Into the Woods uses traditional fairy tales to explore the connections between narrative and identity. Assassins overturns the ideas of official American history and the American Dream. Passion marks a clear dissatisfaction with the absorption of reality into representation. Caught within a web of language, the characters long for a reality—love—outside self-referring discourse. The Frogs examines the social inertia that results from the devolution of language from communication to cliché. Road Show sets two brothers in a societal closed system in which art, narrative, and language tend toward exhaustion.

Opening Doors

This chapter examines Sondheim’s musicals from West Side Story to Company. West Side Story and Gypsy mark both an apotheosis of the Rodgers and Hammerstein aesthetic and an introduction of postmodern styles and ideas into the musical. West Side Story is concerned with the operations of power and the reproduction of ideology. Gypsy presents a theatricalization of the American Dream, turning it into a series of images without substance. In Forum a trickster protagonist generates multiple, clashing realities. Anyone Can Whistle examines the problem of identity construction. Company dispenses with plot and thus examines narrative as a structure of knowledge and identity. The play’s drama is generated by the tension between its own cyclical structure and the goal-driven linear narrative implied by marriage.