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Stephen Sondheim: “Move On"

Sondheim lists three favorite female performances from his lifetime. One is Angela Lansbury, “Sweeney Todd.” One is Ethel Merman, “Gypsy” (on the nights she was self-disciplined). The third is Bernadette Peters in “Sunday in the Park with George.”

Sondheim would surely argue that the following paragraph is too facile. Anyway, it seems that “Sunday in the Park” is a kind of memoir. By the era of “Merrily We Roll Along,” something had become glib in Sondheim’s work. Something was slick. Sondheim was like George, churning out chromolumes: “They’re becoming more and more about less and less.” (One of my favorite moments in “Sunday in the Park” has a stranger struggling to say something polite about the chromolumes... “They’re getting......SO LARGE!!!”)

It seems to me, before “Sunday,” before the move to off-Broadway, Sondheim made a decision to write to please himself, once again. To worry less about what others might want. Maybe James Lapine played a role in this shift.

Like Sondheim, George, in Act Two, seems to have reached a creative dead end. He is having a crisis. A chat with a good friend helps him to redirect himself: He will worry less about whether his vision “is new,” and will instead simply focus on what he wants. (Is this a universal story? Do we all need to hear about an artist struggling to find material? I think Sondheim would say: “Who cares? This is what *I* wanted to write about.”)

“Move On” represents the watershed moment in George’s thinking; it’s when George becomes an artist once again. There’s a great deal happening. The opening rewrites “We Do Not Belong Together”: Instead of separating, the two speakers are now collaborating. (The song builds to a revelation: “We’ve always belonged together. We will always belong together.”)

In Sondheim’s world, form should match content--and so, as George becomes excited, his sentences break down. He begins spitting out fragments: “Something in the light....in the sky....in the grass....up behind the tree....” You sense that he is racing to keep up with himself. The ideas are arriving too quickly. Syntax reinforces the meaning of the words. 

A third thing I love in this song: It makes an observation about family history. Someone’s decision fifty years ago can impact us today. Dot left Europe for America to rebuild her life; there was something impulsive and bold about this; “I chose, and my world was shaken....So what? The choice may have been mistaken. The choosing was not.” George, in the present day, looks at Dot’s ballsy example and realizes there’s something to learn: Dot’s ghost is telling George to get his head out of his ass. Be daring in your life. Be daring in your art.

All that is happening in this justly famous duet, a major turning point in SS’s career.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=cLI4jelnYAI

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