The Headlines:
-Sondheim wrote "Into the Woods" while falling deeply in love with cocaine. This makes sense. "Woods" has always seemed overstuffed and sloppy. It's a show that may make you think, "Here, the writer was abusing cocaine...."
-Many lyricists make grammatical errors. Tim Rice, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Steven Sater: These are all writers who have trouble with grammar. But Sondheim is an exception. So the following line always bothered me. "Nice is different than good." I now know that Sondheim *deliberately* made this error--he believed that Little Red would not say different from....Sondheim insisted on the choice he had made even when others questioned the choice.
-Daniel Okrent offers a smart reading of the song "Finishing the Hat." The money note occurs in the bridge--you get a startling jump from the bottom to the top of the scale. "And how you're *always* turning back too late from the grass or the stick or the dog or the light...." Okrent observes that the artist does not land on a complete sentence until the song's coda. "Look, I made a hat--where there never was a hat."
-The real thrill of this book is its refusal to treat Sondheim as a saint. He wasn't God. The book is especially interested in Sondheim's explosive rage--which was on display in his weirdly vitriolic open letter to Diane Paulus and Audra McDonald in 2011. Sondheim's observations were correct, but the vitriol was odd. There is also a fascinating passage about a portrait that Richard Avedon constructed; the portrait became a gift to the Whitney Museum. I think the portrait is flattering--from approximately 1982 onward, Sondheim generally seemed handsome (at least to me). But Sondheim was so upset by the portrait, he had a Trumpian temper tantrum. He demanded that the Whitney promise not to show the portrait during his own lifetime. (The Whitney met the demand.)
-In the last 25 years of his life, Sondheim did not write for Broadway, but he did write "Hat Box," which was made up of two of the greatest books in the history of "performing arts scholarship." And he found love; he was moderately happy. I wonder if his late-stage creative life might have been less bumpy had he chosen to make more of a commitment to prose. We'll never know. It's touching to see how nervous he was about "Hat Box"--his editor had to reassure him that his doubts were just a sign of mild lunacy.
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