Brother Act.("Assassins" and "Company")(Theater review)

No one wants to leave a Stephen Sondheim show feeling like a dummy, but sometimes people do. It's a sign of inestimable chic to claim to "get" the composer's dense, perverse, and demanding work on first hearing, but it's also an intellectual impossibility, even among the musical cognoscenti. Following the notes--the scales--to which Sondheim's two- or three-syllable word clusters uneasily, often thrillingly, attach themselves requires a degree of concentration that is anathema to the form that Sondheim is remaking, even now, at the age of seventy-eight: musical theatre. Writing with the gorgeous asperity of a free-jazz pianist--the jump and punch in his best songs can remind you of the way Thelonious Monk looked as he danced joyfully around his piano during a concert--Sondheim makes musicals that far transcend what his early mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, brought to the American stage: an occasionally solipsistic, bordering on schmaltzy, social consciousness. Although Sondheim began in a similar vein--think of the sentimental, sometimes weak lyrics that he provided for "West Side Story" (1957) and "Gypsy" (1959)--he quickly found his own voice, which was infinitely more layered, more urbane, more marginalized, and more dramaturgically brilliant than that of his predecessors.

It's important to remember, when listening to Sondheim's scores now, that by the time he wrote "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," in 1962 (his first show as both composer and lyricist), the changes that Hammerstein and the most famous of his composing partners, Richard Rodgers, had instituted, in musicals such as "Oklahoma!"--making the songs and dances part of the action, not separate set pieces, for instance--were two decades old. Sondheim's ambition was even larger: to present the humor and the angst of his epoch as truthfully as possible. He disavowed Rodgers and Hammerstein's penchant for cozy nostalgia--which they used to take the sting out of their more adventurous themes, such as racism and rape; fantasy is not a bag that Sondheim has ever looked good carrying. He would never set a show in Hammerstein's American West. His America is situated, at least in part, in the fractured minds of his protagonists.

In "Company" (1970), a thirty-something single man named Robert observes the compromises and illusions that his married friends rely on in order to live together. But the show (with a book by George Furth) hints at even darker issues: the lies that we must accept if we are to exist on the planet at all. In the play, an older woman named Joanne watches as a couple competes in a silly martial-arts match. Leading a chorus of Robert's other friends, she sings:

It's the little things you share together,, Swear together,, Wear together,, That make perfect relationships., , The concerts you enjoy together,, Neighbors you annoy together,, Children you destroy together,, That keep marriage intact.

Self-disgust, disillusionment, and contempt for the world also mark the characters in "Assassins," Sondheim's underrated 1991 show, whose premise was the gathering together of some of America's most famous assassins--John Wilkes Booth, John Hinckley, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, and so on--in a kind of musical "Ward No. 6." The show, with a book by John Weidman, is a plea for difference. Sondheim opens it with the proprietor of a shooting gallery, where the assassins assemble, singing, "Everybody's / Got the right / To be different, / Even though / At times they go / To extremes." In short, part of Sondheim's greatness lies in his ability to find the music in material that seems distinctly unmusical. (One has the sense that his most fervent defenders are theatregoers who don't, as a rule, like musicals.) He refuses to ignore life's bitter ironies in the name of entertainment. In fact, he makes great showbiz out of bitterness.

Unfortunately, Sondheim's far-reaching sonic and lyrical brilliance is sometimes undercut by weaknesses in the books for his shows; this was true of "Assassins" and "Company," and it is the problem, too, with his current project, "Road Show" (at the Public, with a book by Weidman). "Road Show" is based on the real-life tale of Addison and Wilson Mizner, brothers whose real-estate ...