“I love Company!” was not a sentence I expected to hear this semester. Well, not a sentence I expected to hear from an undergraduate during a seminar on the American musical. In the class I was teaching at Portland State University, I’d anticipated #Hamilfans, enthusiasts for Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, kids who loved Dear Evan Hansen—appreciation for anything that had debuted to acclaim during my students’ lifetimes. Vintage Stephen Sondheim stans, however, I had not predicted.
Not that people don’t love Company, Sondheim’s 1970 stinger that turned marriage, the traditional ending of musical comedy, into an open question. There was a gender-swapped revival of the play on Broadway this year, a documentary spoof of the famous original cast’s recording session, and a trend of covering its numbers in recent films. Company resonates far beyond the narrow slice of Manhattan that appears in the show, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that a 20-year-old Oregonian, especially one who’d elected a class on musicals, would be a fan.
It wasn’t just Company, though. Sondheim’s name seemed a miracle elixir to students for whom Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Stephen Schwartz, and Alan Menken held little currency. “I saw in the opening credits that the music was written by Stephen Sondheim, so I was excited,” a classmate wrote in a post to our discussion board about Sweeney Todd, which another student ranked as one of her “all-time favorite musicals.” The class relished debating the legendary composer’s lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy, and they beamed when I mentioned Into the Woods. While A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures were favorites of senior citizens auditing the course, Sunday in the Park With George was familiar to younger students who’d seen the recent film Tick, Tick … Boom, in which the playwright Jonathan Larson imagines a weekend diner brunch as an homage to “Sunday,” Sondheim’s hymn to artistic composition.
What I found when we began discussing these shows was an attention to a facet of Sondheim’s work I hadn’t seen in the many tributes that came after his death last year at 91. My students could appreciate his skill as a musical dramatist, his innovations as a craftsman, his inventive wit and longing harmonic lines. But what really drew them in—or, perhaps, what they drew out—was his preoccupation with people excluded from the dominant society, his critical eye toward those in positions of power, and his exploration of musical forms that give voice to outsider perspectives.
Sondheim, along with his scriptwriting collaborators, relentlessly challenged the institutions that had given stability to musical theater’s form: the satisfaction of marriage (undermined in Company), the radiance of stardom (tarnished in Follies), the benefits of American imperialism (inverted in Pacific Overtures), the fairness of the social order (cannibalized in Sweeney Todd), the idealism of youth (reversed in Merrily We Roll Along), the achievement of making art (needled in Sunday in the Park With George), the reassurance of fairy tales with happy endings (uprooted in Into the Woods), the founding myths of American self-making (curdled in Assassins). And he did so with music that’s always searching, always swerving in and out of harmony, resisting unison, aching and yearning, nearly incapable of reaching closure. For a genre whose modern version was founded (in Oklahoma) on the equivalence between marriage and nation building (“Startin’ as a farmer with a brand-new wife— / Soon be livin’ in a brand-new state!” the title song cheers), the musical in Sondheim’s imagination opens up a space that can include, in its dissonances, everyone the American promise leaves out…….