Almost everything came up roses

There’s a number in Merrily We Roll Along called ‘Opening Doors’, in which two young songwriters audition for a producer who interrupts: ‘That’s great! That’s swell!/ The other stuff as well!/ It isn’t every day I hear a score this strong,/ But fellas, if I may,/ There’s only one thing wrong:/ There’s not a tune you can hum.’ Urging them to be ‘less avant-garde’, he exits, asking for a ‘plain old melodee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee’ — sung (inaccurately) to the tune of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

There’s a number in Merrily We Roll Along called ‘Opening Doors’, in which two young songwriters audition for a producer who interrupts: ‘That’s great! That’s swell!/ The other stuff as well!/ It isn’t every day I hear a score this strong,/ But fellas, if I may,/ There’s only one thing wrong:/ There’s not a tune you can hum.’ Urging them to be ‘less avant-garde’, he exits, asking for a ‘plain old melodee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee’ — sung (inaccurately) to the tune of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

Sondheim’s ‘Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes’ (the book’s subtitle) claim that he has only written one song based on ‘personal internal experience’. But he concedes that this one is at least ‘drawn directly from external life experiences’.

It addresses what his detractors most often accuse him of: excessive cleverness, cynicism, and deliberately avoiding obvious, popular appeal in both his music and lyrics. But as Mark Steyn pointed out in his survey of musical theatre, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, his supporters say much the same. For this audience — which we may imagine as archetypal New Yorker readers everywhere — Sondheim

was a nobody until Anyone Can Whistle. All he’d done previously was write three solid hits, one after another … his first cult flop made him a genius too special for the expense-account set, the bridge-&-tunnellers and all the other schmucks who’d prefer to be vegged out at Hello, Dolly!

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Gareth Roberts

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Merrily We Roll Along (1981), the last of the shows examined here, is relatively straightforward by Sondheim’s lights.