Pure and simple

It might be that the stage musical is now pretty well over as a form. Certainly, the gloomy parade of ‘juke-box’ musicals through the West End doesn’t give one much hope for the future. It is difficult to pick out a worst offender, but the Ben Elton We Will Rock You, confected from the Queen catalogue, is as bad as any. Its premise, of taking the work of a curious-looking, homosexual, Parsi, excessive genius like Freddie Mercury and turning it into an idiotic story about two clean-cut stage-school kids Putting the Show on Right Now says something truly terrible about the musical: it says that it can only deal with conventional views of conventional subjects.

The demonstration of just how untrue that really is comes with the collected works of Stephen Sondheim, who is surely the greatest figure in the entire history of the stage musical. In his long career, he has not hesitated to address difficult subjects. It’s certainly true that other classics in the genre have dealt with some serious issues — race relations in Showboat, the Anschluss in The Sound of Music, even trade union movements in The Pyjama Game and urban prostitution in Sweet Charity. When Sondheim takes on themes of colonial exploitation (Pacific Overtures), political assassinations (Assassins) or Freudian psychological depths (pretty well the whole oeuvre), he is not stepping outside the previously established limits of the form.

Where he excels, and where some audiences find him disconcerting, is his regular refusal to coat the theme in Rodgers-and-Hammerstein sugar — compare Pacific Overtures with South Pacific, or the rendering of obsession in Sweeney Todd with the Judd sub-plot in Oklahoma! Even more disconcerting, this distinctive clarity of vision is not at all austere: Sondheim, even at his most penetrating, retains a distinctive love of spectacular staging, and the combination of acid psychological commentary, dazzling pastiche and extravanganza makes a musical like Follies — his masterpiece, in my opinion — a unique contribution.