A Tribute to Sondheim

THE BROADWAY LEGEND’S BEGINNINGS WERE IN THE BERKSHIRES

By Anastasia Stanmeyer // Photos Courtesy Williams College

The late composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim left his mark on Williams College in many ways—by bringing the first musical production to the college, by putting the school’s theater program on the map, by being one of the first Jews in a fraternity, and by being a much-needed creative force on campus. Perhaps equally so, Williams was instrumental in the development of Sondheim’s early years.

A campus-wide tribute to Sondheim took place two years ago, including a new play by Ilya Khodosh and Omar Sangare about Sondheim’s time at Williams, and a production of A Little Night Music by the student drama group Cap and Bells. There was also a performance of Sondheim songs by Sebastian Arcelus, Claire Leyden, Michelle Rodriguez, and other alumni. The celebration was cut short because of the pandemic, and one event has been rescheduled two years on, almost to the day. At 7:30 p.m. on March 11 in Chapin Hall, pianist Sara Davis Buechner joins the Berkshire Symphony, conducted by Ronald Feldman, in the premiere of a masterwork composed by Kevin Kaska and Luis Steward, titled “Sondheim Celebration.”

All That Glitters, was Stephen Sondheim’s second musical at Williams College. He was very active in the school and graduated in 1950. Sondheim wrote for the college’s magazines The Purple Cow and Comment.

A symposium titled “Sondheim@90@ Williams” included scholars, musicologists, and theater historians. The presentations and several other writings were compiled into a book. Edited by Williams College Professor W. Anthony Sheppard, Sondheim in Our Time and His was released by Oxford University Press on February 11. The book touches on almost all of Sondheim’s musicals from many different angles, as well as his personal history.

AT WILLIAMS All That Glitters

We at Berkshire Magazine pay tribute to Sondheim, his time at Williams, and his contributions to the musical theater. Sondheim is widely acknowledged as the most innovative, the most influential, and the most important composer and lyricist in modern Broadway history. He won an Academy® Award, numerous Tonys®, multiple Grammys®, and a Pulitzer Prize. Sondheim passed away on November 26, 2021, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, at age 91.

In Williamstown, students still can stand on the same stage of the Adams Memorial Theatre where Sondheim presented his first musical at age 18 during his sophomore year. He attended Williams from 1946 to 1950, a transitional time for the school in the aftermath of World War II. The campus was used as a naval flight prep school, and enrollment was sparse. The small college’s postwar years provided extraordinary opportunities for Sondheim’s developing talents.

“This was one of the best places in this part of the world where Sondheim could learn a lot about theater by being hands-on,” says Steve Swayne, professor of music at Dartmouth College and contributor to Sondheim in Our Time and His. “Everything else fell into place after that. One gets a sense of the force of nature that Sondheim must have been.”

Sondheim’s childhood was largely defined by his parents’ divorce. He and his mother moved to Bucks County, Pa., where they were neighbors of the lyricist, librettist, theatrical producer, and musical director Oscar Hammerstein II. He was a mentor and a father figure to Sondheim and probably suggested that he attend Williams College, says Swayne.

ON STAGE In 1947 at Williams, Sondheim plays a member of the chorus of Theban elders in Antigone.

At the young age of 16, Sondheim entered Williams with five other peers from George School, a private Quaker school near his home. In an interview with James Lipton, published in The Paris Review in Spring 1997, Sondheim talks about his early days at Williams. “As an elective my first year, I took music, which was generally known as a gut course . . . Robert Barrow was the senior of two teachers. The students hated him because he was cold and Mary Poppinsish. He taught rigidly out of a little black book compiled over the years into which he had compressed a lot of texts. He had a completely anti-romantic approach to music . . . Instead, Robert Barrow was talking about leading tones and diatonic scales, and I fell in love. He took all the mystery out of music and taught craft. Within a year I was majoring in music. He changed my life by making me aware that art is craft, not inspiration.”

Sondheim became involved in the campus’s creative life. He wrote for two magazines and performed in nine plays. He wrote Phinney’s Rainbow with Joshua T. S. Horton, the first musical presented by the Cap and Bells. The musical, which ran for four performances, was a satire on college life, and the title was a take-off on both the then-popular musical Finian’s Rainbow and the college president, James Phinney Baxter III. The next year, Sondheim returned to the Adams Memorial Theatre with All That Glitters, an original musical adaptation of George Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s play, Beggar on Horseback. Hammerstein had informally assigned Sondheim to write four different kinds of musicals, and this was Sondheim’s first completed assignment.

Sondheim said in The Paris Review interview, “Beggar on Horseback lends itself easily to musicalization because it’s essentially a long fantasy. We performed that at college when I was an undergraduate at Williams

… It was a valuable experience, indeed.”

In the Class of 1950 yearbook, Sondheim received votes for most versatile, most brilliant, most likely to succeed, most done for Williams, and most original. Yet it wasn’t all rosy for him at what was then an all-male homogeneous college. Those experiences are expressed in his musicals like Saturday Night, an early work by Sondheim where a macho, boastful young man is claiming that he has great sexual prowess.

“Sondheim would have heard that language and vibe in the sort of fraternity culture at Williams. That atmosphere had nothing to do with his life in New York City,” says Swayne, also author of How Sondheim Found His Sound.

Sondheim was dealt a few blows in the second semester of his junior year. A review of All That Glitters in the Williams Record had the headline suggesting that everyone received a “shiner”—a black eye—for their efforts, according to Swayne in Sondheim in Our Time and His. And the fact that he didn’t get into Gargoyle, the senior honorary society, also was devastating.

Sondheim saw himself as living out the tenets of Quakerism, so to be told in no uncertain terms that he was Jewish also was a surprise to him. “The Beta House, which didn’t take Jews, had Steve Sondheim, who was my roommate. But Steve Sondheim didn’t know he was Jewish. He thought he was a Quaker. And he came to me one day and he said, ‘I’m told I’m Jewish. Is that true?’ I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ So we had a long discussion,” said Andrew Heineman, class of 1950, in an interview in 2001.

Sondheim graduated magna cum laude and received the Hubbard Hutchinson Prize, a two-year fellowship to study music. He only returned to Williams in person twice—at least from what is known—once for an honorary degree in 1972, and the other for a talk with The New York Times columnist Frank Rich in 2010. He did attend a handful of Barrington Stage performances in Pittsfield of his musicals, including Follies, Sweeney Todd, and Company. (Barrington Stage will present Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in August 2022.)

Phinney’s Rainbow was a collaboration between Stephen Sondheim ’50 and Josiah T.S. Horton ’48. It was the first musical ever performed by the student theater group Cap and Bells. Sondheim with the Cap and Bells in a photo dated 1949-50.

There was a third live appearance at Williams, via Zoom, in the spring of 2018. Forty-five students and a dozen more members of the Williams community auditing a new course, “The Broadway Musical,” were scheduled to discuss his work. Sheppard was the instructor. “I kept thinking that I should reach out to Sondheim to see if he had any interest in speaking to my class. I went back and forth, convincing myself he wouldn’t be interested, then I decided I should try. He answered my email within hours and said, ‘Yes, I’d love to do this. I don’t know how to use Zoom or anything, so let me get someone to help me.’”

After the students settled into their seats, Sheppard unmuted the screen—and there he was. “He was just amazing. He answered students’ questions, and I had to eventually cut it off. We went 80 minutes, and he would have kept going. He was clearly moved by doing this, because he had never done it for Williams students before. He said it meant a lot to him to see how much they were interested in his musicals. That’s when he said to me, ‘From now on, you can call me Steve!’”

That was incredible for Sheppard, whose first encounter with Sondheim’s work was when he was 13 years old, at home in St. Petersburg, Florida. There was a TV broadcast of Sweeney Todd. “I remember watching that by myself, and just being really sort of blown away by this musical. It wasn’t anything like the musicals I was performing as a kid, you know, Oliver and Sound of Music. It sort of shocked me and opened my eyes and ears.” Then in Sheppard’s first semester in college, he was a clarinetist in the pit for Sweeney Todd, sitting next to John Cariani (Caroline, or Change). There’s a part where the two clarinets were really rubbing up against each other in terms of pitch and dissonant melodies, and playing such an important musical role in the production deepened his admiration for Sondheim.

“Why do people find his works so moving? That’s somewhat mysterious,” says Sheppard. “There’s a number in Pacific Overtures, ‘Someone in a Tree.’ It’s just so repetitive. Yet, every time I’ve heard that number, it has some kind of profound human aspect to it. That’s what keeps coming up in his shows. These moments. Sure, there are really funny parts and sarcastic wit. But then he’ll hit you with a number that just sort of goes right to—Oh my God, what does it mean to be trying to get through life as a human in relationship to other people, and the relationship to time and time passing?”

After the classroom interaction with Sondheim, Sheppard started thinking about a celebration at Williams for Sondheim’s 90th birthday and organized the campus-wide tribute. Sheppard’s honoring of Sondheim carried on to the book he edited. Oscar®- and Grammy®-winning composer and lyricist Kristen Anderson-Lopez (Frozen’s “Let it Go,” Coco’s “Remember Me”), who graduated from Williams in 2004, writes a moving afterword.

“Before I could tie my own shoes, I had absorbed through osmosis (or the television?) multiple lyrics from West Side Story and Gypsy. I would sing a bastardized version of ‘Comedy Tonight’ while swinging on our backyard swing set. Judy Collins sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ on The Muppet Show. My wonderful elementary music teachers had us sing various pieces in Sondheim’s songbook, reading the handwritten lyrics projected on the wall from a transparency sheet on the overhead projector. My high school boyfriend scored major points when he and his family flew us up from North Carolina to New York to see Into the Woods on Broadway for my sixteenth birthday. By the time I was in college making the annual back-to-school commute from Charlotte to Williamstown, Massachusetts, my reverence for Sondheim had crystalized into a personal tradition. It’s worth noting that during those years I had no idea I would later channel this love of the art form and become a songwriter myself. At the time, all I knew was that Sondheim was the measure of intellectual artistic excellence. And every September I would pack up my Dodge Caravan (with classy wood siding) and next to me, in the plastic CD holder on the passenger seat, was every Sondheim original cast album as well as my all-time favorite compilation, Live Celebration of Sondheim at Carnegie Hall. I would drive up I-95 to my academic year at Williams, propelled North by Sondheim’s sophisticated body of work.

SCREEN TIME Professor W. Anthony Sheppard, Chair of the Williams Department of Music, had a special guest in class in 2018.

“To say I have put Sondheim on a pedestal would be an understatement. He is the genius of all geniuses. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of my chosen religion: musical theater. Sondheim’s monolithic greatness—to my mind and in the Broadway community at large—is connected to his ability to capture the nuanced paradoxes of the human heart and mind.”

A projected videotape of Sondheim during a Williams Theatre Department production of Our Time in 2020.