Finishing the Hat

"Stephen Sondheim’s appeal cuts across cultural hierarchies – he elevated the art form. He has never been immensely popular. A lot of his shows haven’t been very successful, financially. But he is the living master of American musical theatre. The meat of this book is described by its subtitle: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. A lot of lyrics collections have been published over the years, but this book is particularly valuable because Sondheim put it together himself and it’s full of insights into his craft. This is one of those books which you can’t stop reading once you start, mainly because of the notes. Sondheim gives the story of how various songs and shows were put together. Let me give you one example. The famous opening number of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was originally a song called “Invocation”. Then it was “Love is in the Air” . Both of them, he says, weren’t working, so the whole show wasn’t working. One of the things he learned from [Broadway lyricist] Oscar Hammerstein, who was his mentor, was that a show has to work from the start. The opening number is of primary importance. Another lesson that Hammerstein taught him was to tell the audience exactly what the show was about. So he wrote “Comedy Tonight”, which is remembered as one of the great opening numbers in musical theatre. It’s a very valuable book for people who want to work as lyricists or composers, because he goes into detail about the specifics of rhyme and how you set words to melodies. He writes frank assessments of his fellow lyricists, including Lorenz Hart, composer Richard Rodgers’s first great collaborator. He goes into detail about why he found Hart’s work unsatisfying. To Sondheim’s mind, Hart and Noël Coward were lesser lyricists than Gershwin, Hammerstein and Cole Porter. You can’t deny the truth of many of his criticisms, and even if you don’t agree with them all it’s edifying to read."