- The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies
- Dedication
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Sondheim’s Genius
- Sondheim and Postmodernism
- “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”: Oscar Hammerstein’s Influence on Sondheim
- “Old Situations, New Complications”: Tradition and Experiment in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
- <i>Anyone Can Whistle</i> as Experimental Theater
- The Prince–Sondheim Legacy
- “Growing Pains”: Revising Merrily We Roll Along
- “Give Us More to See”: The Visual World of Stephen Sondheim’s Musicals
- Orchestrators in their Own Words: The Sound of Sondheim in the Twenty-first Century
- “Nothing More than Just a Game”: The American Dream Goes Bust in Road Show
- “It Takes Two”: The Doubling of Actors and Roles in Sunday in the Park with George
- “Something Just Broke”: Assassins after the Iraq War—A Production and its Reception
- Sondheim on the London Stage
- “And One for Mahler”: An Opera Director’s Reflections on Sondheim in the Subsidized Theater
- Evening Primrose: Sondheim and Goldman’s Television Musical
- From Screen to Stage: A Little Night Music and Passion
- More Sondheim: Original Music for Movies
- Attending the Tale of Sweeney Todd: The Stage Musical and Tim Burton’s Film Version
- A Little Night Music: The Cynical Operetta
- Croaks into Song: Sondheim Tackles Greek Frogs
- Sweeney Todd: From Melodrama to Musical Tragedy
- “Careful the Spell You Cast”: Into the Woods and the Uses of Disenchantment
- Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women
- Follies: Musical Pastiche and Cultural Archaeology
- Narratives of Progress and Tragedy in <i>Pacific Overtures</i>
- Queer Sondheim
- Sondheim’s America; America’s Sondheim
- Bibliography
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter explores the balance and contradictions between Stephen Sondheim’s auteur status and the collaborative world of popular musical theater within which he has worked. Focusing on Sweeney Todd, it argues that his liberal arts education has facilitated both intertextual collaboration with past authors and literary traditions (Dickens’s London, the film Hangover Square, and previous Sweeney Todd authors, including George Dibdin Pitt and possibly Austin Rosser) and the exercise of artistic control that is potentially demonic, like Todd’s monstrosity, but held in check by a “vaudeville” aesthetic. The number “God, that’s good!” is analyzed in detail to demonstrate the point.
Keywords: genius, auteur, Hangover Square, Dickens, Sweeney Todd, Austin Rosser, artistic collaboration, vaudeville aesthetic
Stephen Banfield is a musicologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. His books include Sondheim's Broadway Musicals (1993), winner of the Kurt Weill and Lowens awards, Jerome Kern (2006), and several on British art music of the earlier 20th century. Future publications will include social histories of music in an English region (the west country) and in the British Empire, and a study of classical music's propensity to depict soundscapes.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies
- Dedication
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Sondheim’s Genius
- Sondheim and Postmodernism
- “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”: Oscar Hammerstein’s Influence on Sondheim
- “Old Situations, New Complications”: Tradition and Experiment in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
- <i>Anyone Can Whistle</i> as Experimental Theater
- The Prince–Sondheim Legacy
- “Growing Pains”: Revising Merrily We Roll Along
- “Give Us More to See”: The Visual World of Stephen Sondheim’s Musicals
- Orchestrators in their Own Words: The Sound of Sondheim in the Twenty-first Century
- “Nothing More than Just a Game”: The American Dream Goes Bust in Road Show
- “It Takes Two”: The Doubling of Actors and Roles in Sunday in the Park with George
- “Something Just Broke”: Assassins after the Iraq War—A Production and its Reception
- Sondheim on the London Stage
- “And One for Mahler”: An Opera Director’s Reflections on Sondheim in the Subsidized Theater
- Evening Primrose: Sondheim and Goldman’s Television Musical
- From Screen to Stage: A Little Night Music and Passion
- More Sondheim: Original Music for Movies
- Attending the Tale of Sweeney Todd: The Stage Musical and Tim Burton’s Film Version
- A Little Night Music: The Cynical Operetta
- Croaks into Song: Sondheim Tackles Greek Frogs
- Sweeney Todd: From Melodrama to Musical Tragedy
- “Careful the Spell You Cast”: Into the Woods and the Uses of Disenchantment
- Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women
- Follies: Musical Pastiche and Cultural Archaeology
- Narratives of Progress and Tragedy in <i>Pacific Overtures</i>
- Queer Sondheim
- Sondheim’s America; America’s Sondheim
- Bibliography
- Index
