- 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 places the musical theater of Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators in two contexts: the late-1960s aesthetic exhaustion of the integrated musical play and the rise of postmodernism as a cultural dominant. Self-referentially unintegrated and self-consciously performative, Sondheim’s musicals move beyond the constraints of the musical play and participate in the postmodern critique of narrative as an aesthetic, epistemological, and ontological structure. Company (1970) and Follies (1971) use a formal critique of narrative to disconnect identity from the structure of the life story. Merrily We Roll Along (1981) employs a backward-moving narrative to problematize a structure-completing, progressive conception of time. Road Show (2008) replaces the exhausted master narrative of the American Dream with multiple temporary and contingent narratives.
Keywords: Sondheim, postmodernism, narrative, identity, structure, entropy, Company, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, Road Show
Robert L. McLaughlin is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He has published widely on postmodern literature and culture, particularly on the work of Thomas Pynchon. His articles on Stephen Sondheim have been published in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and the Sondheim Review. He is currently completing a book on Sondheim and postmodernism. He is the author, with Sally E. Parry, of We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II and the editor of Innovations: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Fiction.
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- 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
