Finishing the Hat

The height of my Sondheim fandom coincided with my first couple years of college. Some freshmen do keg stands; others hole up in their dorm rooms with the original cast recording of Anyone Can Whistle.

I couldn’t tell you for sure why I was drawn to Stephen Sondheim’s oeuvre specifically. The standard explanation offered by other devotees has to do with the sophistication of the lyrics and the psychological complexity of the characters in his musicals.

Maybe those things were enough to make me a fanatic. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that Sondheim seemed to share my scorn for corn back then. After all, his work is especially suited to urbane yet disillusioned fortysomething Manhattanites in 1973, and I was never more of an urbane yet disillusioned fortysomething Manhattanite in 1973 than when I was a displaced teenage Arkansan in 1998.

During sophomore year, I tried out for something in the theater department and used “Too Many Mornings” from Sondheim’s Follies as an audition piece. It’s a song about being middle-aged and unhappily married and longing for the ghosts of an irretrievable youth. I was 19.

Just as Swifties have their preferred Taylor Eras, my favorite Sondheim was (and remains) the Sondheim of the early 1970s, when he churned out Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music in quick succession.

If you ask me, those rueful and wry, elegantly sardonic shows are his most Sondheimesque creations, though I of course recognize the towering achievements of Sweeney Todd and the two classics for which he provided lyrics to somebody else’s music, West Side Story (music by Leonard Bernstein) and Gypsy (Jule Styne).

I also like Pacific Overtures, Sunday in the Park with George, and Assassins. Into the Woods is fine, but I have always thought of it as the favorite Sondheim musical of people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

In 2010, Finishing the Hat, the first volume of the composer’s collected lyrics, came out. I duly bought a copy—not really for the lyrics, which I’ve had memorized in their entirety since spring quarter of freshman year, but for the “Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes” promised in the book’s subtitle.

I found this commentary pretty disappointing, though, because most of the time Sondheim comes across as a real snot.

For starters, he takes obvious delight in pointing out the shortcomings of other lyricists, and he does so in this off-putting, stuck-up way like, Hm, are you sure that’s what you were going for? Did you ever think of maybe sucking less at your job instead? (I’m paraphrasing).

And okay, fine, Sondheim probably earned his complicated feelings toward Oscar Hammerstein II, given that the older man was a mentor and father figure. But why pick on Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, whom Sondheim derides as a try-hard and a not-try-hard-enough, respectively?

In the words of another important lyricist, “Bitch, sit down. Be humble.”

At any rate, the first book of lyrics didn’t exactly whet my appetite for the sequel, Look, I Made a Hat, with “Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany” (and Ira Gershwin tried too hard?). That second volume was released in 2011 and I have neglected to acquire a copy to this day.

That would have appalled my completist 19-year-old self. He’d also probably be dismayed to discover that, as I’ve gotten closer in age to the characters in Follies, my tolerance for corn has grown as high as a elephant’s eye.