Neil Archer, Senior Lecturer in Film, reflects on the cinematic legacy of the late, great musical theatre writer
Even though it wasn’t in a musical, my movie highlight of 2019 came courtesy of a Stephen Sondheim song. In Marriage Story, Adam Driver plays a theatre director separating from his actor wife, played by Scarlett Johansson. Dining at a restaurant with the rest of his cast, visibly trying to come to terms with his impending divorce, Driver’s character gets up from the table and goes to the open mic set up by a piano, lurching into a rendition of ‘Being Alive’, from Sondheim’s 1970 show Company.
Why is this scene so great? The element of surprise here is a plus (He’s singing? Adam Driver!?), but it’s more the intensity of the song, shot in one unbroken take, that does the trick. It’s also a reminder of the power of a musical theatre song to convey feeling and – in this case – a complexity of emotion beyond the power of mere dialogue. It’s as if the film’s writer-director, Noah Baumbach, at this moment raises his hands: Okay, Stephen. Right now, you do this so much better than me.
Sondheim, who died on November 26th at the age of 91, is still hot. His 1990 show, Assassins (a musical about, well, assassins) is being revived on Broadway; while Steven Spielberg’s film of West Side Story, for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics while in his twenties, is released this month. His sometimes bitter, ironic take on the musical, and his fondness for often intimate, everyday stories, didn’t always make him a good fit for cinema, especially as he was peaking at a time when the genre as a major Hollywood staple was somewhat in decline.
The garlanded first film version of West Side Story, in 1962, marked the end of the musical as a major studio event, its fortunes ebbing during the late sixties and into the next two decades. More recently, though, with a revival of the film musical’s critical and commercial fortunes, his work has been revisited, sometimes in unexpected forms: the blood-drenched Victoriana of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007); or the starry, Disney-does-dark of Into the Woods (2014).
Significantly, his influence is there to see, too, in many of today’s new musicals. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, a recording of which is streaming on Disney +, owes much to Sondheim’s exploratory, edgy approach to what constitutes a suitable subject: a rap musical, anyone, about the first US Treasury Secretary, sung by an all-actor-of-colour cast? You got it!
Sondheim had little left to prove in his long career, but his death still struck me as poignant, given that I’d just seen him. Well, not him, exactly, but a version of him, played by Bradley Whitford in Miranda’s Tick, Tick…Boom! (2021), streaming since November on Netflix. In the film, adapted from Rent author Jonathan Larson’s biographical musical, and starring Andrew Garfield (Yes! Garfield sings!), he’s a kind of divine figure, hovering around the film, a mentor-in-waiting to Garfield’s aspiring writer-composer. Sondheim’s the guy everyone notices even when he shuffles discretely into the room, trying and failing not to be noticed. But his presence is felt even when he’s not there, in terms of everyday people, singing about everyday themes, in ways we don’t see every day.
Stephen Sondheim steals the show. Again!
Keele Film Studies 