Criticism doesn't equal hate.
By Gregory Jacobs-Roseman
Left: Stephen Sondheim. Right: Lady Gaga.
It’s the ides of March today, and while you’re not totally just stabbing Caesar a different kind of widely perceived assassination – albeit a character assassination and not a literal one – occurred this past Friday when Playbill dropped an article highlighting quotes from a new interview with Stephen Sondheim (blessed be he) where he called Lady Gaga’s performance of a Sound of Music medley at this year’s Oscars a “travesty.” Fridays being my day to post to Crazytown, I had already filed my week’s article before this little morsel dropped, so I am taking this rare Sunday opportunity to address the story head-on (and no, I will not be talking about the sex dungeon quote. I don’t care if Sondheim does or does not have a sex dungeon – which according to him, he doesn’t, and I take him at his word. Either way, it’s none of my business). I feel I must do so after getting into a Facebook comment war yesterday with people I’ve never met over this issue. It is my belief that anyone who reads the entire quote in context can see that Stephen Sondheim was not hating on Lady Gaga, but rather addressing a serious point about how music written for the purpose of storytelling should be addressed from a performance perspective.
I want to start by pointing out that the Playbill.com article (which can be viewed here) was merely a selection of quotes from an article published in The Times of London. That article is not available online for free so most of what people on social media had to go on were these lifted quotes and not the full text. Being the intrepid Sondheim super-fan that I am, I paid for a monthly subscription to The Times so I could read the article in full, and when you have the complete picture of what Sondheim was talking about, the quote is a lot less mean-spirited than many have perceived it to be. More on that in a minute.
Lady Gaga at the 2015 Oscars.
When I heard Lady Gaga perform that Sound of Music medley at the Oscars I thought she sounded thrilling. I tweeted enthusiastically in all caps: IS THERE ANYTHING LADY GAGA CAN’T DO?!?!? I’ve heard her sing pop, folk, jazz standards (I adore her work with Tony Bennett), and now she entered using legit head-voice. “Wow.” I thought, “listen to her! She has such range!” Vibrato and pure vowels! Perhaps she’s mimicking Julie Andrews a little, but I was still impressed. It was a five-minute segment in a three-hour-plus awards show, but all I took away from the performance was how astonishing it was to hear her sing Rodgers and Hammerstein.
IS THERE ANYTHING LADY GAGA CAN'T DO?!?!? #ctownoscars
— Greg Jacobs-Roseman (@GJRoseman) February 23, 2015
Side note: I've never liked how Rodgers set the word "eyelashes" musically in "My Favorite Things." Eye-LASH-es? No one says that word like that. It's EYE-lash-es.
The following day there was the anticipated backlash on Facebook from some of my musical theatre-inclined friends. You get used to knowing and loving hyper-critical and opinionated friends when you work in the theatre. She was too ‘this’ or she was too ‘that’ or – whatever. I tuned it out. We got a musical theatre medley in an environment usually hostile to the form that was watched by millions, and that was enough for me.
Then the interview with Sondheim dropped, and the debate heated up again. Internet articles about the article appeared on my newsfeed with headlines along the lines of: “SONDHEIM SAYS LADY GAGA A TRAVESTY.” But then I read the quote and realized that such headlines couldn’t be more misleading. Sondheim was acknowledging that she displayed vocal “versatility” and that's what the audience – myself included – enjoyed. But her lack of emotional connection to the material is what he was bemoaning. Sondheim has often said that he prefers “actors who sing” over “singers who act” and there’s a reason for that, because in musical theatre the songs are there to serve the story, not the other way around like arias in an opera. This critique made total sense to me. You can’t just sound good, you have to connect to the text and music as well.
Apparently speaking ill of Gaga is treasonous to many gays of my generation.
“Arrogant!” more than one person commented on one Facebook thread I mistakenly got involved with yesterday, “cranky,” remarked another, “conceited,” or my favorite: “he’s just pissed Into The Woods went home empty-handed” – anyone who knows anything about Stephen Sondheim knows that he has no fucks left to give about any of your stupid bowling trophy awards. From the full Times of London article (which the Facebook commenter I just mentioned might have seen if Playbill was able to do more than pull quotes from the article for their post):
Into the Woods didn’t victoriously sweep awards season, but Sondheim thinks “very little” of that. “Awards matter when you’re young. They give you confidence. Most come when you’re older when it’s too late. The ones that have real meaning come with money.”
So, as you can see I went to the Times of London’s website and purchased a subscription so I could see the whole original article for myself. I’ve seen a lot of interviews with Mr. Sondheim, I’ve listened to him give many lectures, and on one glorious afternoon in graduate school he gave a master class at the Dramatists Guild just for my NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program class (it was, in a word: amazeballs). But in all the times I’ve heard him speak, I’ve never heard the man raise his voice or say anything in a cantankerous, angry, or caustic manner while on the record – so the idea that he might do so now seemed incredibly out of character and rather suspicious to me. I had to read the original source where the quote came from to know exactly what was going on with these secondary internet posts.
Sondheim on the Colbert Report.
What struck me about the Times of London article is how much Sondheim opened up about his personal life. In the “reintroduction” to his 2011 book “Look, I Made A Hat,” the second installment in his two-volume anthology of his lyrics, he writes as a response to some criticism of the first volume:
…some of the complaints are also worth addressing. The most common of them is that I didn’t speak enough about my personal life, “personal” being the euphemism for “intimate,” which is the euphemism for “sexual.” …Finishing The Hat was not meant to be a memoir. If I’d wanted to write a memoir, I would have, but I don’t, and I didn’t.”
Sondheim has been reluctant over the years to talk about his personal life, so to see him open up in the way that he does in the Times interview was quite unexpected. Upon reading the full article, it was much clearer to me that this comment wasn’t intended to be an unprovoked dig at Lady Gaga. It comes in a section where he is talking about his relationship with his partner who is many years Sondheim’s junior. He details, in a truly heartfelt and sweet way how their age difference manifests itself in ways such as their music tastes. From the Times article:
Sondheim and Romley have been together for 11 years. “It’s having somebody in your life who enriches you,” Sondheim says, “somebody who doesn’t let every day be the same day, somebody who forces you to go outside of yourself”. It is his second relationship; his first, when he turned 60, was with Peter Jones, a dramatist who now works for him. The age gap between him and Romley is “an interesting deal. The kinds of music I grew up on are entirely different to his. Although he loves my kind of music, I do not share his taste for contemporary pop music.”
While Sondheim enjoyed the new Broadway show Honeymoon in Vegas (“the essence of the musical theatre I grew up on”), he is not a fan of Lady Gaga, whom Romley “would crawl a mile to see. On the Academy Awards [in which she performed a medley of Sound of Music songs] she was a travesty. It was ridiculous, as it would be from any singer who treats that music in semi-operatic style. She had no relationship to what she was singing. What people liked was her versatility.”
Sondheim may not want to deal with pop concerts’ “screaming fans”, but he went to a Radiohead gig where “the audience was more like church than concert”. He is a fan of the group’s harmonies. “For me music has always been about harmonies. Most pop music today isn’t: it’s about rhythm, sonic values, performance and visceral reaction.”
Sondheim the lover. I love that. It makes me smile from ear to ear to read those adorable quotes where he talks of his partner with such affection. But the bit about Gaga – it has less to do with her as a performer and everything to do with Sondheim trying to relate to his younger partner’s taste in music. I imagine him saying the words “travesty” and “ridiculous” in his signature even monotone, barely showing any sort of negative emotion in his voice or demeanor. The simple fact is: he just doesn’t care for the popular music being produced today. I joked in a comment on Facebook yesterday: “This just in: 85-year-old man isn’t a fan of current pop music. More on this at 11.”
But Sondheim is Sondheim and that means that his critique is more nuanced than “old man doesn’t like what the kids are listening to these days.” It’s about the substance of the music itself (seriously though, how cool is it that Sondheim likes Radiohead? Radiohead was the soundtrack of my years almost – oh my God – 14 years ago living in the Emerson College dorms in Boston when my friends and I would get super high and talk about “really important stuff” like life, and politics, and everything while sitting on the decaying docks of the Charles River esplanade, paying tribute to the disembodied statue of Arthur Fiedler’s head as we came and went). But Gaga just famously did a medley of Rodgers and Hammerstein at the Oscars – and if there’s one thing that’s in Sondheim’s wheelhouse, it’s R&H. The man was Hammerstein’s protégé for Christ’s sake. This is a topic on which he can speak with authority.
And speak he did. He thought the performance, though versatile, was a travesty. He thought “any singer” who didn’t connect to the songs would be a travesty. And as someone who enjoyed Gaga’s performance, I am here to say he’s correct.
The lyrics to the songs in The Sound of Music are rich and full of imagery. To simply hit the notes is not enough. To wave your arms about and close your eyes while singing those words isn’t doing them any justice. To ignore all dynamic markings and maintain a volume level somewhere between mezzo forte and fortissimo the entire time ignores the emotional content of the music. In fact, the title song of the show maintains a piano dynamic marking for most of the song. The loudest it gets is forte for one beat, before an immediate decrescendo back to piano.
These examples are from the 1995 edition of the published piano/vocal score, which is the one I own. Note the dynamic markings. Also: to the friends of mine who work at R&H, I swear I double-checked to make sure my inclusion of this snippet is covered by fair use! I’m using it as an educational example!
There’s a reason that this song is to be performed with hushed excitement. Maria is in awe of the hills and their music. She is absorbing every bit of the beauty that is around her. Sometimes quiet wonder is more powerful than loud exclamation.
Sondheim is also right to make his point if for no other reason than it goes directly to something I’ve been complaining about for many years: the American Idol-fication of musical theatre singing. To sing loud, impossible notes with your eyes closed to the audience may work in pop, but it’s a recipe for disaster when the lyrics matter – and it’s a style and habit that has crept its way onto the musical stage.
There was a wonderful article (which you can and should read here) I read a few years back about Harry Connick Jr. when he was a judge on American Idol coaching the contestants on singing the Great American Songbook. I’ve never really watched American Idol, but John Stark, the author of the article, sums it up thusly:
Not one of the contestants took Connick's "Then" advice when they got on stage. Substance was thrown out the window for pyrotechnic vocal tricks. Angie sang Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” an ode to vulnerability, in full-power voice. She hardly came off as “a little lamb who’s lost in the wood,” as the lyric says. More like a John Deere tree cutter.
…
[Connick’s] breaking point came when Randy Jackson implied that Connick's advice had hindered Kree’s vacuous rendition of "Stormy Weather," which none of the judges liked. He thought she should have sung it more like Etta James, as she had wanted to do. As it turned out, her rendition was neither Etta nor Lena, nor even Kree. It lacked any personality or feeling. You could see Connick about to pop his cork. …Taking a seat, Connick proceeded to school a very defensive Jackson in the art of singing standards. The point Connick tried to make, which Jackson didn't want to hear, was that the show’s contestants didn't know these classic songs well enough to take liberties with their melodies and lyrics. In doing so, they were murdering the music.
I see this syndrome all too often these days, from open mics at The Duplex to Broadway stages and everywhere in between. I’d say we have to do something about it, but I worry that the problem has become so ingrained in young singers that no BFA degree in musical theatre can shake it out of them. Even I am guilty of falling for the charm of powerful, beautiful voices, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As I said, I loved Lady Gaga’s performance at the Oscars when I first saw it. But have we as theatre people come to expect so little from our vocal stars that just the mere fact that they deign to sing a showtune is enough to impress us?
In the end, however, I stand by my assertion that I think it’s a good thing that Lady Gaga performed the medley, even if the performance wasn’t quite what musical storytelling is supposed to convey. She performed a five-minute Rodgers and Hammerstein medley in front of an audience of millions, who for the most part would have had no interest in Rodgers and Hammerstein if it weren't Lady Gaga singing their songs. It is indeed a sad comment on how far tunes written for the musical theatre have fallen from grace in the eyes of those who consume popular song. But, like I said about both The Sound of Music Live! And Peter Pan Live!: if that performance got just one person out there interested in musical theatre who wasn’t interested in it before, then it was a nice success, and in that case I say: brava, Lady Gaga. And for those of us who strive for a more perfect future of this craft of musical theatre, I say bravo, Stephen Sondheim for reminding us once again that nice is different than good.
GREGORY JACOBS-ROSEMAN is a composer/lyricist and theatrical sound designer. His musical Save The Date: A Wedding Road-Trip Musical won the Overall Excellence Award for a Musical in the 2013 New York International Fringe Festival. gregjr.com
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