The Highbrow Kid

Big Steve is 80 years young and to celebrate BBC Radio 3 has made him composer of the week. The downloadable highlights are a treat. It's always a pleasure to hear Sondheim talk about his work: he's honest and direct, bluntly correcting the assumptions of the interviewer; remarkably unpretentious (he practically snorts at the comparison between Wagner and Into the Woods); and genuinely funny as opposed to merely witty.

But the fact that he's on Radio 3 at all says something about his reputation. Aside from Bernstein he's the only musical theatre composer to get short-listed. The Radio 3 folks aren't the only ones to single him out. His songs are played in opera houses and the Proms. Actors and writers gush at the cleverness of the man. You hear a lot of this kind of sentiment: "Oh well, I'm not really a fan of musicals but I adore Sondheim". There is a sense in which Big Steve is a little too good for the average man. He's the artistically acceptable Broadway fella; a highbrow kid in a generally lowbrow world.

I think this is his major contribution to musical theatre, to take it upmarket. Yes, he did a lot of experimental stuff but so did a lot of other Broadway writers (and more successfully too). Yet no other Broadway writer has quite the whiff of cultured elitism that surrounds Sondheim. Why so?

1. He's not Andrew Lloyd Webber. In this country, at least, he's been seen as the antidote to the megamusical.

2. His lyrics are word games. A lot of theatre critics are basically wordy-lovers who judge theatre lyrics on the cleverness of the rhymes. Big Steve can certainly deliver on this count - "moustache/just ash" from A Little Night Music springs to mind. But theatre lyrics are more than just word play. Other qualities are equally if not more important such as sound, phrasing, singability not to mention little things like, er, truth and meaning. This is not to say that Sondheim's lyrics lack these qualities only that the cleverness of a good lyric is not always as obvious as it is in a Sondheim lyric.

3. His music is sophisticated. Again, for a Broadway composer absolutely true. But at the same time he ain't Wagner and grandiose talk about leitmotifs is stretching it somewhat (hence the derisive snort). For all the sophistication he's still essentially a Broadway baby and his music is essentially, undeniably, often gloriously Broadway. I don't think Big Steve would disagree. The best part of the Radio 3 piece was picturing the interviewer's face when Sondheim cheerily and categorically stated: "I hate opera". He much prefers musicals. Has anyone else ever said such a thing on Radio 3?

4. Compared to other writers' work, his songs tend to be more intellectually appealing. They are difficult and complex. The audience has to "work" a bit harder. Critics and academics get more to chew on with a Sondheim. (This last point is, I think, an argument about thoughts over feelings, that to express a thought is a greater artistic achievement than to express a feeling. If anything I'd say it's the other way round. Thoughts can indeed be difficult and complex but they're child's play compared to emotions.)

I've always found this elevation of Sondheim to High Art as curiously inappropriate. He strikes me as a very practical man of the theatre and one of a number of equally wonderful and practical Broadway songwriters who don't seem to get the same accolades. Jerry Herman on Radio 3? I could start a campaign.

How to Write a Theatre Review

Theatre reviews must be tricky little numbers and I don't envy those who try. But it probably helps if you're not a professional theatre critic, especially when it comes to musicals. One of the most interesting reviews of Love Never Dies comes from Guardian journalist Ian Jack. After ruminating honestly on Snooty-gate and his own attitude to musicals, he gets to the eveing itself:

"I took my 17-year-old daughter. Two tickets for the stalls cost £135; a programme, £3.50; three orange juices and a small white wine, £13.80."

It struck me that the cost of a night at the theatre is hardly ever reported. Why not? Ticket prices are, in part, an indicator of value and spending £10 or £100 to see the same show would most definitely colour your view of the evening's entertainment.

"The house was sold out, but the row immediately in front of us remained strangely empty until, two or three minutes after curtain-up and the action begun, half-a-dozen big people bumped down in their seats.

Why not tell us where you're sitting and who's sitting around you? Sometimes they're more interesting than what's on stage.

"As for the rest of the evening, there was nothing to dislike about it and a lot to be enjoyed..."

In my experience that's about as much as you can say from the first viewing of a new show.

"...some of the stage effects are transfixing; all the way back on the tube we puzzled over the extra who had real legs and the torso and head of a skeleton. Amazing! How had it been done?"

Special effects, spectacle, stage gimmickry - these are often the most memorable parts. They offer an immediate, visceral and determinedly theatrical experience. It's probably more honest to talk about them than to pretend you know what's wrong with the book structure in Act II.

"By the end, quite a few in the audience were in tears, or standing on their feet and cheering, or both."

Again I'd be pretty interested in the general audience reaction, not just the critic's (especially if it conflicts with the critic's). Overall this review struck me as being one of the most interesting I've read. Rather than running through a laudry list of opinions on author, director, performers, designers and so on, this gave me a pretty good account of the evening's experience.

Of course the best review of Love Never Dies came from an audience member, quoted in Metro, who expressed concerned about the number of times the Phantom gets unmasked:

"In this one, he whips it out all the time"

That's the kind of insight that every musical producer needs.

The Snooty Show

Snooty is as snooty sounds and actress and musicals star Sheila Hancock has been sounding off a bit:

"There's an incredibly grand attitude towards musicals. I don't understand why my profession is so snooty about it. It's not just my profession, it's critics too"

And non-snooty critic Michael Billington has leapt to the defence. No, he says, criticisms of musicals are all entirely snooty-free. Let's see, non-snooty criticism number one:

"The first is what I see as the unhealthy dominance of the musical in the West End"

Hmm, perhaps a touch of snootiness here. I wonder if he's ever argued that there aren't enough musicals in the West End? Or asked why the National doesn't do Lloyd Webber shows? I suspect not. Non-snooty criticism number two:

"TV, in particular, treats the musical as the only theatrical form that matters."

Again, would he be complaining if the Beeb did wall-to-wall Pinter? Why the special pleading for non-musical theatre? Besides television's job is to make good television and I'm not convinced that theatre works particularly well on the box. Even popular musicals, it seems, have to be squeezed and sculpted into a reality TV format. Non-snooty criticism number three:

"One of my big beefs about the genre right now is that it lives almost entirely off the past...Where, I've asked a score of times, are the new musicals?"

This is perhaps the least snooty complaint. But it would be more convincing if he had a surer understanding of what counts as "new musicals". He manages to lump together Sister Act, Legally Blonde and Priscilla as being unoriginal due to the fact that they are based on films (by the same token he would have dismissed A Little Night Music) . Now it's true that Priscilla is a compilation of pop songs but the other two have entirely orginal scores. One by an multi-oscar-winning composer, no less. If that doesn't count as an interesting "new musical" you probably shouldn't be doing musical criticism.

I do suspect a lot of theatre critics have to hold their noses when they attend a musical. To be honest, I don't really blame them. I imagine most of them are smart university graduates who didn't spend their formative years reading Chekhov to have to write 2oo words on drag queens singing disco hits. On top of that, when it comes to musicals, I suspect that critics are fairly redundant. Whereas they may be able to help a struggling straight play get noticed I wonder whether they have much influence on musicals.

So, on the whole, I'm with Sheila. Musicals are simply a cut above common snootiness.