{"id":971,"date":"2026-05-14T14:11:03","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T18:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/?p=971"},"modified":"2026-05-19T15:07:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T19:07:54","slug":"art-isnt-easy-by-daniel-okrent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/?p=971","title":{"rendered":"Art Isn’t Easy, by Daniel Okrent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I’d have to go through my playbills and figure out when it was that Stephen Sondheim and his husband sat down next to my friend. He (Sondheim, not my friend), died in late 2021 so I’m thinking it was before Covid and not because of Covid. Anyway, what struck me during the performance was how loud Sondheim was with his reactions. He was the type of person who would annoy me, if I hadn’t known who he was — someone who gasps loudly at an obvious plot reveal in a movie. Or worse, someone who sighs very loudly when they’re bored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But, like the time I sat across from Philip Seymour Hoffman on a subway, I realized that certain artists live with a natural intensity of observation that most people don’t utilize. Shirley Maclaine was also described as having this quality by Pete Hammill, who dated her, in his memoir “A Drinking Life.” I think, in Sondheim’s case, just from observing him, he approached watching a play (even a revival) as a completely new experience. Every laugh or revelation was completely brand new and he responded with the eagerness of a child listening to a story being told by a parent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it also annoyed his partner, who stood up and walked out and never came back, even after intermission. But it was also telling to me that Sondheim didn’t seem to give an absolute shit. He enjoyed the second act as much as the first, and was just as engaged. He was famously unable to commit until extremely late in life — not until his sixties. He was married in 2017 to Jeff Romley, at the age of 87. Romley was 37. But it worked for them. When Romley walked out of the theatre that night, it seemed, as an observer knowing nothing at all about them, that they were having a relationship spat and nothing more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title “Art Isn’t Easy” is one of the lines from the song “Putting It Together,” from the show “Sunday In The Park With George.” Despite his status as a giant of the musical theatre world (and I have to add it is one of the nastiest and bitchiest of all the professions available, so don’t do it, if you have any sense. And it’s also dying a slow sad death as it prepares for a Phoenix.) he didn’t actually have a lot of great hit shows and he had only one song that “crossed over” to the radio, “Send in The Clowns.”

His greatest show and achievement was “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” That was 1979. But then there’s some confusion or controversy about what’s considered “his show” and what’s considered a show that he contributed to. This book adds more flesh to the story but I don’t think it’s definitive, if a collaborative art can ever be definitive or defined as “someone’s” show. For example, the music for West Side Story is by Leonard Bernstein. The lyrics are Stephen Sondheim. Book is by the piece of trash Arthur Laurents. Original play is by Shakespeare, who borrowed his story from one Matteo Bandello, an Italian short story teller who wrote something called (in translation) The Tragical History of Romeus and Julieta and in the original Italian language as “The Unfortunate Death of Two Most Wretched Lovers.” Shakespeare, as was his genius, added some characters: namely the Mercutio and Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, Gypsy came along and the lyrics, again, are written by Sondheim but the music is by Jule Styne. This is solely because Ethel Merman refused to have a “new” songwriter do the work on a show that was designed specifically for her to play. It sort of begs the question or thought as to what that song list would have looked like had Sondheim been allowed to write it. I’d be hard pressed to say that Sondheim would have written better songs (tunes) than Jule Styne, who is one of the GOATs. “Some People,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sondheim was both composer and lyricist on “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum,” but it wasn’t until “Company,” that he finally refused to write lyrics without also writing the music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then it was all hit and a miss, almost in alternating order. (This is something the book doesn’t really discuss too deeply. Sondheim’s many failures.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Company” was a hit. “Follies” was a miss. “A Little Night Music” was a hit. “Pacific Overtures” was a disaster. “Sweeney Todd” was a huge hit and has remained so. “Merrily We Roll Along” failed after 9 nights. “Sunday In The Park With George,” “Into The Woods”: hits. “Passion”: failure. “Assasins”: failure. “Road Show\/Bounce”: No one’s heard of it. By now he said he was too old — that the juices weren’t flowing anymore. There was a posthumous production called “Here We Are,” which was dreadful, in my opinion — like copying the script of a movie and then presenting it with some background music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost all his failures have been revived and sometimes rewritten in a way that has brought them up to a certain level of great. “Follies,” in particular, has grown in people’s eyes — especially with the help of Cameron Mackintosh in London and The Roundabout Theatre Company in New York. “Merrily We Roll Along” has been rewritten so many times it’s hard to list, but the recent production with Daniel Radcliffe was an enormous success. I suspect that “Passion” will ultimately find its way to brilliance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first Broadway show “A Chorus Line” and the second was “The Wiz” — both in 1978. I saw “Sweeney” in 1980 (I think) and I might even still have the Playbill. I was on a class trip, and I also saw “Talley’s Folley” by Landford Wilson. My classmates thought I was crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I think with Sondheim, pulling off the layers of cult-madness that adorn him, what you find is a very talented writer and composer — he was actually more interested in composition than in lyric writing — who was animated by revenge and had the gay man’s ability to be an absolute bitch. But one thing I will always be grateful for, is that when he and the stupid slimy usurper named Arthur Laurents — a poser if there ever was one — “reconciled,” Stephen Sondheim still told him “You’re just smart enough to know how mediocre you are.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have my own personal reasons for hating Arthur Laurents but that in no way affected any of my feelings about this short, terrific, biography, part of the “Jewish Lives,” series. And if you believe that, there is a president who would like you to join his fan base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I’d have to go through my playbills and figure out when it was that Stephen Sondheim and his husband sat down next to my friend. He (Sondheim, not my friend), died in late 2021 so I’m thinking it was before … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":979,"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions\/979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thomasfcook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}