I had such a great time at our Sondheim Masterclasss this week, I thought I’d post a series of blog posts to complement the class.
First up, and meant without any offence, if musical theatre was a religion, Sondheim would be a god. In all sincerity, the messages he has to share with us preach truth and clarity, and could have perhaps been delivered in any number of formats, but he grew up with Oscar Hammerstein as a mentor and happily for us, musical theatre is his medium. So it’s as a composer that he shares his insights into humanity.
Certainly in my life, I have been guided by Sondheim’s philosophies expressed in his lyrics. He has an uncanny insight into the human condition, and that is what the great playwrights of the theatrical canon have to share with people. So as audience members, the characters and situations in these shows may be far removed from our lives, extreme or even fantastical, but the human experience that they are living is something that has the capacity to resonate with our own experiences.
When we go to the theatre and can see something about our own experience in another person’s story…this is what moves us, inspires us and maybe starts to provide us with some answers about what we are experiencing ourselves. And that to me is the most powerful theatre,
And Sondheim does that in musical theatre. I believe that is one reason he has such a legion of fans, because we feel moved by his work and we feel connected to his work and to that experience. It also means as artists that it’s a huge challenge to rise to and do the work justice. More on that coming in my next post!
Something special about Sondheim is that he writes both the music and the lyrics, and that creates such a synthesis of music and text which is a gift to us as actors, because he has thought through all the elements of interpretation for you. He has considered the speech rhythm, the emphasis, the direction of the line, and because there’s this perfect marriage of text and music, of lyrics and rhythm, he’s shaped the line, the lyric, the rhythm, the phrase as an interpretation. So we can see how he’s scored something, and already have a clue into how he envisaged this being interpreted.
With pitch as well, he knows when to keep an actor in their speech register and when to exploit the upper range when the emotional stakes are raised. So in terms of acting through song, the way the melody is shaped is already giving us so many clues as to where the height of that feeling is, and what the actor needs to do, going up, going down, and how their expression should be shaped. And that’s one of the marvellous aspects of his writing. The fact that he has taken complete control of the music and lyrics that he’s able to be so specific about what he is communicating to us on the page.
Sondheim may be challenging to learn but the effort is immensely rewarding. The Sondheim repertoire I’ve sung stays with me and I’m frequently guided by it. Often when I find myself contemplating some challenge or difficulty or decision….Sondheim has the answers. The answers that you need will be somewhere in one of his characters, one of his lyrics…there will be clarity. And I just love that he has shared all these lessons with us, and it happens to be through the medium of musical theatre.
I hope you have the chance to enjoy my Sondheim Class at The Sing Space and more coming here soon….