“Lesson #8”: A Hymn to Essence

Claybourne Elder in Signature Theatre’s “Sunday in the Park with George”. Photo by Margot Schulman.

There was no love lost between Alan Jay Lerner and Stephen Sondheim. At least, it seems that way. The older lyricist and librettist known for his successful collaborations with composer Frederick Loewe on shows like My Fair Lady and Camelot, also managed to write a “history” of the artform he toiled in over his career, the posthumously published, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration. He doesn’t find much to celebrate in his younger colleague’s work, though. Glib praise of Sondheim’s lyric writing aside, he describes his work (beginning with Company) as containing “no rainbows, no joy, no hope, no melody aimed at the symbolic heart”, and later refers to Sunday in the Park with George as “hardly distinguished for melody.”  

Sondheim did not comment publicly on the work of living writers, or at least, rarely did. He found it “hurtful and stifling” when fellows practitioners engaged in such behavior.  He would not negatively criticize a writer or individual piece… until they were dead.  (“…speaking ill of the dead seems to me the gentlemanly thing to do. The subject cannot be personally hurt, and his reputation is unlikely to be affected by anything you say.”) In both volumes of his collected lyrics and attendant essays, Sondheim certainly had some things to say about Alan Jay Lerner, who died in 1986. His work was “professional and uninteresting”, he was “a chameleon of one color” and, regarding the one song in Lerner’s lyric writing oeuvre he was “exhilarated by”, “A Hymn to Him” from My Fair Lady,  he found its title “so self-consciously clever that I almost turned against the lyric.” (NB. The refrain line of the song is “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?”, and it should be the title.)  That brings us to “Lesson #8” from Sunday in the Park with George, or “Primer” as it originally appeared as a title idea written on of  those voluminous sheets of yellow legal pad paper Sondheim worked on.  

Author-director James Lapine said in Putting it Together,  his own fascinating memoir about the creation of Sunday in the Park… that he always though that “ “Children and Art” explained the show and “Lesson #8” explained George.” (“Children and Art” being the song sung moments earlier by the contemporary conceptual artist George’s grandmother, and George Seurat’s granddaughter, Marie.) Indeed, “Lesson #8” does explain the conceptual artist, but also Act I’s George Seurat. If George in Act II of Sunday in the Park with George is believed to be an extension of Seurat, not just his great-grandson, this is his most nakedly emotional song— even more so than Act I’s “Finishing the Hat.” That song, among other things, does get an audience to sympathize with the obsessive, coldly clinical French painter. However, its emotional content is no more (or less, mind you) than an acknowledgement that art takes sacrifice, especially from emotional commitment. It is a typically startling Sondheim song of ambivalence, ending with the perversely joyous, yet pathetic, sight of George sharing his latest sketch with a dog. In “Lesson #8”, this contemporary extension of Seurat shares— with the audience beyond “the fourth wall” and the essence of his recently deceased grandmother— his anxieties and disappointments, and his grief. Does this relate to his art? Yes. But it also relates to his lonely life during a lonely moment on the far less green, far more sterile Island of La Grande Jatte in 1984.  

George begins this song as he’s going through Marie’s “red book”, an educational tool her mother, Dot, used in the first act of the show to learn to read and write. He reads, “Charles has a book…Charles shows them his crayons…Marie has the ball of Charles…Good for Marie…Charles misses his ball”, and then reflects, “George misses Marie. George misses a lot. George is alone”, and onward. How can he go on without the gentle guidance of his loving grandmother? How can he go on when collaborators leave for other projects, like his associate Dennis plans to? How can he create something new when all he seems to be able make do are “Chomolumes.” Number 7? Shouldn’t it have been a series of three, or four at the most? And now, the island in the painting Marie refers to as “the family tree” is a sterile representation of modern consumption. He’s reading this primer. He needs to relearn life, and his artistic canvas needs… a primer.  A title is born! Sondheim “liked the pun (a base for both Dot and the painter)”, but then he remembered “Why Can’t a Woman Be…”, no, excuse me… “A Hymn to Him.”  

“A Hymn to Him” takes place in a similar moment—particularly in regard to running length—in My Fair Lady. It’s late in Act II, a crisis has hit linguist, dialectician, and misogynist Professor Henry Higgins, and now Lerner and Loewe must explain him. However, Higgins cannot bare his soul. In fact, has he soul? For now, it seems that his soul is only made up of his work, and befuddled misogyny. “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” They’re so “pleasant and easy to please”, and “why can’t a woman be a chum?”, willing to give a winner’s back a pat, and able to use her head. This perfectly funny and characterful song, though, is very much a product of traditional American musical theatre of the 1950s. My Fair Lady itself, whatever its individual peculiarities are, is such a product, and so is Alan Jay Lerner. Sondheim was going to change that, while still maintaining the surface-level wit and sophistication, and craft, of  Lerner and his contemporaries. He would further redefine the artform, and his work in it, with Sunday in the Park with George, which occurred at a transitional moment in his career.   

Works of art are products of their time. There’s no such thing as a “timeless classic.” “Timeless” is a buzzword used for advertising. My Fair Lady is a work of its time (1956), and Sunday in the Park with George of its (1984), and both are wonderful shows. I have affection and admiration for both, and as a writer myself, envy and steal from them both. Lerner and Sondheim, too, were products of their time. Henry Higgins and George (Seurat and whatever the surname of Marie’s grandson is) are products of theirs, and certainly products of the imaginations of the writers who conceived them— Lerner, Loewe and George Bernard Shaw, and Sondheim and Lapine. Whereas Lerner looked for joy and melody aimed at the “symbolic heart” (nifty phrase, by the way) while maintaining an aura of sophistication, however surface-level, Sondheim’s joy, hope, and heart come from ambivalence and sometimes startling gut emotions. This is achieved through verbal ingenuity, intricately thought-out music, and theatrical storytelling less linear than what audiences may have been used to in the 1950s. However, bells and whistles aside, Sondheim writes about the essence of life. The time between 1956 and 1970’s Company made that possible.  

Fourteen years passed between the jolt of Company and Sunday in the Park with George. It is a musical brought down to its essence. It is, for all of the dots on Seurat’s canvas, about less. At fifty-eight bars and two minutes and fifty-three seconds  “Lesson #8” is one of the shortest songs, and the most compact song in the show. It needs to be. It is the artist and person George brought down to his essence. “Less is more”, went  the second watchcry of Sondheim writing principles. If ever Sondheim could show how he applied that to one of his works, he could look no further than this show, and this song. In fact, he could look no further than the word “Primer” crossed out, and the new title that replaced it on the yellow pad paper.  

But let’s look beyond the craft. Just like one hundred years’ time affects those in and around “the family tree” of Marie’s grandfather’s painting, time affects an artform, and entire careers and oeuvres of individual artists working in it in order to get to the ever-elusive essence of life.  

JOHN VERDERBER is a theatre writer living in New York. Born in New York in 1992, Mr. Verderber’s individual theatre songs have been showcased by the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop and Little Red Light Theatre, among other organizations, and his theatre reviews and commentary have been published in New York and Time Out magazines. He has been a multi-episode guest on the podcast Scene to Song. His musical Harry Reems Goes to Hollywood is currently being developed by Little Red Light Theatre. Mr. Verderber is a member of The Dramatists Guild of America.

LESSON NO. 8 

Charles has a book. 
Charles shows them his crayons. 
Marie has the ball of Charles. 
Good for Marie. 
Charles misses his ball. 
George misses Marie. 
George misses a lot. 
George is alone. 
George looks around. 
He sees the park. 
It is depressing. 
George looks ahead. 
George sees the dark. 
George feels afraid. 
Where are the people out strolling on Sunday? 
George looks within. 
George is adrift. 
George goes by guessing. 
George looks behind. 
He had a gift. 
When did it fade? 
You wanted people out strolling on Sunday. 
Sorry, Marie. 
See George remember how George used to be. 
Stretching his vision in every direction. 
See George attempting to see a connection, 
When all he can see 
Is maybe a tree. 
The family tree. 
Sorry, Marie. 
George is afraid. 
George sees the park. 
George sees it dying. 
George, too, may fade, 
Leaving no mark, 
Just passing through. 
Just like the people out strolling on Sunday. 
George looks around. 
George is alone. 
No use denying. 
George is aground. 
George has outgrown 
What he can do. 
George would have liked to see 
People out strolling on Sunday…