More Than Song and Dance with Each Show,

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The birth of pointillist painting. Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West. A murderous barber and his woman companion who cooks the victims in pies. A bitter show-biz story of financial rise and moral fall--told chronologically backwards. The ruin of marriages. The disappointments of infidelity. The decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence.

Unlikely-seeming stuff, any of this, for the makings of Broadway musicals. The U.S., after all, is a nation built on optimism, and the musical, its foremost contribution to the world theater, has typically been seen as a straightforward comic romance that sends audiences out grinning and humming. But in an intensely imaginative 13-show career, Stephen Sondheim has embraced all those unpromising themes. From his big-time debut in 1957 as the lyricist of West Side Story to his 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, a fantasy about the creation of a French impressionist painting, Sondheim, 56, has steadily pushed toward--or beyond--the limits of what the score, the narrative, the very premise of a musical can be. More than anyone else writing today, perhaps more than anyone who came before, he merges a consummate mastery of what musicals have been with a vision of what they should become.

This is all the more impressive because Sondheim rarely originates concepts and recoils from most proposals made by others. Indeed, says his erstwhile collaborator, Director Harold Prince, "Sondheim will find every good reason not to do a show." Once he agrees, however, his creativity is liberated by the confinement of specifics. Sondheim has said, "If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier and it makes me free to say anything I want." As that self-analysis suggests, Sondheim's lyrics consistently reach past charm and wordplay (in which he delights) to become compact, emotive playlets. He composes not just songs but complexly interwoven suites. The tales his shows tell are almost all about loneliness, obsession and disillusionment--there is scarcely a happy love story in the lot --yet their honest grasp of human nature brings unexpected emotional satisfaction. Watching and hearing a Sondheim show is not always easy, not always comforting, but always memorable.

Critics have often labeled Sondheim's work special or even avant-garde. In fact, Sondheim is simply carrying forward an innovative tradition in which he was steeped from youth. Born into a prosperous New York City dress- manufacturing family, Sondheim had as friend and mentor Oscar Hammerstein II. Although Hammerstein became a pillar of the mainstream musical, some of his revered standards, notably Oklahoma! and South Pacific, were seen the way Sondheim's work often is now, as daringly unromantic and political. Where Sondheim genuinely differs from the past is in his effort to avoid writing pop ditties so catchy and lyrics so generic that they are instantly detachable from the show in which they appear: perhaps his only universally known song is Send In the Clowns, from 1973's A Little Night Music. He studied with the experimental composer Milton Babbitt and still prefers listening to serious work in the classical vein. Sondheim's West Side Story collaborator Leonard ( Bernstein has called him "compulsive and excessive," not least in his commitment to the idea that everything in a musical must strictly serve the task at hand. Even so, Sondheim's songbook made up a splendid 1977 review, Side by Side by Sondheim, which in turn became a beguiling two-record album. Cast albums, even of such failures as 1981's Merrily We Roll Along, are prized by collectors. Last September the belated complete recording of his 1971 spectacular Follies turned into a pair of sold-out Lincoln Center concerts and a PBS television special. Sunday in the Park will reach PBS next week. Sweeney Todd (1979) has received the ultimate musical-theater accolade: being scheduled by the New York City Opera. Many of Sondheim's shows failed to recoup their investment the first time around. But unlike most songs in the genre, Sondheim's have the staying power to rebound to eventual success.

These days Sondheim has disappointingly little competition. For the past two years--since Sunday in the Park--the New York Drama Critics Circle has not deemed any musical worthy of an award. Next season promises a resurgence, with perhaps the brightest glimmer on the horizon Sondheim's own Into the Woods, devised with his Sunday in the Park partner, James Lapine. Its premise is that the stories of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy-tale figures all take place on the same day in the same forest, practically within bumping distance. The show is still evolving through workshop stagings, but according to one Sondheim friend, "It is about the consequences implicit in those stories--what happens during the 40 years after Cinderella marries the prince."

The mythical audience for the Broadway musical in its heyday was the tired businessman looking for a little mindless entertainment. That kind of theatergoer has often been intimidated by Sondheim's literacy, acidity, unpredictability and aspiration. Thus Sondheim's admirers hope that Into the Woods will at last give him a blockbuster mainstream hit. However the show fares, Sondheim is once again rejuvenating a too often tired and mindless format. And the best news for the future of the musical is that Sondheim can rightly claim that, in the title phrase of a bawdy anthem he wrote for the movie The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, "I Never Do Anything Twice."

With reporting by John Edward Gallagher/New York