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Molly Sanford
MUHS 8048

Greek Chorus and Sondheim’s Postmodernism

Greek chorus has long been a method of communicating with theater audiences, and

Stephen Sondheim and his collaborators have taken advantage of this with unique effects.

Classic Greek chorus would typically speak for audiences and represent communal views, but

Sondheim’s shows often present the opposite of this. Contrary to traditional purposes, Sondheim

often uses Greek chorus to undermine clear grand narrative values rather than enforce them; a

familiar and traditionally straightforward component of theater takes on a different relationship

with the audience, adding layers of meaning that subvert our expectations and make us think. In

this way, Greek chorus elements become a postmodernist tool that we also see defined musically

in each show to strengthen this role.

In order to define Sondheim’s Greek chorus in this way, we must draw the connection

between postmodernism, Sondheim, and chorus functions. Features of postmodernism are

prevalent throughout Sondheim’s repertoire. There are self-referential aspects that call into

question the way we perceive art and that emphasize the limitations of language in conveying

messages. He uses nonlinear forms to present stories in a fragmented manner for the audience to

interpret. The main postmodernist feature that I have observed in his works is the rejection of

grand narratives and a focus on subjectivity. This comes in the form of ambiguities, double

meanings, and unsatisfying endings: Sondheim, in reference to Company, stated that he wanted

the audience to enjoy his musicals “and then go home and not be able to sleep” (qtd. in Olson

65). The effect is a redefinition of how audience members receive the musical in that clear

messages are no longer portrayed.

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We will examine how Sondheim achieves this specifically with Greek chorus, but we

must first define Greek chorus’s traditional function. It would typically take the form of a group

that commented on the action of a show, both diegetically influencing characters and non-

diegetically addressing the audience. They would often provide context and establish the tone of

scenes, which “keeps the action flowing and guides the action from one section into another”

(Fraser 227). Alexander Badue defines it as a “collective character” that can act as “an

intermediary between the world of the play and the audience whose perspective it helps to

shape” (111). This would be an entity that the audience would trust. In Greek theater, there was a

significant focus on community and societal values, and the chorus would speak from this

perspective to relate shows to communal views. It functioned as a tool to provide commentary to

which the audience would relate.

Sondheim uses elements of Greek chorus in arguably every show, having been inspired

by his work with Rodgers and Hammerstein on Allegro. He has listed this as a major influence,

noting that putting the idea of Greek chorus with musical theater was something that had not

been done before. Sondheim’s Greek choruses do use many traditional functions such as

establishing scenes and providing descriptive commentary, but he also uses it as a way to leave

audiences with mixed messages. The chorus entities can create cognitive dissonance against

other elements of the show, present views with which the audience doesn’t necessarily agree,

blur past and present to interrupt narratives, and enforce ambiguous or uncomfortable themes,

forcing audience members to think critically about the chorus rather than easily identifying with

it. Authors such as Barbara Means Fraser, Alexander Badue, and Susan Eileen Speidel outline

ways that Sondheim’s Greek choruses can still function to make the audience feel at ease; I have

found the ways in which he inverts this purpose to play a much more significant role, fitting in
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with the postmodernist impressions of Sondheim’s musicals that leave the audience to interpret

what they are presenting. I will explore Company, Follies, and Sweeney Todd as case studies, but

this can be seen conceptually and musically in many of his other shows.

Sondheim’s Company includes a nontraditional chorus group consisting of Robert’s

friends, acting as a communal commentary but also being members of the show. They influence

Bobby and speak to the audience like a traditional Greek chorus, but many other elements lead

us to not take the chorus’s view. Throughout the show, they put pressure on Bobby for being

single; the women of the group especially hold this view, but overall, romantic relationships are

continuously emphasized. We see Robert struggling to discover what he really wants against the

pressures of society that he should find a wife. If this were a traditional Greek chorus, it would

be clear to the audience that him finding a wife is preferable, because this group of characters

would be expressing the communal view; yet we see Robert’s point of view juxtaposed with this.

The chorus’s stance is presented against Robert’s perspective in such a way that the trust

relationship with the audience is corrupted.

Musically, a main feature of this Greek chorus is the “Bobby” motif of a descending

third: this is insistent and repetitive, and in its original form consists of the lyrics “Bobby baby,

Bobby bubi, Robby.” This short motif gets into Bobby’s (and the audience’s) head, and has a

patronizing, even annoying, tone. It is prevalent, for example, in “You Could Drive A Person

Crazy,” while the chorus and Bobby’s girlfriends present a judging and berating argument that

Bobby’s non-commitment is “deeply maladjusted,” and attempt to understand him without

engaging with Bobby himself. The motif appears throughout the show, and the relentless

insistence places an emphasis on him being single and serves to further isolate him. In its full

form, seen in the overture and in the lead-up to “Being Alive,” it takes the form of a fugue
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between the different couples in Robert’s life that grows into a loud, four-part cacophony. The

use of electric guitar, a modern rock idiom, places the chorus as representative members of our

real-world culture. The effect is an overwhelming insistence of this message from the chorus

characters and from, presumably, society as a whole, with which the audience is prone to

disagree due to this aggressive presentation. Barbara Means Fraser effectively sums up this

questionable Greek chorus as perceived by the audience, saying “Sondheim’s chorus is guiding

them along, but the audience may be wary of the path” (228). When the audience is led to

interpret the chorus from Bobby’s point of view, we do not empathize with them as was

customary with these entities.

This show has a very postmodern, nonlinear form, and the Greek chorus guides us

through vignettes about Robert’s life. However, throughout all of these, we see important

revelations about the makeshift chorus’s own relationships, such as in “The Little Things You

Do Together.” Problematic marriages are explored in a song about togetherness: “It’s things like

using force together, shouting till you’re hoarse together, getting a divorce together, that make

perfect relationships.” We get insight into their daily lives and receive the lines about perfect

relationships as tinged with irony. Their objective truth-telling function has been subverted by

exposing them in this way, and we are led to a further critical view of them in “Poor Baby,”

which is also established with statements of the Bobby motif from the chorus members. A typical

Greek chorus, often being non-diegetic, would have the knowledge of the audience and comment

on the diegetic characters from that perspective. In “Poor Baby,” when Robert’s friends lament

that he is alone and they individually are “the only tenderness he’s ever known,” the image

onstage is Bobby with a woman at that moment. We are seeing what the commentary of this
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song does not see, and it contradicts their message while emphasizing Robert’s point of view that

they are leaving out.

Near the end of the show, these elements come to a head when Robert interrupts the

insistent “Bobby” motif-turned-fugue by yelling “Stop!” There has been a tension throughout the

show between what Robert does and what the chorus or society thinks is best for him. His

climactic song that follows, “Being Alive,” while presenting an inconclusive resolution between

singleness and togetherness, features the revelation of Robert examining what he actually wants

apart from these societal pressures. Speidel says that “a balance between Robert and his Greek

chorus of friends is finally achieved. They have lost their hero, but he has found his own path”

(87). The audience is conventionally used to sympathizing with the chorus and having them

involved in a conclusive ending, but in Company, we are left to interpret for ourselves the

different sides of relationships and mixed messages that have been presented. There is only a

subjective narrative to be found between the critical view of the chorus couples and Robert’s

self-realization.

Another show featuring this postmodern Greek chorus effect is Follies. The commentary

in this show takes the form of ghosts that juxtapose the past and present: first, showgirl ghosts

represent the diegetic theater’s past, or the general non-diegetic Broadway’s past. However, they

appear as “not the reality of the past, but the glorification of it” (Speidel 90), and it is clear that

they represent something more than their surface-level presence. This is established musically in

the opening of the show, when they appear onstage before any other characters and the orchestra

suggests their ghostly nature before the audience has context. The prologue takes the form of a

waltz that includes slightly off-putting dissonances of tritones and sevenths throughout, as well

as evocations of floating, featuring ethereal-sounding celeste, violin harmonics, harp glissandi,

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and string tremolos. The ghosts’ role is then confirmed in the first song, “Beautiful Girls,” when

the modern characters enter and the ghosts appear to mirror them in a Broadway-style number

that would have been performed in this setting decades earlier. There are also ghosts of the four

main characters’ past that establish the tone of the scenes and relationships, and present

memories as the show unfolds. Robert McLaughlin points out that showing past and present at

once calls into question the older characters’ narratives, and by extension, the audience’s own

sense of narrative. The commentary that they provide is indirect and makes the audience connect

the dots between the Greek chorus ghosts and the show, which is necessarily going to mean

something slightly different to each audience member, rather than lending clarity.

Musically, the ghosts are present and participate in the show’s Broadway pastiche

numbers, “Beautiful Girls” being one of them. These songs are constructed as nostalgic

references to diegetic and non-diegetic Broadway, like the showgirl ghosts themselves. They

feature typically standard tonality and form, and the accessible, pleasurable nature of Broadway

classics. “Waiting For The Girls Upstairs” is an example of Broadway pastiche used in a

memory song, and this function is clarified through its opening transition. Stephen Banfield

explains:

Marked ghostly in the score, it carries rich associations in its rhythm, scoring,
texture with sustained tenor, harmony with chromatic appoggiatura chords, and,
when the voice enters, a jazzlike shift to IV7 as the first progression alongside a
foxtrot melodic indicator of three cross-rhythmic eighth notes followed by a long
note - all these seem to epitomize the vanished Broadway style. (204)

This musical characterization with non-diegetic connotations serves to enforce the removed

commentary role of the ghosts, evoking a different time frame in the audiences’ minds and

forming a self-referential standpoint that causes critical examination of the show and its

messages to follow.
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Often, the ghosts’ function is to simply be there and visually make a statement on the

present state of the characters versus their past. Speidel describes how in the original staging, the

ghosts would physically turn away from the main characters “at key dramatic moments,” and

that “this shunning of the older self by the younger confirmed their position as a Greek chorus

that silently commented on the lives and choices of their living counterparts” (90). This visual

commentary leaves the audience to interpret what happened between then and now that would

cause that disconnect. McLaughlin states that “we can work to infer the implied narrative, but we

know that the result will never be complete or definitive” (Gordon and McLaughlin). The

chorus’s presence and the main characters’ perspectives make a postmodern, fragmented

impression on the audience that is perceived subjectively, and the nontraditional forms of

commentary by the Greek chorus entity facilitate this presentation.

Banfield’s description is along the same lines as Speidel’s, and he further notes that the

main characters never have an actual confrontation with their younger selves. This “deprives us

of the opportunity to judge for ourselves whether the passage of time has changed the characters”

(Banfield 193). This is especially prevalent in the scene just before “Loveland,” where all eight

of the main characters (four older and four ghosts) argue and dissolve into screaming. When the

ghosts join the cacophony of the main characters, the audience loses any help that they provided

in understanding the situation. This points out the serious issues in both the past and present but

leaves the audience to interpret what is going on in both situations; the audience loses trust in

both the older main characters and the ghosts. Following this, we see Ben break down in

“Loveland,” but Banfield explains that the reason for this is not evident from the information

presented in the show: “it is never quite clear whether the breakdown occurs because he hates

himself for wounding Sally, because he actually feels he made a wrong choice in marrying
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Phyllis, or because he resents the facts of life that forced him to choose in the first place” (196).

By positioning the chorus figures throughout as incomplete commentary, the Greek chorus in

Follies illustrates prevalent flaws of clear narrative-making and memory.

A show that appears to have a fairly standard Greek chorus on the surface is Sweeney

Todd. However, in context, it still serves to convey a postmodernist depiction of any potential

morals. The non-diegetic group of characters that comments on the action throughout to unify

the show doubles as diegetic townspeople, as well as including Sweeney Todd himself. This

already establishes a critical view in blurring the perspective of the Greek chorus between the

audience’s society and the show’s community. This chorus does serve to provide traditional

context in that “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” recurs to explain or remind us that Sweeney is a

murderer, establishing the plot with the lyrics “he shaved the faces of gentlemen / who never

thereafter were heard of again.” However, rather than just presenting this straightforward

message, the first act juxtaposes elements of sympathy for Sweeney with what we are being told

from the chorus. When the audience meets the characters outside of Greek chorus explanations,

they are humanized with backstories. As Millie Taylor explains, “the audience then learns about

what befell [Sweeney’s] wife and child as a result of his absence, and his vengefulness appears

to be, if not appropriate, then at least understandable.” We see Sweeney’s motivations, and it is

not until the second act that he makes the transition from “tragic victim” to “melodramatic

villain” (Gordon and Taylor). This creates dissonance between what the chorus is presenting and

what we are seeing. Musically, the “Ballad” opening the show with its ominous message

contains straightforward, steady vocal rhythms that are easy to follow: the verses have a

consistent motion of eighth-note and quarter-note pairs, and the choruses have constant, accented

dotted quarter- notes, helping to set the “Ballad” apart from the dialogue-based songwriting
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prevalent in many of the characters’ numbers. It is immediately contrasted by the musical setting

of Sweeney’s backstory. After the chorus’s driving rhythms, the contrasting solo in “No Place

Like London” that introduces us to a different side of him is lyrical, with lilting mixed meters,

and much more stepwise and legato vocal writing. This “gives Todd the opportunity to draw the

audience to him, explain his motives, and to connect with his voice, his loving emotion, his

righteous indignation, and the beautiful melody,” and separates this sympathetic view from what

came before (Millie Taylor).

Additionally, Sweeney Todd is constructed around the dies irae in almost every motif, as

explained by Banfield. Important to note additionally is that the melody of the “Ballad” includes

the most direct statement, using five melody notes in the direct contour of the dies irae, whereas

the other motifs of the show utilize it in inverted or more fragmented forms. This presents an

adamant statement by the chorus of the uncomfortable subject matter, but leads to additional

connotations by using this musical signifier for death from the audience’s world. Other musical

elements place this in our world as well, such as the representation of a factory with the shrill

whistle in the opening, and what Banfield describes as the evocation of “nightmarish swinging of

bells” with oscillating chords and the first notes of the dies irae (297). At the end of the show, in

a way that a typical horror film may suggest that evil is unresolved in the real world, Sweeney

reappears from the dead after the chorus sings the line “isn’t that Sweeney there beside you?”

and suggests that we, having listened to Todd’s story, have heard “the music that nobody hears.”

These elements enforce the chorus’s role of providing direct commentary to our world, but by

blurring diegetic and non-diegetic lines, they add layers of interpretation and implication and

cause audiences discomfort in a way that the familiar Greek chorus would not.
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While the chorus runs contrary to the sympathetic view established for Sweeney in act

one, the “Wigmaker Sequence” in act two momentarily reverses this role. We do see Sweeney as

a villain after “Epiphany” where he declared about humanity that “they all deserve to die,” but

the chorus now switches to the role of echoing his thoughts, against what we would expect based

on the changed perspective of Sweeney between acts. While he writes a letter to Judge Turpin,

they repeat the word “honorable” in ironic commentary on the antagonistic Judge, and

Sweeney’s daughter’s name “Johanna,” recalling the justification from Todd’s backstory that

was previously established. The chorus forces the audience to see Sweeney from both

perspectives, victim and villain, when juxtaposed against the progression of the show. In

between these conflicting narratives, the chorus also takes on an unsettling tone by narrating the

violence that occurs. They switch from past-tense storytelling in the verses of the “Ballad” to

lyrics in the choruses that encourage Sweeney: “Swing your razor wide, Sweeney, hold it to the

skies;” “Sink it in the rosy skin of righteousness;” “Feel how well it fits, as it floats across the

throats of hypocrites.”

For me, the most telling line that the chorus is not seeking to teach clear lessons to the

audience is “freely flows the blood of those who moralize.” After the contradictory stances and

ambiguous perspectives, this line acts as a summary as well as another gory and uncomfortable

description, and it directly opposes objective moralization. By deconstructing a clear opinion of

the characters and blurring the lines between worlds, even a show about a murderer leaves the

audience thinking subjectively about the implications and message.

Greek chorus as a postmodern communication tool can also be observed in several other

Sondheim shows, and in each instance, the trend is also realized through music. A Little Night

Music includes a group known as the Liebeslieder that exists completely apart from the plot and
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characters as a traditional chorus would, but their commentary focuses on the ironies in the

show’s dysfunctional relationships. They sing the characters’ words from act one over significant

scenes from act two to emphasize mistakes and hint at a cyclic, inconclusive ending that may

have only been perceived on the surface level without this narration. The Liebeslieder characters

only sing waltzes, satirically depicting romance as the show discovers its flaws.

Into the Woods utilizes a narrator figure in act one with a very traditional story-telling

role who is distinguished musically by not singing, allowing us to receive his content as removed

from the story and logically factual. As the morals of the story become unclear and the show

departs from society’s standard lore, the narrator is recognized diegetically by the fairytale

characters and killed. The second act, with the narrator removed, shows the audience that there is

not always a clear message of good or bad, or a clear distinction between right and wrong that

can be objectively explained. Speidel points out that this reflects the musical’s lyric “sometimes

people leave you halfway through the wood,” which is an important theme of the show in

deconstructing the typical straightforward messages of its fairytale stories.

Assassins presents another instance of a narrator being removed from the story. The

Balladeer had been set up as a familiar figure with American folk music idioms, and functioned

as a relatable outsider examining the assassin characters. This time when he is removed, Lee

Harvey Oswald takes the main stage as an outsider looking at the assassins; he is the epitome of

a chorus figure with which an audience would not want to relate. However, as he becomes part

of the story, John Wilkes Booth steps up as the main leader of a chorus that influences Oswald.

We now have a group of American assassins as the Greek chorus, which is a group the audience

would not normally trust, but it is used to present narratives beyond the mainstream in more

subjective ways.
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This trend occurs in almost all of Sondheim’s shows, but these selections establish its

important and unique function. Sondheim’s nontraditional Greek choruses are important

elements to examine due to the way audiences’ expectations for narratives are consistently

subverted through such a traditionally familiar medium. On top of maintaining important

practical elements of the Greek chorus to establish context and provide explanations, this

relationship with the audience is then used within the whole of each show to support

uncomfortable themes and moral ambiguities rather than societal values and objective

viewpoints. Musically and thematically, the idea of Greek chorus takes on a new role,

contradicting grand narratives for the purpose of postmodern expression. We can no longer take

the chorus’s messages at face value and will surely be thinking about them subjectively after any

of these shows.
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Works Cited

Badue, Alexandre. “Comedy Tomorrow, Tragedy Tonight: Defining the Aesthetics of Tragedy
on Broadway.” Electronic Thesis or Dissertation. University of Cincinnati, 2012. OhioLINK
Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. Nov 2019.

Banfield, Stephen. Sondheim's Broadway Musicals. University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Company. By Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, directed by Lonny Price, 2011, New
York, NY. Performance.

Follies. By Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman, directed by Dominic Cooke, 2017, London,
England. Performance.

Fraser, Barbara Means. “Revisiting Greece: The Sondheim Chorus.” Stephen Sondheim: A
Casebook, edited by Joanne Gordon, Garland, 2000, pp. 223-250.

Gordon, Robert, and Millie Taylor. “Sweeney Todd: From Melodrama to Musical Tragedy.” The
Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies. Oxford University Press, June 02, 2014. Oxford
Handbooks Online. Date Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
<https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195391374.001.0001/oxfo
rdhb-9780195391374-e-021>.

Gordon, Robert, and Robert L. McLaughlin. “Sondheim and Postmodernism.” The Oxford
Handbook of Sondheim Studies. Oxford University Press, June 02, 2014. Oxford Handbooks
Online. Date Accessed Nov. 2019.
<https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195391374.001.0001/oxfo
rdhb-9780195391374-e-002>.

Olson, John. “Company - 25 Years Later.” Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook, edited by Joanne
Gordon, Garland, 2000, pp. 47–68.

Sondheim, Stephen. Company. Theatre Communications Group, Inc, 1996. Print.

Sondheim, Stephen. Follies. Range Road Music Inc., Quartet Music Inc., Rilting Music, Inc. and
Burthen Music Company, 1971. Print.

Sondheim, Stephen. Sweeney Todd. Rilting Music, Inc. and Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.,
1979. Print.

Speidel, Susan E. “Gods of the Theater, Smile on Us:” Elements of the Greek Chorus in the
Musicals of Sondheim, Stephen as Influenced by Rodgers and Hammerstein's “Allegro.”,
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Drew University, Ann Arbor, 2015. ProQuest,

https://search.proquest.com/docview/1680010086?accountid=2909.

Sweeney Todd. By Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, directed by Harold Prince, 1979, New
York, NY. Performance.