SOURCE: Adler, Thomas P. “The Musical Dramas of Stephen Sondheim: Some Critical Approaches.” Journal of Popular Culture 12, no. 3 (winter 1978): 513-25.

In the following essay, Adler utilizes a number of critical approaches, including generic, formalist, and thematic, to assess Sondheim's dramatic philosophy as well as his contribution to American musical theater.

In 1974 Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove collaborated on a musical adaptation of The Frogs, which does for Aristophanes pretty much what they had done for Plautus eight years earlier in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In it, Dionysos believing that we “lack passion”¹ in our lives, journeys to Hades to bring Shaw back to earth; but after hearing a lively competition between him and Shakespeare, Dionysos decides that, instead of Shaw, who “stand[s] for the great abstractions: conscience, virtue, integrity” (TF [The Frogs], p. 116) what the world and theatre most need is...