Time and Time Again

This chapter explores Sondheim’s treatment of time throughout his musicals, focusing on the works in which time and memory are central topics and in which presentation of narrative time is anything but conventional and linear. Company may be understood as distending one specific moment in time, Merrily We Roll Along moves backward through time, Pacific Overtures fast-forwards many decades at the end, and past and present appear to coexist in Follies. The chapter discusses the difference between (linear) plot and situation and how Sondheim's scores for these and other shows moved musical theater forward by focusing on the latter. The interpretive work presented reveals that our relation to time is a consistent philosophical topic in Sondheim’s oeuvre.