Developer Insights – Stories & Analogies

Yesterday was Stephen Sondheim‘s 80th birthday. Last fall I was able to catch him in Stephen Sondheim: A Life in the Theater in Santa Rosa. He’s got a large collection of anecdotes, polished through repetition, but still interesting. For some of the audience, most of the stories were new. But even the Sondheim faithful learned new things. One item that struck me was his comment about writing for a specific performer and that performer’s strengths and weaknesses. I came home and found the story in an online interview.

Stephen Sondheim Interview — Academy of Achievement

Stephen Sondheim: What happens is, when you’re out of town or… yeah, out of town is what it amounts to — although that one was written during rehearsals — you know your cast well and you know their strengths and weaknesses, and you can start writing for them. Just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors. And I’ve said it with heavy humor, that I really don’t want to write a score until the whole show is cast and staged, because… that’s why so many good songs get written out of town, and written fast, because you know exactly what’s missing, you know exactly what has to work or happen, you know exactly who you’re writing for, you know exactly what the audience is starting to feel. And so the more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write, and when you’re out of town and you’re restricted by all those factors, it’s much easier to write them than when you just have a tabula rasa and say, “Gee, we’ve got to have a love song here.” You know, it’s not the same thing.

Q: You said “Send In The Clowns” was written during rehearsal, can you tell us how that came about?

Stephen Sondheim: We hired Glynis Johns to play the lead, though she had a nice little silvery voice. But I’d put all the vocal weight of the show on the other characters because we needed somebody who was glamorous, charming and could play light comedy, and pretty, and to find that in combination with a good voice is very unlikely, but she had all the right qualities and a nice little voice. So I didn’t write much for her and I didn’t write anything in the second act. And the big scene between her and her ex-lover, I had started on a song for him because it’s his scene, and Hal Prince, who directed it, said he thought that the second act needed a song for her. And this was the scene to do it in. And so he directed the scene in such a way that even though the dramatic thrust comes from the man’s monologue, and she just sits there and reacts, he directed it so you could feel the weight going to her reaction rather than his action. And I went down and saw it and it seemed very clear what was needed, and so that made it very easy to write. And then I wrote it for her voice, because she couldn’t sustain notes. Wasn’t that kind of singing voice. So I knew I had to write things in short phrases, and that led to questions, and so again, I wouldn’t have written a song so quickly if I hadn’t known the actress.

So how does this relate to software development?

• Does “the more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write.” apply to writing software?
• Compare the constraints and capabilities provided by a software platform, hardware, OS, tools, SDKs, with the constraints and capabilities of a theatre and a cast.
• Compare writing a show for high school students to writing a show for Broadway. Compare writing software for your family to use to writing software that will be deployed globally across a variety of platforms, current and future?
• Is it easier to make incremental improvements and adjustments to an existing product or to start from scratch?
• Sondheim talks about the situation where the writer is bringing a huge amount of knowledge and talent to the situation. What about the situation where you don’t have that knowledge, where you are brought in to be a firefighter?