Sondheim Supplement #4
Welcome to the latest Sondheim Supplement, our weekly newsletter exclusively for paid subscribers to The Sondheim Hub. This week, a Company-themed crossword, more from our conversation with Alexa Lopez, a lyric of the week from Pacific Overtures, our survey of This Week in Sondheim, and a look back at our essay on “A Wooden Ring” from A Little Night Music. Enjoy!
Lyric of the Week
They call them spectacles
I drink much wine
I take imported pills
I have a house up in the hills
I’ve hired British architects to redesign
One must accommodate the times
As one lives them
One must remember that
“A Bowler Hat” is Pacific Overtures’ masterful depiction of cultural transformation through personal change. Throughout the number, we watch Kayama, once a minor samurai, gradually adopt Western ways over several years. The number’s genius lies in its evolving repetitions: what begins with Kayama tentatively describing foreign objects (“It’s called a bowler hat”) evolves into confident ownership of Western culture, culminating in this final passage. Sondheim’s lyrical structure mirrors the slow unraveling of tradition, threading Kayama’s journey through subtle shifts in tone and perspective that reflect both adaptation and loss.
In these closing lines, Sondheim brilliantly captures both the apex and the tragedy of Kayama’s transformation. Gone is the hesitant voice that needed to name and explain foreign objects—now he speaks with the casual authority of someone fully immersed in Western ways. The progression from “I take imported pills” to “I’ve hired British architects” charts a deepening Western influence, moving from the passive consumption of foreign goods to the active reshaping of his physical world in a British image. Each step signifies not just adoption but an escalating commitment to a new identity, one that elevates him socially yet distances him from his roots. The mention of “spectacles” and “wine” earlier in the passage hints at a performative quality—Kayama sees and savors the West, but through a lens that obscures his past.
But it’s the final lines that cut deepest: “One must accommodate the times / As one lives them / One must remember that.” The shift from the personal “I” to the impersonal “one” suggests both Kayama’s complete assimilation and his self-justification—he’s no longer merely adapting to Western ways but philosophically defending the abandonment of his cultural identity. This universality in “one” implies a resigned acceptance, as if such transformation is an inevitable law of progress. Yet the repetition of “one must” carries a haunting weight—less a confident assertion than a mantra to quiet his unease. It’s a moment of profound irony: in becoming most Western, he has also become most alienated from himself, his samurai heritage now a faint echo beneath the bowler hat’s brim.
The Sondheim Hub Crossword
This week’s subscriber-only crossword is Company-themed! Here it is: