ABSTRACT
Beginning with Company, Stephen Sondheim's musicals have been centrally concerned with how musical numbers in a show manage time. Paradoxically, however, there is a disconcerting trade-off that accompanies both the shifts between Japanese and "Western" temporal sensibilities and the use of documentary vaudeville as the main vehicle to carry the historical narrative. Documentary vaudeville is in abstract terms an ideal mode for Sondheim's purpose, since it stands between more conventional Broadway and Kabuki, the principal Japanese theatrical model for the show. In structural terms, the three "Western" numbers perform the critical function of establishing one side of the show's operative boundaries, but in quite different ways. Yet, despite the tragic undertow of "Poems," its expressed hopefulness cannot simply be put aside as a phantom. One may well query Sondheim's temporal differentiation between East and West. A sense of timelessness and suspension is after all what the West has always found in the East.
