COLUMN
by Clair Hughes Stephen Sondheim's musical 'Sunday In The Park With George', 2006
Sondheim’s Hats
Clair Hughes is an independent scholar. She previously held the position of Professor of English and American Literature at the International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Hats (2017), Dressed in Fiction (2005) and Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001)
In Stephen Sondheim’s musical of 1970, Company, socialite Joanne shakily raises her glass to toast “The Ladies Who Lunch”, “grim” after a morning choosing hats. Turning to the audience, she demands: “Does anyone still wear a HAT?” Sondheim began writing for the musical theatre in the late 1950s, introducing darker tones into what had been a gorgeously costumed and hatted escapist entertainment. Company has no plot but records the disintegrating relationships of contemporary middle- aged, middle-class couples. Joanne ridicules women trapped in meaningless, obsolete rituals – like choosing hats? Once mandatory items of dress, hats had in fact been declining since the 1950s: in parallel, coincidentally, with the darkening mood of musicals. Joanne, tipsily mocking “girls who stay smart”, who “follow the rules”, concludes, however, by demanding we “toast” this “invincible bunch”. Maybe such rituals are not so meaningless nor hats so absurd. Hats still fascinate us: they are certainly
important historically. Bowler hats, for example, are now almost costume. But for Japan in 1853, when American gunboat diplomacy threatened its isolation, it symbolised the West’s commercial power. Kayama, a government official and central character in Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures (which tells the story of Japan’s westernisation), is told to deal with the foreigners. Consequently, he begins to adopt Western ways. As the musical moves to its harsh
conclusion, Kayama reflects on his life. “It’s called a bowler hat,” he says, holding one up. He knows to “pour the milk before the tea”, to drink the wine “they send” and
62 | the hat magazine #97
smoke cigars; he had a wife but left her. And now, he asks, “Where is my bowler hat?” That fool, the Dutch ambassador, “wears a bowler hat”. One must “accommodate the times”, he concludes. Pacific Overtures was written in 1976, when Japan began to dominate Western markets. And the ‘Bowler Hat’ song delivers the musical’s central theme: submission to the bowler hat and ‘accommodation’ to the times come with personal and cultural costs. By 1984, when Sondheim wrote the
musical Sunday In The Park With George, hats might be protective, celebratory or just fun, but were not obligatory. If no longer part of daily life, designer hats on the other hand had acquired the status of artworks, and milliners were regarded as artists. In the song ‘Finishing the Hat’, the painter Georges Seurat, battles with La Grande Jatte, a painting he worked on between 1884 and 1886, a time when hats were at their height in all senses. The song records his torment, struggling to reconcile the demands of art with life and love: the girl who left him because she wouldn’t wait for him to “finish the hat”. Projected as backdrop to the stage performance, the painting depicts Parisians in their Sunday best on the banks of the Seine. Although painted in Seurat’s formalised, innovative technique of juxtaposed dots of colour, the type and style of every hat is at once identifiable. “Dizzy” from “studying the hat, entering the world of the hat”, Seurat finally succeeds – “Look, I made a hat /Where there never was a hat.” Like a game of Chinese boxes, Sondheim
writes a lyric about the hat, for the actor who, as Seurat, recalls the hat so painfully painted, which was the creation of the hatter or milliner who fashioned the hat “where there was never a hat”. “Does anyone still wear a HAT?” Sondheim asked in 1970. Hats may be admired, adopted, rejected or ridiculed, but somehow or other Sondheim’s hats proclaim they are still here – and invincible.
Photo: Alamy
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