An ambitious dissertation that does not convince.

I’d thought that an erudite treatise on Sondheim’s oeuvre might cheer me. Revisiting the music certainly did. Listening to a stack of brilliant original cast recordings is a reason for joy, and listening to familiar ones with a deeper appreciation of context, even more so. But McLaughlin contorts meaning to find connecting threads that strain credibility. Sometimes there is simply no “there” there, genius can exist on a purely emotional level, and it can be argued that a finite limit exists to the number of times one can hear the word “epistemological” in an essay.