Sondheim's Sound, in the Key of 'Sorry-Grateful'

If you like Stephen Sondheim musicals, pause for a moment and ask yourself why. Is it for the witty lyrics? The bittersweet stories?

You're lucky if it's not for the music.

Sondheim's scores have been the most vulnerable element in recent years. Directors don't seem truly interested in his music, perhaps fearing audiences aren't either. Directors clearly prefer story.

Note the unharmonious trend in four big treatments of Sondheim musicals in recent years:

· In John Doyle's 2005 "Sweeney Todd" on Broadway, actors doubled as musicians, toting their instruments with them on the stage. Doyle set the show in an insane asylum, thus making nutty sense of the doubling.

· Doyle again had performers play their own instruments in his similarly high-concept 2006 Broadway staging of "Company," in which the only character not playing an instrument was Bobby, the single man in a sea of married friends. (Parading in circles around the set, the cast at times sounded like an amateur marching band.) Ready at last for some sort of emotional connection, Bobby played piano for the climax, "Being Alive."

· Tim Burton's 2007 film of "Sweeney Todd" was sumptuously scored and creepily envisioned but pitiably sung, especially by a cadaverous Helena Bonham Carter as the usually (and crucially) life-affirming Mrs. Lovett.