So Much " More": The Music of Dick Tracy (1990)

By Steve Swayne

By his own pithy description, Stephen Sondheim is "a playwright in song,"1 and some have favorably compared Sondheim’s melopoesis to Wagner's.2 Dramatic characterization occurs in Sondheim's pastiche songs as well as in his nonderivative music, and nowhere is this clearer than in his 1930s-era songs for Warren Beatty's 1990 film Dick Tracy, in which Beatty starred as the title character and Madonna played his nemesis, Breathless Mahoney.