You can always tell when something is new by how violently it is attacked by the critics," says Stephen Sondheim, a bearded, not-quite-chubby bachelor. He sits in the luxurious den of his five-story Manhattan brownstone sipping vodka, chain-smoking and brooding about what he regards as the appalling lack of perception which caused some critics to roast Pacific Overtures. It is his opulent, all-male, Kabukiesque musical portrait of Commodore Perry's rapacious romp in Japan that last week won 10 Tony nominations.

Bad notices are hardly new to the 46-year-old composer-lyricist, or to Hal Prince, who has adventurously produced, directed and defended their last four collaborations.

The battle lines were drawn in 1970 with Company, their first effort at changing the tune and tone, the shape and substance of the American musical. Conservative viewers hissed this unsentimental view of the savage games married people play, complaining that it was misogynistic and musically strident. But Company was also applauded as a subtly melodic salute to new-fashioned, nerve-jangling love and marriage.

There were even a few bold reviewers who claimed that Sondheim and Prince had invented a whole new art form—the "concept musical," in which a weighty subject, such as marriage, is scrutinized from every intellectual, emotional and musical angle.

The critical storms continued with the brash and mournful Follies, and then again with the sardonic A Little Night Music. And now, to some, Pacific Overtures is a mush-minded, perversely unmelodic desecration of Asian tradition. To others, it's a soaring musical excursion into uncharted theatrical regions.

Japan's native Kabuki theater still excludes women from its stage. To the dismay of many theatergoers, Pacific Overtures has brought this quaint custom to Broadway (with the brief exception of the perky beauties who pop up in the show's surprisingly mod and zingy finale).

"I don't have any feelings against actors playing female roles," says the Japanese actor Mako, who plays four roles in the show—all of them male. "That is what theater is all about, taking on other identities. But, emotionally, I resent it. Oftentimes, Asian-American actresses are looked upon as exotic furnishings, and this is one time when they would have had a chance to perform in something meaningful."

The ritualistic, womanless world of Pacific Overtures seems oceans away from the rowdy There Is Nothing Like a Dame sentiments of South Pacific. Yet Oscar Hammerstein was one of Sondheim's first champions—and one of his harshest and most helpful critics. Sondheim discovered this early on when he asked for an opinion on By George, a show for which he had written music, lyrics and book.

"Oscar criticized it in great depth," Sondheim recalls. "He pointed out everything that was wrong—the characters weren't developed, the scenes weren't real, the songs had no beginning, middle and end. And he did not for one second take into account that this was a high school production and I was only 15 years old."

Sondheim had been a dutiful piano student when he was 7 or 8. ("It was the sort of thing a nice Jewish boy did, and my parents used to bring me out and show me off.") Only after his mother divorced Herbert Sondheim, a prominent New York dress manufacturer, and settled down on a farm in Bucks County, Pa. did Steve really fall in love with music—mainly because their neighbors were the Hammersteins. "Oscar was one of the most remarkable men I've ever met—generous, witty and sharp-tongued, and it was he who encouraged my interest in music and the theater."

For such a young boy, Sondheim had a remarkably sophisticated view of the breakup of his parents' marriage. "I was very sad, but I don't think I was confused by it. My father explained it to me very carefully. I was an introverted child, but not a lonely one. I loved school and had a good time, and during the summers I stayed with the Hammersteins. I spent most of my time raising rabbits with Jamie Hammerstein [Oscar's son] and sneaking onto a nearby golf course to play a quick two or three holes."

"My father was a patriarchal figure," recalls Jamie Hammerstein, today an accomplished stage director. "Stevie spent four summers with our family, and I guess you could say he was semi-adopted. He was always a bright kid, lots of fun and a little overcompetitive. He wanted to write music, to write and direct plays, and even to act. Stevie wanted to be Noël Coward."

Noël Coward he never became. But it certainly is arguable that his tender-sharp, wickedly rhyming words—beginning with West Side Story, when he was 27, and running through Gypsy and Do I Hear a Waltz?—can hold their own with those of the modern masters, from Coward to Hammerstein.

There is less agreement over the shows for which he contributed both words and music—like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Anyone Can Whistle and all of the Prince collaborations. The feeling among a few influential critics is that talented lyricist Sondheim is tone-deaf, sadly incapable of penning a tune anyone can whistle, much less hum. This verdict so far seems unaltered by the fact that the haunting Send In the Clowns last month won a Grammy as the song of the year.(Although it was introduced three years ago in A Little Night Music, the Grammy voters were enthralled by Judy Collins' 1975 recording. Perhaps by the time Elizabeth Taylor warbles it in the movie, Sondheim will have convinced critics that he can write a catchy tune.)

"Steve writes the most beautifully melodic lines," says Alexis Smith, the 1940s movie queen who startled Broadway with her singing and dancing in Follies. "But his songs are never simple, which is the reason you don't hum them on your way out of the theater."

Dorothy Collins, former Hit Parade sweetheart and Alexis' rival in Follies, gasps when she hears that some colleagues are so tin-eared they can't hear the melody in Sondheim. "They can't be singers if they say that!"

"Everything is hummable," says Sondheim himself, a bit piqued. "When they say my music is not, they're really saying it is not reminiscent of something else. Hummable is a meaningless word, and so is melodic. If a tune is heard often enough, it becomes hummable. The hits from shows are the tunes that are played four or five times during the course of the evening. The reprises. Well, I don't like to use reprises, because the emotional situations themselves do not recur. I've always thought reprises were fake."

Naturally, Hal Prince concurs. "Hal and I see things exactly alike in the large areas and in detail," Sondheim says. "Where we disagree is the middle ground, and that makes for the proper kind of abrasion so that we're challenging each other's ideas all the time. There are always a couple of moments with every show, moments when we get very growly with each other, when I'm not satisfied or he's not. There's a joke, a particular lyric—I won't tell you which one—that Hal absolutely hates, and it's still in Pacific Overtures. I just couldn't improve it."

Sondheim is quick to object when labeled "King of the Concept Musical." "When they say a show is a concept show, what they really mean is that it is some kind of presentational approach—that it's all done in red, or it's all done with mirrors, or it's all a metaphor for...war, or whatever. The idea of 'concept' comes from wanting to reduce things to simplicities.

" 'Concept' is this decade's vogue word, just as 'integrated' was the vogue theatrical word of the '40s, referring to an approach in which a story is told and characters are advanced through song. The watershed, the landmark musical was indisputably Oklahoma! Everything that followed can be seen as a development of it—either a rejection or a carrying on. Me, I'm carrying it on, making variations.

"My main goal is to tell a story and, if I tell that story well, tell it with resonance, the inferences to be drawn will take care of themselves."

Sondheim gets up, stubs out a cigarette and refills his glass with vodka.

What should the audience feel at the end of Pacific Overtures?

"I would like them to have a sense of exhilaration, but also of thoughtful-ness. I want them to consider what's happened in the world, how time is catching us at the throat, how we are being rushed into careless and thoughtless decisions, as a government and as a people.

"We Americans have a special tendency to ignore history. We remember only what is pleasant. We must have a sense of the past. Without it, the present is meaningless and stupid."

Do audiences get the message?

"Half of the people I've talked with say yes, and half say no," sighs Sondheim, gazing moodily into his drink. "Hal and I have had that trouble with all our shows. I never know if it's our fault—or theirs."

As voluble as he can be on his profession, Sondheim becomes the original Mister Mum if the conversation edges toward his private life. "I am still in analysis," he grudgingly acknowledges, "but talking about that is like talking about your operation. As for my views on marriage, I feel any relationship with one person is increasingly difficult these days, as the world shrinks and we are pushed and pushed by time.

"Yet it's more important than ever before to make personal contact. You could say that my life-style is very ordinary, very simple and unglamorous. I'm neither a party-goer nor a hermit.

"As the years go by, I find that I want to spend more and more time with fewer and fewer friends—people like Lennie and Felicia Bernstein, Hal and Judy Prince, Tony and Berry Perkins and Arthur Laurents.

"The people I like are the people who are in touch with themselves and who are not smug. People who are troubled and do something about their trouble—not wallow in it."

Sondheim's ingenuity at thinking up clever games has been widely noted over the years. The subject now pains him. "Please don't say we spend all our time playing games together. I get so bored reading about that. I used to invent games, but I don't anymore. And I don't play them. Now I use them mainly for wall decorations."

Actor Tony Perkins is a graduate game player who collaborated with Sondheim on the screenplay of the mystifying movie The Last of Sheila. They will do an encore on The Chorus Girl Murder Mystery (to be directed by another friend, Michael Bennett). "I find Steve absolutely compatible," Perkins says. "He has a mordant sense of humor, but it's never more wounding than it is funny. I particularly like Steve when he tries to stop smoking. That always brings out every acerbic crack that's in him."