A Few Thoughts on Stephen Sondheim

Like so many theatre lovers, I was hit last night by the news that Stephen Sondheim passed away. He was 91 years old, so it’s hardly a “taken too soon” situation, but I hope that it was peaceful and without pain. May his loved ones find the solace they need in the days ahead.

So today, I’d like to just spend a little time thinking about Sondheim and his music. This post doesn’t have a specific aim or agenda. I’m just going to start writing, and we’ll see what comes out.

I believe I was around 17 when I first knowingly fell in love with Sondheim’s music (I’d gotten into West Side Story late in grade school, and I knew I loved the lyrics to “America,” but I didn’t know Sondheim’s name.) This was a little late in my informal musical-theatre education, and it was interestingly roundabout. I wasn’t introduced to Sondheim through Into the Woods or Sweeny Todd or A Little Night Music. It was actually Assassins. The Broadway revival cast performed the finale of “Everybody’s Got the Right” at the Tony Awards, and even though it was a brief and far-from-flashy performance, it piqued my interest enough for me to seek out the cast recording. It was an album I listened to repeatedly—there were songs and sections and lines that grabbed me from the start, but others needed to grow on me as I took time to acclimate to the very singular style of the show I was listening to.

This was repeated with the Pacific Overtures revival the following year (and they didn’t even perform at the Tonys—the show had already closed by that point, but just the short montage they aired during the telecast made me want to check it out,) after which I was ready to learn a lot more about this Stephen Sondheim fellow and his music. Through the rest of high school into college, I gradually increased my collection of Sondheim shows, picking up a new album every few months until I’d heard every score, including multiple productions for many of them (I just did a quick count, and I have 32 different Sondheim albums.) I tended to begin with revivals, which starred actors I already loved (ex: Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone in Sweeney Todd, Raúl Esparza in Company,) so I often came to the iconic original casts later in my exploration. I got my hands on some of the filmed productions too, watching with rapt attention as, for instance, Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters broke my heart in the most beautiful way in Sunday in the Park with George. Every few years, I’d find a new splashy tribute concert for his birthday, which I could sometimes catch on PBS.

And of course, I started seeing live productions. The 2005 revival of Sweeney Todd is, regrettably, the only one I’ve seen so far on Broadway, but I’ve seen a number of others in all manner of regional productions (again, some more than once.) I remember sitting in my seat awash in the arresting harmonies of A Little Night Music, the tremendous production of Into the Woods I saw that filtered the fairytales through the lens of different Asian folklore influences, the moment that I realized the opening notes of “Sunday” would always put my heart in my throat. I saw an inventive A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at a delightful hole-in-the-wall theatre and a sumptuous professional mounting of West Side Story. I hope that, at some point in my life, I’ll be able to say I’ve seen them all live.

For me, what makes a Sondheim score so exquisite is the way he was able to blend those intricately-clever rhymes and puzzle-box patter melodies with searingly-beautiful themes and the spare simplicity of honest emotion. I love that Sweeney Todd features both “A Little Priest” and “Johanna,” that A Little Night Music is home to both “Now” and “Every Day a Little Death,” that Pacific Overtures is known for both “Please Hello” and “Pretty Lady.” He wrote marathons of cadence and internal rhyme like, “No dared to query her superior exterior,” and he wrote achingly-simple expressions of emotion like, “There is nothing between us.”

Rest in peace, Mr. Sondheim, and much love and comfort to your family. For more than 50 years, you exemplified the words that you yourself wrote, words I strive to live by as a writer: “Anything you do, / Let it come from you. / Then it will be new. / Give us more to see.”