Day 635…
I have a cold. An honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned, pre-pandemic, cold. Just to be sure, I have taken three COVID tests over the last few days and they all have come back negative. It’s really just a cold. Curled up on the couch or the bed with the wind slapping up against the windows, It’s an oddly comforting feeling and not totally unwelcome. It seems like a miserable dear old friend.
Stephen Sondheim died.
I never got to work with him, but I have been adjacent to him - in the same large gathering of people, in the room next door to him, in the elevator with him - countless times. So many times, that it has always felt as if he was always just around the corner and a part of everything that the rest of us were doing.
The first time that I went into New York to see a Broadway show, I took a bus in from New Jersey on a Saturday with my friend Tom. We were just sophomores in high school, and it felt like we were starting out on a huge adventure. We bought standing room tickets for two shows. For the evening we got tickets to see the original cast of Annie for five dollars and in the afternoon, for some reason, we went to a musical review with a cast of British people I’d never heard of, called Side by Side by Sondheim. Those tickets cost three dollars and fifty cents.
Side by Side by Sondheim was a review of music from all of Sondheim’s shows sung by five people in elegant evening wear clustered around a piano. I was fifteen years old and completely enthralled. The songs were funny and sad and went to wholly unexpected places both lyrically and musically. We were standing in the back, but it seemed as if we were sitting in a living room with them. I didn’t want it to stop.
I bought the two-disc vinyl album of the show and played it on our RCA record player incessantly. The way that the words fit in so perfectly with the music seemed miraculous. There were places in the songs where there was almost the physical sensation of gliding down a snowy hill in a sled into a dip at the bottom and then whooshing up the side of the next hill. I can still feel that sensation in the pit of my stomach sometimes when I listen to something he’s written.
After that day in the city, I was hooked on theatre and started going in all the time, often by myself, but sometimes with Tom again. I got standing room, but I also discovered the half-price ticket booth. Tom taught me how to second act shows - we’d casually stroll into a theatre at intermission and find empty seats at the back. If you could find a playbill from the show before you went in, and carry it, all the better. Over the years, ushers have caught on. It’s almost impossible to do that now.
The first full show of Sondheim’s that I saw was Sweeny Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It opened when I was seventeen. I saw it three times. I can still feel the sound of the factory whistle they used in my chest. I didn’t see his next show, Merrily We Roll Along because it didn’t last long enough, but the one that came after that, Sunday in the Park with George, was a kind of miracle.
Sunday in the Park with George is a musical about creativity. It is about the act of making something. I saw Sunday three times, too, and, to this day, remains my favorite musical of all time. In it, the painter George Seurat sings about what happens to him while he paints:
…How you have to finish the hat
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window while you finish the hat…
…Coming from the hat, studying the hat
Entering the world of the hat
Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window
Back to this one from that…
…Starting on a hat, finishing a hat
Look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat…
Nothing encapsulates the feeling of artistic creation better or more simply than those last two lines. It doesn’t matter whether you are talking about making a pie, a sweater, a book, or a painting a hat, something new is in the world because it came into your mind and moved through you and became something concrete.
…Look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat…
Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, and Patti LuPone, who I have had the enormous pleasure of working with over the years, devote large parts of their concerts to Stephen Sondheim’s work. All three of them sing Being Alive from Company, and all three of them sing it differently. It means something particularly strong to each of them and when they sing that song it takes them each to different places. Watching Bernadette sing Send in the Clowns in the revival of A Little Night Music or Patti sing The Ladies Who Lunch in the current revival of Company, is a master class in performance for anyone who is hungry to learn. His songs, while seemingly perfect, include enough space for an individual to bring in their own experiences to complete them. They aren’t truly finished until they are fully inhabited by the person performing them.
The original production of his musical, Assassins, was rehearsed at the old Manhattan Theatre Club rehearsal studios on 16th Street. I was working on something else down there, but I spent more time than I should have with my ear to their door, listening. I remember a thrilling song that the character of Squeaky Fromme sang that I listened to several times through that door, but when I finally saw the show, it had been cut.
When we did the revival of Gypsy with Bernadette, Sondheim was around sporadically. The only time I remember him being in the room was when they were rehearsing Rose’s Turn, and they did it privately without the rest of us. I would have given anything to have been in that room with them listening to him talk about the number.
Stephen Sondheim is one of the artists that have truly inspired me and guided me even without him knowing who I am. There was always the feeling that something new and amazing was going to come out of him. He was reportedly working on a new show at the time of his death, so maybe we will see some of it. Now, he’s passed and we, or I should say, I, am feeling a bit like our general is gone.
This pandemic has changed my relationship to my working life in ways that I still don’t fully understand. I haven’t quite figured out where I’m going yet. I’ve enjoyed the theatrical projects that I’ve worked on over the last six months, but I have also enjoyed doing what I am doing now, sitting on the couch with the cat, and writing. The editing and recording and proof-reading of all that I wrote over the shut down is exciting. I am very much working on the hat. My hat.
…Look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat…
It may not lead anywhere at all, but I am happy to be on the journey. Whatever life has ahead, though, it’s going to unfold without Stephen Sondheim out there, somewhere. As I wonder what I really want to DO and what this post-pandemic life should BE, all I can hear is the song Move On, from Sunday in the Park with George. I’m not going to quote it because it’s just too on the money. Yes, he will live on through his music and, truthfully, that’s only how I know him - through his music. I just want more of it. I just want him to write songs that answer all the questions that I have. In truth, he’s already answered so many of my questions that I guess it’s time for me to start answering them myself.
…Look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat…
You certainly did.
Thank you.
RIP Stephen Sondheim.
Loved, loved, loved this. Thank you!
😭 Heartbreaking loss. There’s great articles in the NYT today but I assume you’ve seen them. Feel better my friend- at least it’s just a cold☺️ I’m working on gaining enough confidence to feel comfortable getting out to shows. Worried about accessibility and crowds New hip doing well- other one going to need same.