Sondheim: A Giant In The Sky
By Kate O’Flanagan
The most beloved LP in my collection is the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. The gatefold is delicate, the corners scuffed, it has a skip around two minutes into the A-side that I have to physically move the needle to get past. I bought it online almost a year ago from an anonymous independent seller in Germany, after having it bookmarked for months, and probably paid too much for it. In the end, it was an impulse buy. I'd stayed up too late working my way through Sondheim's body of work on Spotify and clicked through the purchase before I could think properly about it. Stephen Sondheim was dead, and I needed a tangible way to honour him.
The common perception of musical theatre is that of pure escapist, pleasant, apolitical subjects with feel-good musical numbers that tie up the narrative in a neat little bow. As a fervent defender of the genre, I have to reject that definition. But, I wouldn't be able to without Stephen Sondheim. A composer and lyricist, Sondheim cracked musical theatre wide open from the inside and revolutionised the artform with his clever, intelligent rhymes, witty wordplay, and songs that dove into the messy, complicated aspects of being alive, from loss and deception, to hope and longing, love,sex,desire, loneliness and ambition. Sondheim used the vehicle of musical theatre to tackle the human condition and changed the game.
Sondheim's groundbreaking Company is a concept musical lacking a concrete plot that tackles questions of marriage and loneliness and struggling to connect with people. Musicals, in Sondheim's own words, "would always lead to the so-called happy ending." In a wholesale rejection of this convention, Sondheim embraced ambivalence. Not only that, he took the musical as a storytelling medium seriously and redefined the types of stories you could tell on stage. A musical about the Westernization of Japan, a musical about what happens after you get everything you want, a musical about a murderous barber and cannibalism, a musical about sacrificing your artistic integrity, a musical inspired by a painting — not every one of Sondheim's shows was a hit, but each one was a challenge to the status quo, even after the status quo had been defined by him, and he pushed the artform forward as a result.
It's hard to explain the extraordinary talent Sondheim possessed and the impact he had. He was musical theatre's answer to Shakespeare. Once you know where to look, you can see his influence everywhere in the world of theatre, and beyond. Rian Johnson has named The Last of Sheila, the murder-mystery film written by Sondheim and his long-term partner Anthony Perkins as a direct influence on his sequel to Knives Out.
When he wasn't changing the trajectory of an entire medium, Sondheim was a prolific letter writer. In the wake of his death, @sondheimletters on Instagram began documenting the hundreds of letters Sondheim wrote to fans and colleagues. It is a pure joy to read the personal correspondence and encouraging words that span over half a century, right up until his death. Written on a typewriter on his own personal stationary, he responded to fan questions about songs and songwriting, agreed to help with homework assignments, read college theses, and profusely thanked people for their compliments. He even wrote a letter as his beloved poodles, Addie and Willie, complete with a watercolour paw print in place of his usual signature.
He was in a league of his own, a titan of musical theatre. He did not have to respond so thoughtfully, or at all, to his fans, to up-and-coming and as-yet-unknown writers and composers. He could have pulled the drawbridge up behind him having remade the artform of musical theatre in his image. He didn’t. He cared, deeply, about the state of the art. Behind the scenes and with little fanfare, Sondheim spent his life quietly, faithfully, encouraging and nurturing the generations of creatives who came after him. He spent his last day of theatre going, two days before he died, in the audience for a pair of form-bending documentary plays that were about to close due to financial struggles. While to many theatre fans he was the be-all and end-all, Sondheim delighted in broadening his theatre horizons. He showed up for new work, seeking out those that were offbeat and obscure, that challenged conventional definitions of a play or musical – just as his own work had done.
“I am sorry I didn’t have any,” Sondheim said, in a 1988 profile for the television show 60 Minutes, when asked if he would have liked to have children, “But art is the other way of having children. I believe that firmly.” In that case, Sondheim had more children than he could count. Not just creatives he directly inspired, but everyone his music touched.
I discovered Sondheim at thirteen years old. I can track my teenage years through what show of his I was listening to obsessively, from Into the Woods at thirteen to Sunday in the Park with George at eighteen. His shows are a key component of my own personal canon. The art that made me, pierced me through the heart, and shook up my ideas of what it means to be a person; of what art can do, or be, or look like. The bottom fell out of the world, for a moment, when I learned of his death.
He died peacefully at home at ninety-one years of age, having lived a long, accomplished, illustrious life. And it still felt a little bit cruel. It still does. To a thirteen year old in the south of Ireland, Stephen Sondheim and his music were magic. His characters and songs carried me through my teenage years, and continue to carry me through my young adulthood. Snippets of his lyrics come to me and buoy me through times of trouble, or when I'm looking for inspiration, or simply because they are incredibly hummable. The emotions contained in his shows were big and they've validated my big, messy, contradictory feelings for almost a decade.
To steal a turn of phrase from another eulogy by another musician who would shake my world up: Stephen Sondheim was too big to die.
Sondheim belongs to history now. He has entered the pantheon of luminaries who lit up the world while they lived and left it a little brighter. He and his work are taught, and will continue to be taught, in institutes of learning across the world. The facts of his life will be remembered and retold and written about in historical terms. His story is inextricable from the story of art in the 20th century, from the story of musical theatre. When we talk about what defines a musical, the technicalities of what makes a musical work, Sondheim will always be part of that conversation.
But his story belongs to the witnesses, too. The story of Stephen Sondheim is in all the people who loved him but never knew him, in the typeface he replied to every letter with, in the act of me moving the needle two minutes into the A-side, so that it doesn't skip.