It Took Me Years to Understand the Genius of Stephen Sondheim
Eventually, I began to see that his work reflected the fullness of the human experience
When Stephen Sondheim died last month at 91, I grieved with the rest of the musical theater world. The man behind shows like Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, and Company is surely one of the greatest composers and lyricists of all time. And yet, even as a lifelong fan of musicals, it took me years before I fully understood and appreciated the genius behind Sondheim.
I was well into my twenties when I first noticed what the fuss was about, and it wasn’t until my thirties that I accepted his songbooks as gospel. As a kid, growing up in a musical theater-obsessed household in Miami — far from the lights of Times Square — his shows were not part of our rotation. My Cuban immigrant dad was obsessed with Tap Dance Kid and Dreamgirls — shows with complicated family sagas, big belters, and a little bit of Motown. My mom, a nice Jewish girl from the suburbs of Miami Beach was, as one would expect, a Barbra acolyte — but she was also a sucker for a happy ending.
And so was I. But as I got older, I started to expand my repertoire beyond the Peter Pans and Beauty and the Beasts of my youth. In college, I had the good fortune of making friends with the daughter of a genuine musical theater legend, John Weidman. Our freshman year, we all traipsed from Boston to New York, giddy like school kids on a field trip, to see Contact, his stunning dance musical. I loved the whole experience from start to finish: coming up out of the subway at Lincoln Center with its magical fountain, lit up windows, and twinkling lights, losing myself in a beautiful and compelling show told mostly through movement, and then going backstage and fawning obsequiously over the actors who made that piece of art.
When John invited us all the following year to see Assassins, playing at the ART in Cambridge, I jumped at the chance. It was a show he wrote in the 90s with Stephen Sondheim, whose work at that point I didn’t really know. The title should have tipped me off. The score was haunting, the message both uncomfortable and terrifying. When one of the actors pointed a (fake) gun in my face I nearly walked out of the theater. Who was this Sondheim and where were my tap dancing nuns, damnit?
The older I got and the more I enjoyed the rich diversity that musical theater has to offer, I found that I couldn’t escape Sondheim’s influence. A college production of Into the Woods was wonderful, but, I remarked to my friends, should have ended after the first act, all neatly tied up in a bow. Sure, it was obvious that he was talented. But why didn’t he give us the happy ending we all craved?
Here’s the thing about great works of art — they stay the same, more or less over time, but you change around them. You grow, you develop (or regress); you experience life’s pain and pleasure in deeper ways with each passing year. When you consume a piece of culture, you are bringing to it the sum total of your life’s experiences and the context around you. Each time you see something, your perspective will be different.
Who was this Sondheim and where were my tap dancing nuns, damnit?
My fondness for Sondheim started, ironically, with an incredible production of Merrily We Roll Along, one of his notorious flops that have since been reclaimed with a new appreciation. Merrily is told backward, the story of three friends who start the show in the misery and depression of middle age. As the story unfolds, they blossom as they go back in time. The show ends happily, funny enough, with all the optimism and promise of youth.
At that time, I was somewhere in the middle of the characters’ timelines. Not yet having a mid-life crisis, but old enough that some of the luster of adulthood had worn off. The lyrics were poignant and telling, and the music stayed with me for long after. I went back to see it twice more on its short London run.
And then there was the gender-bent revival of Company which I saw twice with the great Patti Lupone. I had been to a production of Company once, in my twenties. I went with my parents, who were visiting me in New York, and my serious boyfriend — the one with long-term relationship potential. A show about how truly unhappy marriage could make people made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat. I couldn’t wait for it to finish and thought, once I left, that I’d never see it again.
But the 2018 production of Company in London, now on Broadway, turned everything on its head. Yes, it swapped the genders of the main characters, giving some of the tired husband and wife tropes a fresh perspective. But it was more than that. I was different. Married nine years at that point, mostly happily, but certainly more intimately familiar with the lyrics of “Sorry/Grateful”:
You’re sorry/grateful
Regretful/happy
Why look for answers when none occur?
You’ll always be what you always were
Which has nothing to do with/all to do with her.
Sondheim wasn’t married when he wrote those lines, but it didn’t matter. He could peek under the hood of the one thing in our all lives that was the rawest, messiest, most wonderful, and real: our relationships with others.
He saw the world and the people in it — our base desires, our best and worst qualities, the ones that made us perfectly imperfect — and he reflected those back to us through his music.
Musical theater, as an industry, has a reputation for being insular and exclusive. I understand why that is, particularly at the highest levels. But as a genre and a form, it is the opposite — a place for the misfits and the misunderstood to come and be seen. And that’s what Sondheim did for a generation, and will continue to do for many more. He saw the world and the people in it — our base desires, our best and worst qualities, the ones that made us perfectly imperfect — and he reflected those back to us through his music.
I had the chance to meet Sondheim last year (if by meet you mean awkwardly bump into) at the first day of rehearsals for the Classic Stage Company’s production of Assassins, where, thanks to John Weidman, I was shadowing as part of my own mid-life crisis — a year of internships in middle age (which would make a great musical).
For two weeks, just before the start of the pandemic, I sat in on rehearsals, listening to some of his best music sung again and again. As they parsed through each complex note and key change and discussed what the lyrics meant today, acknowledging that we are full of complicated emotions, I came to truly understand the depth of Sondheim’s genius.
This time I didn’t want to run from the room. I wanted to be there to let it wash over me.
Alisha Fernandez Miranda is a Miami-born, Scotland-based writer, entrepreneur and ex-CEO. Her coming-of-middle age story, The 40-Year-Old Intern, will be published by Zibby Books in 2023.
Her writing has been featured in publications including Romper, Business Insider, Moms Don’t Have Time to Write, The Good Trade, Huffington Post and Waterproof, an anthology of essays about Miami and climate change. Say hi to her on Instagram.
