Sondheim to the rescue

Life lessons from a dead music man.

There’s only so much miserable news a person can take — I think you know what I’m talking about here — and so I’ve been shoring myself up with the arts. A huge and gorgeous Wayne Thiebaud show at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor. A Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA. Last month: Patti LuPone at UC Berkeley and Here There Are Blueberries at Berkeley Rep. This month: Sinners at my local movie palace, the Grand Lake Theater; August Wilson’s Two Trains Running at ACT; and a delightful one-woman show, Pulp and Prejudice: A Defense of Romance Novels — a benefit for Oakland’s Chapter 510 youth writing center — by my new friend Jenny Noa.

And, maybe best of all, Sondheim.

How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, by Richard Schoch

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021, at 91,¹ but he lives on in a new book, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, by Richard Schoch, an American professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast. Disregard the self-help-y title: This is a rich, thoughtful book, full of insights about Sondheim’s music, lyrics, and themes.

Each chapter explores a different Sondheim musical, from Gypsy (“How to Be Who You Are”) to A Little Night Music (“How to Handle Your Regrets”) to Assassins (“How to Let the Darkness In,” never more relevant than right now).²

When I was about halfway through the book I discovered, to my surprise and delight, The Sondheim Hub right here on Substack. Sign up to receive an essay and an interview in your inbox each week. Paid subscribers get a crossword, too! (Stephen Sondheim loved puzzles of all kinds.)

Last November the Sondheim Hub published an excerpt from How Sondheim Can Change Your Life and a conversation with the author. Here’s author Richard Schoch in a passage from that conversation:

I quote an Oscar Hammerstein lyric at various points throughout the book, which is also a song title: “The song is you.” That’s the nub of my argument. Yes, there are characters on stage, but ultimately, the song and its lesson, its insight, its meaning, must be returned to the audience. The song is you. If the song is not ultimately about the audience, then really there’s no point to it.

I don’t know whether art will save us, but I do know that art is worth saving. Even now. Especially now.

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But wait, there’s more!

If I were in London right now — should I go to London? would someone like to pick up the tab? — I’d be seeing the new production of Sondheim’s final work, Here We Are, inspired by the films of Luis Buñuel. It’s playing at London’s National Theatre through June 28, 2025, with a very starry cast that includes Rory Kinnear, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski, and Martha Plimpton. You can listen to the original cast recording in its entirety. And you can watch a short video shot during the first week of rehearsals. I’m really sorry I missed the show’s Off Broadway run in 2023.

While I’m waiting for competitive offers to send me on that London junket, I’ll send up a plea: Dear National Theatre, please include Here We Are in the NTLive screening series³ or, failing that, NT at Home.

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One last recommendation: The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, Lonny Price’s 2016 documentary about Sondheim’s disastrous 1981 flop Merrily We Roll Along and its unexpectedly successful afterlife, is viewable for a fee on various streaming platforms and also on the free public-library service Kanopy. (Thank you, Los Angeles Public Library!)

1. I’m a big Sondheim nerd — maybe you’ve noticed? — so of course I published a tribute.

2. I loved Sondheim’s musicals even before I was old enough, or informed enough, to know who’d written them. I still haven’t seen everything he wrote, but everything I have seen — Gypsy, West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Assassins, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods — I’ve seen multiple times, in productions ranging from Broadway-level to community theater. I’ve also read both volumes of his collected and annotated lyrics, Finishing the Hat (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat (2011). The book titles come from Sunday in the Park with George, which I still haven’t seen; a film of the original production is available on YouTube, so there’s still hope for me.

3. The most recent NTLive show I attended was Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan playing all of the Peter Sellers roles from the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film. It was terrifically good and creepily timely.