It’s so strange to think that Stephen Sondheim is no longer on this earth when the earth has so often felt like simply a platform for his work to exist. Everything that happens and everywhere I go and every word that every person says reminds me of some truth he shared with the world that we were lucky enough to hear and understand and connect with emotionally. No one was more honest about the complexities of human emotion and the depths of human frailty, and applying that honesty to musical theatre elevated it as an art form and reinforced that it’s deserving of respect. Look at what musical theatre can achieve, he said. Look at how we need musical theatre to truly express our humanity. That’s why we love him so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not foolish enough to think that I can eulogize him better than others have (except the Guardian of course) or discuss the brilliance of his works in detail like theatre historians. I just wanted to take a few minutes to think about how important his creations are to me personally. Unfortunately I’m not able to do what everyone loves doing (and you can’t really fault them for doing it), which is to share a photo of me and the deceased, because I never had the opportunity to meet him. While part of me is of course sorry that that will never happen, part of me is glad because I can go on imagining him as more than an ordinary man. For me and for most of us who love theatre, he was this sort of holy figure, whose genius necessitated that he must be more than human, despite understanding and expressing humanity on such unparalleled levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This past weekend, I was without power and cell service for a few days due to the storm, and while that experience was one of the worst, it let me have a few extra days of believing I actually shared a planet with him, this great figure. That we existed in the same era and in the same universe is a miracle to me, and not just because it’s Chanukah and he was Jewish and I’m primed to be thinking all miracley anyway. He would be the last person to think of himself in such laudatory terms as we all do, as he was just a man (a NJB really), but his genius made him seem superhuman, despite that very genius being grounded in humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a personal level, his works form important touchstones for so many parts of my life. One of my earliest memories is watching the PBS airing of ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ over and over with my mom. She had taped it (VHS baby) so she would put it on frequently for years after. I remember it was even on when she was drying her hair one morning, and I was just staring at the small screen. Mandy Patinkin quickly became my mom’s favorite non-family (maybe even including family who knows) person in the world, and I loved everything about it, this woman in the dress with the poofy butt (who know one day I would work with her) and the colors and all these characters and above all the sound of this perfect music that I was too young to understand but knew was beautiful and important. As a teenager, I was obsessed with the dark twists of ‘Into the Woods’ and the lessons it taught about consequences and the ramifications of wishes, especially as someone raised on Disney princesses. But, I was also raised on ‘West Side Story’ and with it my dad’s favorite story of his single line: ‘COPS!’ And I’m not saying I married a man because he appreciates and loves how insanely ingenious ‘Assassins’ is but it’s not not<\/em> why. I can’t imagine what life looks like without his shows helping us understand it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It doesn’t matter that he was 91 or that we’ve been fearing this moment since his big 80th celebration. Genius of that sort is rare and now we are without his. But we have his work, his brilliant creations, each of them special and so many of them continually surprising in their truth and beauty. We are so lucky that his works keep getting produced and we can keep experiencing them, and in new ways, even if we will never get that fabled next show from him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His genius was in peeling away layers to reveal raw human truths that seem so simple and clear but are so complicated, and doing that to incredible music. He seemed to so often be drawn to extremely niche situations for his settings — not e.g. a basic family drama that everyone could relate to but instead a group of aging former performers confronting their pasts in a closing dilapidated theatre, or a beloved painting brought to life through the backstory of its creator and muse, or a group of historical assassins detailing their exploits and commenting on the current state of politics (current at any time, another aspect of his brilliance). Even the situations that don’t seem too rare or extreme, like the single man deliberating his singledom, were novel and innovative at the time. Instead of writing characters as every day people we would immediately relate to, he made it so we related to people we didn’t automatically see ourselves in. We weren’t always reflected outwardly but we would soon feel emotionally connected and reflected due to the honesty and depth of his words and how the music enhanced their meaning. He found emotional truths in this nuance and showed them so clearly that the shadows seemed like daybreak. His legacy for me is how he let audiences easily see themselves in characters that aren’t clearly similar to them, or see truth in situations that don’t look like their normal lives, which more easily lets people connect with those different from them in real life. I believe he did this, and since being able to connect in those ways increases empathy, with his art he thus made the world a better place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When loved ones die, Jewish people say may their memory be a blessing. To remember Stephen Sondheim is to remember his genius and how that genius manifested in the creation of these lasting works of emotional truth and humanity. His memory is a blessing, and will always be a blessing, as his life was, as his art was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s so strange to think that Stephen Sondheim is no longer on this earth when the earth has so often felt like simply a platform for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-theatre"],"yoast_head":"\n