Yknow,
When you’re a theatre kid, it feels like your next show will be the rest of your life. And so on, and so on. You’re emotionally encumbered with the friends you’ve made, the tears you’ve shed, and the rush of endorphins you receive every time a crowd of your friends’ parents give you that sweet, sweet validation you’ve been craving.
And would you ever listen to anything else? Certainly not. Musical theatre is enough. You’re satiated to the point where nothing else sounds as good. You meet up and cluster together, assigning roles, working out your ranges, belting One Day More at the top of your lungs while the altos sing the boring part, it’s the good stuff, the high life. Surely this is forever.
But, it isn’t. Now you’re sixteen and you’ve swapped your librettos for library books, your tap shoes for Air Maxes, your grease paint for The Body Shop’s two-in-one tea tree acne cleanser and exfoliator. In a few years you’ll be off to university, and you want to sing along to Wicked’s A Sentimental Man while you’re on the train to your open day, but you bite your tongue because the girl sitting opposite you is kind of cute. And a few months after that, Wicked, JCS, Les Mis, all evidence of that glamorous, foot-stomping, jazz-hand-waving world has been erased from your music library for the foreseeable future. Music is still vitally important, but now it’s music you can relate to, music you can nod along to, and listen to in front of people. Songs you can pick apart with your friends or dance along to at parties. It’s the music of the real world; real people facing real issues, bold and experimental and outrageous and tear-jerking. And you can’t imagine listening to anything else.
And then you discover Stephen Sondheim.
You wanted to find art that resonated with your gloomy, adolescent, self-loathing, soul-searching crusade, and you ended up going back to the place where you started.
Something Sondheim understood better than most was the human condition. He wrote characters that didn’t know what they wanted, characters who weren’t honest with themselves, characters who were fickle and unpredictable and irrational, which in the Greater Extended Musical Theatre universe was uncommon, especially in the mid-seventies. He understood what it meant to forgive, but he also understood exactly what it meant to lose one’s shit. He understood the anxious pang of feeling directionless, but he also understood the glorious harmony of everything coming together, beautiful resolution, spectacular closure, the little tummy butterflies that tell you everything’s going to be fine despite your odds. Very importantly, whether sour or sweet, he understood what it meant to fall in love.
You listen- it’s eerie at first. Basslines that teeter on a knife’s edge, vocal harmonies that make no sense. Discordant, chromatic crescendos with chromatic, discordant resolutions. But you pick out scraps of pure brilliance amongst the chaos. The second verse of Marry Me A Little. The last verse of Johanna. The soaring conclusion to Move On, a fiery duet that encourages artistic integrity above all else. And then, suddenly, like all great things, the jigsaw falls into place, the curtain is lifted, and a masterpiece constructs itself before your eyes. You watch old VHS tapes of Sondheim training young theatre grads, peering from the top of a Steinway with one eyebrow raised. His beard is dishevelled, his hand gestures are wild, his direction is acute, and when it all comes together, you can catch the faint crooked smile of a genuinely proud genius who is watching his work come to life in real-time. Over the years, there are celebrities that have tried to catch this brilliance with limited success. Johnny Depp, poreless and vacant, like a reanimated corpse, breaking three vocal chords at the end of Epiphany. James Cordon, autotuned voice wavering and falling flat as he rolls down a hill with Emily Blunt, almost suffocating her. I don’t want to sound elitist, because recreating some of his best moments is a monumental, almost impossible task. Treading the line between harmony and disharmony, beauty and obstruction, life and death.
Goodnight Stephen- you were the best of all time, and probably will remain so.
thinking about things 