Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)

Few things in life are constant, but that doesn't mean that there aren't things that feel constant.  Landmarks, experiences, iconography that greets you with consistency, like the swallows at Capistrano or the steely gargoyles of the Chrysler Building.  For the past seven decades, Stephen Sondheim has numbered amongst these constants.  A musical genius who inexplicably was behind hit-after-hit, song-after-song, consistently cranking out absolute magic without any sense of slowing down, Sondheim had become so synonymous with Broadway that for most, it felt as if he was simply one of their brightly lit marquees, glowing every night without fail.  How could anyone so luminous ever disappear?

But Stephen Joshua Sondheim was not immortal, as the world learned today when he passed away at the age of 91.  It has become a consistent refrain when celebrities die to indulge in hyperbole, to pour out the most adjectives in a sign of public grief, proclaiming pretty much everyone with the phrase "there will never be another like him."  With Sondheim, though, superlatives always felt too little-indeed, there will never be another like him...it's hard to believe that there was one like him to begin with.

Listing out his achievements (EGOT, Pultizer, Oliviers, a Presidential Medal of Freedom) is one thing, but just look at the list of what he wrote.  Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Assassins...somehow the same man wrote both West Side Story and Into the Woods, both "The Ladies Who Lunch" and "Everything's Coming Up Roses."  Save for his friendly rival Andrew Lloyd Webber (with whom he inexplicably shared a birthday), no figure can come close to his stature & significance in the theater industry in the past half century, and as most theater fans would be quick to point out, even Webber pales in comparison to Sondheim's critical hosannas.

Like any budding gay boy, I learned to sing Sondheim's songs when I was young.  While other kids my age were burning Puff Daddy and the Spice Girls off of Kazaa, I was downloading Glynis Johns singing "Send in the Clowns" and playing it in a melancholy sadness as I lay in my bed, wondering of a world beyond it.  I have seen two Sondheim musicals on Broadway, both starring his longtime muse Bernadette Peters, and found them both transportive.  Sondheim had a way of making all of his shows seem personal, as if they were written not just for each person in the audience, but for a specific life moment of each person in the audience.  When he said "I insist on miracles" you knew which dream he meant, when he said "what was just a world is a star," you could relive your own first love soaring above Leonard Bernstein's music.  Sondheim was, and thanks to assured revivals will always be, synonymous with the American stage.  And so, while his light has dimmed, he will remain one of those true constants as long as Broadway houses are filled with audiences looking for a dream, one that he inspired countless times.