I don't know much about Sondheim. There were no high school musicals or showcases during my childhood. I knew his work was in the pantheons of great musicals but it didn't seem to be about me, anyone I knew, or my interests. It was similar to when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize and I started reading her short stories. I got them. I enjoyed them and saw their beauty, but nothing brought me back to consume Munro. Sondheim felt like someone talked about by people who went to theatre camp or that annoying date who came to NYC to make it as an actor and ended up being a legal aide who scored their lives by Sondheim references..."that was a joke from Follies...that was a pun off from the Patti Lupone and Bernadette Peters blah blah blah." Check please! As a child I watched the "Dick Tracy" movie but that didn't leave an impression on me.
I didn't see a Sondheim musical until the 2007 movie version of "Sweeney Todd" and I think I got some of 'it": the Sondheim darkness, ambivalence, witty lyrics that seemed half-drunk with dizzy rhyme schemes and meters. Years later I saw the movie adaptation of "Into the Woods" and a recorded performance of "A Little Night Music."
In 2017 a friend lost his Valentine's date and I got the extra ticket for the Jake Gyllenhaal led revival of "Sunday in the Park with George." That was my first live Sondheim experience. Then I flew back to LA that same year and caught a spring revival of "Merrily We Roll Along" starring Wayne Brady at the Wallis Annenberg Center. I saw recorded versions of "Gypsy." In 2020 I attended the Broadway revivals of "West Side Story" and "Company" right before the covid shutdowns.
All in all, I've seen 4 stage revivals of Sondheim that were artistically "adventurous," and 4 recorded/movie versions of his work. It still feels like I could walk around in his music for years and never get to the end of the road. But I am grateful to continue exploring this world created by a cultural giant who left behind so many treasures.
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