HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Life lessons gleaned from the work of a musical theater master.

Drama professor and devoted fan Schoch, author of Shakespeare’s House, lovingly explores Stephen Sondheim’s musicals, aiming to show how they can help people achieve a more fulfilling life. “His works understand us as much as we understand them,” the author avers. Zeroing in on 13 shows, he enthusiastically walks us through the essence of each to demonstrate that “Sondheim, if we let him, can change our life.” Schoch notes that in his first musical, Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim tried to impart the lesson, “Be aware of the roles that you enact in your life,” but it was a flop because he forgot to “put the audience first.” He never forgot it again. Gypsy tells the story of a toxic mother-daughter relationship, but the vivid characterizations expressed in song demonstrate that “hurtful patterns can be disrupted and then replaced by the benevolence of a nurturing heart, beginning with our own.” In the plotless Company, Sondheim anatomizes the “loneliness of modern urban life,” then suggests how we can overcome it in the song “Sorry-Grateful” (a “true masterpiece”). “Whenever I hear the quintet in A Little Night Music warming up,” Schoch writes, “I hear a rehearsal for life.” Sweeney Todd, the ultimate revenge piece, asks us how we would respond to injustice. Merrily We Roll Along, poorly received when it opened in 1981 but a Tony-winning hit in 2024, oozes with feelings of personal regret. On Sunday in the Park With George, Schoch remarks, “How can we not pay attention to a play that honors so elegantly the lost art of paying attention?” Into the Woods confronts “not knowing which path to choose,” and Schoch softly brings down the curtain with Here We Are, which opened in 2023, two years after Sondheim’s death: “a perfect theatrical non finito: not finished, and that’s by design.”

A lively, thoughtful self-help book—sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.