Whither 2022?

It was a year that began with an organized, systematic, and violent effort, organized and encouraged by the then-president of the United States, to overthrow constitutional government in this country, an effort that came much closer to succeeding than many people may realize. It was a year that ended with a billionaire, and not those who defended constitutional government from that attack, declared as the Person of the Year. In between those events, there was a systematic effort by the leaders of one political party, and the more degenerate examples of their followers, to weaponize a deadly virus in an effort to continue that assault on constitutional government.

There is a straight line over four decades from the worship of Ronald Reagan and the exaltation of the wealthy, along with the subsequent demonization of their opponents as traitors, to that assault and that elevation of a man and his self-exaltation at the expense of the workers who put him where he is today. As we go into an election year in which constitutional government itself may very well be on the ballot, we should not lose sight of that fact.

Nor, for that matter should we lose sight of the fact that this was not only an assault on constitutional government, but on the very future of our nation itself, as illustrated not only by the continuing the spread of the pandemic, but also the fact that it is pushing our health system itself to the point that so-called socialized medicine was supposed to create.  That is to say, rationing care, and, with the explosion of pediatric cases, continuing the assault on our posterity that gun violence has already initiated.  All of this, despite the fact that posterity is supposed to be one of the things our Constitution was primarily written to protect.

It’s worth noting at this point the death of Senator Harry Reid, a man who moved from the right to the left over his career because he was fundamentally a fighter and he recognized that fighting spirit, and the shared fundamental values behind it, in the left-leaning members of his party. It may very well be that the need to fight, the willingness to fight, and the ability to fight, is what is really needed to unify everyone in this country, regardless of their political affiliation, who still cares about democracy and is willing to do whatever it takes to protect it.

We enter 2022 with the realization that it could very well be a historic year. That could be true in one of two ways. Either it can be a year in which we the people re-commit ourselves to the values that are expressed in our Constitution's Preamble. Or it can be a year in which the Constitution itself is reduced to little more than four decaying pieces of parchment in an airtight glass case, a case that may protect the parchment, but not the government or the ideals that the words on the parchment are supposed to protect.

The choice, as always, is yours. As someone who turned 65 this year, and who is deepening his appreciation, as he looks at his grandchildren, of the need to promote and protect the future, I beg you with my head and heart, and with my body and soul, to not let this opportunity to save the Republic slip away. It is easy to slip into the comfort of dropping out. It is much harder to rise to the obligation of standing up and staying in the fight. But it has never been more essential to do so.

Whatever you do, this year, honor our Constitution, and the memory of Senator Reid, by being a fighter. Do it to save all of us. And, for that matter, do it to save yourself.

And with that, I wish everyone a happy new year, in the hope and prayer that will end up being one.

One last minute coda.  Thanks, Betty White, for being a consummate professional and an unbelievably decent human being, one whose end-of-the-year exit was as graceful as the life she lived.

Stephen Sondheim, The Broadway Gift That Will Keep On Giving

The day after Thanksgiving this year is one I will never forget.

I was sitting in my law office, engaged in my work, when, suddenly, the voice of my wife broke the train of my thoughts.

"Oh, no!"

"What?"

"Stephen Sondheim died."

Those are words I never wanted to hear.  Over the years, I've mourned the death of a lot of celebrities I've admired or respected, with varying degrees of sadness.  None, however, have devastated me as much as those five words my wife uttered.  I'm sitting here more than three weeks later, and I'm still in something of a state of shock.  I feel the loss of Stephen Joshua Sondheim, the American theater's foremost composer-lyricist, as deeply as I would feel the loss of a family member, or a close friend.

I never had the pleasure of meeting him, or talking with him (although our lives did intersect once; more about that later).  Yet I can honestly say that I have felt his presence, in a variety of ways, at various points in my life.  Going all the way back to close to the beginning of it, in fact.

In writing previously about the passing of my mother, I mentioned the fact that she imbued me with a passionate love for theater.  I remember, as a young boy, sitting in the living room of our suburban Baltimore row house, where she would iron clothes and sing songs from Broadway shows.  One day, I crawled across the floor and started going through the records stacked neatly under our Magnavox stereo.  Among others, I found the original cast album for "West Side Story," read the names on the cover, and was delighted to discover that one of the authors of the show had my first name.

OK, I'll admit, a deeply narcissistic reaction.  In my defense, I was about five years old at the time.  Nevertheless, it launched me on a lifelong love of Sondheim's career and work.  That love really started to percolate in my adolescent and teenage years, as my own interest in theater translated into an interest in acting, including a high school production of "The Music Man," (ironically, the show that beat "West Side Story" for Best Musical at the Tony Awards).  It continued into my young adult years, when I got to see three of Sondheim's shows--"Pacific Overtures," "Sweeney Todd," and "Merrily We Roll Along"--prior to their official Broadway openings.  It picked up again in middle age, as I got involved in efforts to save a Broadway theater, while introducing my wife and stepchildren to my affinity to the history of theater and Sondheim's place in it.  And it has continue long after it became apparent  that Sondheim was unlikely to create new musicals, spending much of his time working on revivals of his existing works.

If you know little or nothing about him, here is a link to the obituary I knew I would have to read someday, and dreaded doing so.

The success story of his life is one that does not fit some popular measures of success.  None of his shows, in their original incarnations, ran as many as 1,000 performances.  And not all of those productions were financial successes, although they were often critical ones; many of them lost some, and in a few cases all, of their initial investments.  And his critics in the press, though they were in the minority, could be utterly brutal, even when they were forced to concede the ingenuity and insight of his lyrics.

The conventional critical rap on Sondheim is that he was the master of ambivalence, his work expressing a view of life as something without clear and painless paths or choices, with pain as an inevitability.  This perspective has been repeated to the point of cliché, albeit a cliché that obscures instead of underscoring (no pun intended) the value of his work.

Sondheim had, by all accounts (including his own), a childhood that was financially privileged yet emotionally scarred.  His parents' marriage ended when he was 10, and his childhood life thereafter was molested, emotionally if not literally, by his mother, who took all of her anger toward her ex-husband and directed it toward her son.  As he himself would admit, this fostered in him a general distrust of human relationships and their reliability.  However, it didn't diminish, and may have to some extent fostered, the analytical side of his thinking, which led in turn to a perspective on life that could honestly appraise all aspects of human experience.  This range of his appreciation for reality, its blessings and its curses, can be seen in the range of the source materials for his work.

And the range of his talent can be seen not only in his Broadway career, but also in his love of other forms of writing, especially puzzles.  Sondheim's Manhattan townhouse was decorated with antique puzzles and games, and was the inspiration for the setting of Anthony Shaffer's "Sleuth."  He enjoyed not only solving puzzles, but creating them as well, doing so for the readers of New York magazine before his work on "Company" got in the way.  As is explained in detail here, Sondheim introduced variations on the traditional crossword puzzle to New York's readers.  There's a quote of Sondheim's in the article that poignantly explains the appeal for him:  "One of the great things about crossword puzzles is, there's a solution.  And that's unfortunately not true of all the puzzles in life."

Happily, his passion for puzzles was something he shared not only with two of his creative colleagues, Leonard Bernstein and Burt Shevelove, but even earlier with the man who served as his professional mentor and surrogate father, Oscar Hammerstein.  That is appropriate, in a way, because it was his relationship with Hammerstein and Hammerstein's family, a by-product of his mother's post-divorce decision to move from New York to Pennsylvania, that began to give his life an emotional and professional grounding.

One of my favorite Sondheim stories from this period of his life is the one he told about the time, at the age of 15, when he wrote a musical and asked Hammerstein to evaluate it from the perspective of a professional producer.  Notwithstanding his personal regard for Sondheim, Hammerstein punctured his aspiring protege's dreams of being the first teenage songwriter on Broadway by telling him it was the worst thing he'd ever read--to which he quickly added "Now I didn't say it was untalented.  I merely said it was terrible.  And if you want to know why it's terrible, sit down and let me show you."

Those last seven words are perhaps the most fateful in the history of the American musical theater.  They were the beginning of a mentorship that would run through Sondheim's college days and into his work on his first Broadway hits.  And, as the quote above suggests, Hammerstein was an unsparing teacher.  A little bit of full disclosure here:  I myself, with the help of a musician friend, tried to write a musical during my high school years, without getting as far as Sondheim did.  I have no illusions that dreams of glory would have been ours had there been a Hammerstein in our lives.  But that experience, if nothing else, deepened my own appreciation for what it took to create at the level Sondheim achieved.

Despite the abuse Sondheim experienced at the hands of his mother, the younger songwriter was able to feel the love and respect his mentor showed him not only by holding him to the highest of standards but, simultaneously, ingraining in him the value of writing songs with his own voice, rather than someone else's.  Perhaps it helped to make him his own harshest critic as well, seeing in that harshness the discipline need to create art at the highest levels.

He did not believe his work, having once been produced, deserved to be preserved and admired on some sort of pedestal.  In revivals, he has frequently accepted the revisionist ideas of other, younger theater professionals, as is exemplified by the current Broadway revival of "Company."

And he repaid the debt he owed to Hammerstein handsomely, through his advice and mentorship to a large number of young theatrical professionals, most notably Jonathan Larson, the author of "Rent," and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author of "Hamilton."  He paid them the same compliment Hammerstein paid to him, by not letting his personal regard for them get in the way of making sure that they did their best work.  In the cases of Larson and Miranda, among others, his mentorship was in-person; in the case of others, it was by way of correspondence (full disclosure, hinted at earlier:  I have one of those coveted hand-typed-and-hand-signed notes from him, in response to a letter I had sent him concerning my work in historic theater preservation).

In the process, he not only repaid his debt to Hammerstein, he perhaps illustrated Hammerstein's own point that a teacher is ultimately taught by his, her, or their students.  Perhaps he also came to understand the extent to which professional fulfillment can also be personal fulfillment as well.  I think, in this context, of Sondheim songs such as "Children Will Listen," and "No One Is Alone," from "Into The Woods."

I like to think that although our interactions were limited to that one exchange of correspondence, I'm one of his children, too.  Although my own interest in theater was nurtured by my parents, my interest in a theater career, notwithstanding my failed attempt to become a lyricist, was nurtured by Sondheim's career and by my desire to make some kind of contribution to theater--if not in his way, and at his level, then to whatever extent I could do it.

I don't think I could have helped form a movement on the Internet to save the Biltmore Theatre from becoming the lobby to a condo building if I didn't have a love for theater history that transcended the bounds of rationality.  (Ask my wife and stepchildren if you don't believe me.)  That crusade, along with my other artistic pursuits as a visual artist, an actor, and a producer, is driven as much as anything by something I think Sondheim and I shared:  a contempt for the mediocracy of modern culture.  For me, it's best summed up in the words of Madame Armfeldt, from "A Little Night Music":

Where is style?

Where is skill?

Where is forethought?

Where's discretion of the heart?

Where's passion in the art?

Where's craft?

No one can doubt that Sondheim valued art above money, a fact reflected in his working right up to the end of his lengthy life, even though he had no financial reason for doing so. It may be, in one sense, deeply premature to bring this up, but I can't help hoping that some of the material from this last incomplete show, "Square One," is performed and recorded.  As much Sondheim as we have, there can't be too much, even if satirists might think otherwise.

And, however adventurous and financially unprofitable some of Sondheim's musicals may have been, the sheer quality of his work found a way to break through and become a part of the larger culture outside not just of Broadway, but theater itself.  Nothing better illustrates that fact than the success of "Send In The Clowns" from "A Little Night Music," the very first Broadway musical that I actually saw on Broadway, during the last week of the original production's run.  Nothing I can say or write can describe the experience of listening to Glynis Johns singing it, or the ovation she received after doing so.

Perhaps, in our deeply divided times, one of Sondheim's greatest accomplishments was his appeal to people on both ends of the political spectrum.  He was not only admired by liberals (like me), but also by conservatives, including prominent media figures such as John Podhoretz and Cal Thomas.

On a related note (again, no pun intended), I think perhaps his greatest lesson to all of us lies in his willingness to adapt.  He started out at the end of the great Tin Pan Alley tradition of 32-bar, AABA melodies, and almost seamlessly transitioned the Broadway mainstream into what has become a long and still unfolding era of experimentation in musical theater.  In the process, he took an institution that was in danger of completely disappearing, and extended its life for at least decades beyond his own lifetime.

I remember what Broadway was like in the early 1970s, about the time that the Sondheim-Hal Prince collaboration emerged as a strong creative force, and my own interest in theater began to peak with my first visit to Broadway (Alan Bates in "Butley," at the now-departed Morosco Theatre) and the aforementioned appearance in my high school's production of "The Music Man."  Broadway, simply put, was dying.  Theaters were being torn down.  Fewer new authors and producers were emerging from the shows that did get on the boards.  In the fall of 1973, on my birthday, there were exactly 12 shows running on the allegedly Great White Way.  Today, even in this COVID-ravaged times, there are more than 40 active Broadway theaters, including historic houses brought back from the dead.  That would not have happened without a handful of dedicated theater professionals keeping Broadway on life support until a new generation could come along to embrace it.

Sondheim, as well as Prince and Joseph Papp, deserve enormous and undiluted credit for the fact that this happened.  And all of these individuals did it by understanding that the world around them was changing, and theater's survival depended on its ability to change with it.  Sondheim, in his relationships with Larson and Miranda, even found the ability to embrace rock and rap music, despite at one point having derided the former as being too dependent on rhythm for the range of emotional expression needed in drama. Perhaps he best expressed the need to survive by adapting here.  (Perhaps I should say "still here" instead.)

The key to the adaptation theater needed, for Sondheim as with many modern artists, lies in deconstructing reality, showing it from multiple perspectives, teaching us about its various facets by showing it from multiple perspectives and multiple points in time.  He could take fragments of one song and combine them with another, a technique he used to perfection in "Merrily We Roll Along," a show that operates with a reverse chronology.  Bits of one song at the show's beginning, or at the "end" of the story, would build to fuller versions later on, or toward the "end" of the story.  If you can find a copy of the original cast album, get it not only for its magnificent score, but also for Sondheim's liner notes, which explain in better detail than I can his thinking about how the music and lyrics are meant to work.

Perhaps its not surprising that one of his own later works, "Sunday In The Park With George," revolves around an Impressionist work of art; like Cezanne and other Impressionists, Sondheim was a master of deconstruction and reconstruction.  Yet it would be unfair to suggest that he did not develop a point of view in his work.  Despite his work's reputation for emotional ambivalence, time and again it would come back to the need for commitment as the only choice that each of us can ultimately make.  Commitment to art, to a person, to something.  The score of "Company" expresses this best for me, in songs like "Sorry-Grateful":

You're always sorry

You're always grateful

You're always wondering

What might have been

Then she walks in

Or, "Being Alive":

Somebody crowd me with love

Somebody force me to care

Somebody let me come through

I'll always be there

As frightened as you 

To help us survive

Being alive

Being alive

Being alive

We should all be not sorry, but deeply grateful, for the fact that in his career, and ultimately in his personal life, he found the ability to make that commitment, while still enjoying and exploring the complexity of life with a candor and commitment that has led some to compare him to Shakespeare.

Mandy Patinkin, who starred in the original production of "Sunday In The Park With George," made the same comparison, while hoping that Sondheim ultimately found the solace that was denied to him during his childhood, and added this:

Patinkin derives comfort from the knowledge that his friend is "the furthest thing from gone.  He left the heart and soul of his existence, his being, what he cared about, what he thought, what he wished for, wishes that he sometimes couldn't realize for himself--that will be here forever."

Perhaps Patinkin, along with the rest of us, can find solace in this evidence that Sondheim did find a measure of that peace, did in fact understand the value of what he would leave behind.  In a "60 Minutes" interview with Diane Sawyer back in the 1980s, in connection with his work on "Into The Woods," Sondheim expressed regret over not having children, but added, with a smile, that art can be a type of child.

Yes, art, as well as the people who follow your lead in creating it.  To me, this is the best way I can sum up my gratitude for the life and career of Stephen Sondheim.  He will continue to inspire creativity in others, through the legacy of his shows and the people he mentored and inspired to follow the trail he blazed.  As one small but powerful example of this, I leave you, thanking you for your indulgence if you've gotten this far in my musings, with a video based on one of my most favorite Sondheim songs from one of my most favorite of his scores, for "Merrily."  You will thank yourself for giving it a look and a listen, even if you are not as moved to the brink of tears as I was.  Among other things, it puts the lie to the accusation that his work was cold and unmelodic.  And it validates Patinkin's view that Sondheim's work gives us Sondheim forever.  It's what makes his loss, and the obituary I never wanted to read, bearable. It's what makes me, and should make all of us, deeply thankful for his life and work.

Thank you, Mr. Sondheim, indeed.  To paraphrase from another "Merrily" song, here's to you.  Who's like you?  Damn few?

Damn fewer than that.

Baruch dayan ha'emet.  And it will be.