The Teacher

While appearing on the Bravo program “Inside the Actors’ Studio” in 1994, Stephen Sondheim was given the traditional questionnaire that came at the end of one of James Lipton’s interviews. When Lipton asked “What profession would you like to try other than your own?” He answered, “Teacher.”

 As if he wasn’t one already.

 It is difficult (as it should be) to encapsulate what Sondheim meant (means) to me. As a young theatre kid, I was a Jet in a summerstock production of West Side Story. When I would sing in a college cabaret, “Anyone Can Whistle” was a regular part of my repertoire. Starting out in my professional career, I worked on productions of Gypsy and …Forum and I have had the privilege to design A Little Night Music (with arguably the best Act I finale in Musical Theatre) and Assassins (a piece that only becomes more terrifyingly prescient as time goes by). Each time I got to work with his creations it was clear that when you are working on Sondheim, you had best bring your A-game. His work is incredibly demanding. It requires detailed analysis, and sophisticated dramaturgy. Your first thoughts are almost never sufficient. He’s way out in front of you and you wonder if you’ll ever catch up. It’s humbling, exhausting, and exhilarating.

Perhaps my greatest joy, however, has been in bringing his work into the lives of my students. From time to time I teach a class called “The Musicals of Sondheim.” In it, we take a deep dive into his work and I get to watch many of my students experience his work for the first time. The first thing they learn is how he was the heir-apparent to the golden age of Musical Comedy, learning literally at the feet of Oscar Hammerstein II. Then they get to see how he took the form and entirely defined it over the course of a career that spanned 70 years.

 They marvel at his technical skill and dizzying rhyme schemes: (See: “It's a very short road - From the pinch and the punch - To the paunch and the pouch - And the pension.”); at his mathematician’s brain (his claim) crafting impossible combinations and pathways through a song, matching words, or notes, or phrases from one line or one character or one scene, and mirroring it, or twisting it slightly for another line or character or scene, and in doing so, exposing whole new layers of meaning and depth. They laugh at his silliest lyrics (“That’s the puddle where the poodle did the piddle.”) and often must do a Google search in order to fully comprehend what’s going on. (Was it the Dutch or the English that first negotiated fishing rights in the Sea of Japan? Maybe it was the Russians?)

 But my greatest joy comes from watching them connect to the heart of the work – or, rather – watching the work connect to the hearts of my students. Through his characters they get to experience wonder, crushing loss, regret, and a sense of hope for the future, and he gives them permission to acknowledge that they have felt these things themselves. He clarifies and gives voice to these feelings in ways that a young person is often just starting to grapple with. And, of course, he wrote about Love. Being Sondheim, however, he wrote about the full spectrum of how love can be manifest: joyous, dizzying, giddy, yes, but also unrequited, inconvenient, messy, painful, compromised, or even lethal. He wrote about what it is like to be human, and he did so with the audacity to suppose that his audience were adults. His characters live in worlds with adult problems (see the fairly-tale characters in Act II of Into The Woods). They experience loss and regret, love and lust, pain and trauma. They struggle with feeling alone, abandoned, and scared. It is when my students connect to this aspect of his writing that you watch them “drop in.” Teachers know what I mean, here. It’s not so much a “light bulb” moment as much as it’s one of recognition. They sense that they have crossed a threshold into a larger, more complex, and less innocent world.

 In this way, we are all his students. We all want the right to be happy. We all want to be loved. We are all afraid of giants. Through his words and music we see that we are not alone. And while we may not live happily ever after, the world is full of beauty and being alive can be so much fun.

 What greater accomplishment could there be for a teacher?