August 5, 2024
Schoch (The Secrets of Happiness), a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast, pays affectionate tribute to the late composer Stephen Sondheim and the lessons his musicals offer. Covering the full span of Sondheim’s career on Broadway, Schoch posits that Louise’s break from her domineering mother to become a burlesque dancer in 1959’s Gypsy teaches audiences to live for themselves; that Bobby’s apparent victory over his fear of intimacy in the final minutes of 1970’s Company reminds viewers that “love isn’t there to make our lives less frightening... it’s there, if we can find it... to give us more life”; and that 1979’s Sweeney Todd forces spectators to grapple with the banality of evil. Here We Are, which was posthumously staged in 2023, reveals that beauty can be found in the unfinished or improvised—as in life itself, Schoch argues, since the “wild, wondrous mystery of ourselves won’t ever be fully revealed.” While some of Schoch’s interpretations can feel like a stretch, he illuminates with appealing and unbridled enthusiasm how Sondheim plumbed the depths of human experience. Musical theater lovers will be delighted.