I try to put a South American piece in every show I write.

Heard now, with every one of his scores available to us, Sondheim’s words seem to invite a kind of treasure hunt. But he was speaking in 1970. Most of those scores had not yet been dreamt up, and we should be careful about conflating his words on that day with a promise governing another half-century of work.

The most important of those words, I think, is “try.”

Sondheim was describing an impulse, a musical world he liked to find room for whenever he could, rather than a pattern. Nearly three decades later, speaking to Mark Eden Horowitz, he admitted there were “not a lot of bossa novas” in his shows.

Our question, then, is not whether we can find a “South American” piece in every Sondheim show. That’s not a promise he ever actually made. The more interesting thread to tease out, I think, is what Sondheim understood by “South American,” and what it sounded like when that impulse, that fondness, did find its way into one of his scores.

Four years before Company, Sondheim contributed “The Boy From…” to the 1966 Off-Broadway revue The Mad Show: a wonderfully straight-faced parody of “The Girl from Ipanema,” performed by Linda Lavin. The music is not Sondheim’s — it was written by Mary Rodgers — so we should resist claiming it as an early example of his own South American compositional impulse. But his lyrical contribution alone tells us that, by the mid-1960s, this particular Brazilian sound-world was already somewhere in his creative orbit.

Our first (and perhaps clearest) example of South American Sondheim, though, lies not in Tacarembo la Tumbe del Fuego Santa Malipas Zacatecas la Junta del Sol y Cruz — lovely though that boy’s hometown undoubtedly is — but in the show being recorded on that long, exhausting day in 1970. In Company, Joanne’s “The Ladies Who Lunch” is, explicitly, a bossa nova.

A bossa nova for Joanne

Bossa nova emerged in Brazil in the late 1950s, principally through the music of Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto. Its great trick is one of compression (how very Sondheimian!): it takes the rhythmic life of samba and makes it intimate.

At its most recognizable, a steady bass pulse anchors the music while chords arrive syncopated — on, just before or just after the beat. The subdivision is generally straight rather than jazz-swung. Harmonically, bossa novas (bossas nova? bossa novae?) tend to luxuriate in major sevenths, ninths, altered dominants and chromatic passing chords. Smooth voice-leading prevents those chords from sounding clunky: light dances on the harmonic water, but the surface barely ripples. Above all this, the melody is a dragonfly — skimming the surface, seemingly untroubled by the accompanimental waters beneath, delivered with conversational ease.

So: we have a pared-back samba-derived groove made up of a steady bass, syncopated upper chords, sophisticated but supple harmony, and a fairly free-roaming, conversational melody. Bear all that in mind as you look at a little of “The Ladies Who Lunch”:

It’s interesting to consider what this bossa nova chassis is offering Joanne dramatically. The poised, grounded tread of the bass… The straight, supple syncopation… Sondheim’s accompaniment, holding its own vodka stinger aloft, might sway from side to side a little, but it remains always on its feet. As Joanne’s performance becomes increasingly abrasive, the music that surrounds her never spills its drink.

And by remaining sleek, elegant, and (relatively speaking) unruffled, the music of “The Ladies Who Lunch” mimics precisely the world of caftans, fittings, and brunch Joanne attacks with such aplomb. Remember, she’s attacking that world from within. This, it would seem, is as true musically as it is dramatically.

What is South America doing in Victorian England?

Discussing “Wait” from Sweeney Todd in 1997, Sondheim said the following to Horowitz:

I always fall into South-American rhythms. I don’t know why. In every show, and quite often, whether the songs are relevant or not.

If the Pennebaker quip (“I try to put…”) describes something conscious, “I always fall into” describes a habit. By Sweeney Todd, South America would seem to be a direction in which his music naturally leans.

“Wait” is an especially odd place for this tendency to surface. If we instead could hear South America in “By the Sea,” we could (at a stretch) toy with the idea that it served as sufficiently un-London to feed musically into Mrs Lovett’s escapist seaside fantasy. But in “Wait,” Sondheim said, the rhythmic idea had “crept in” unconsciously.

The harmony had a longer, more traceable journey. Sondheim explained to Horowitz that the chord structure was influenced by a South American lullaby: Xavier Montsalvatge’s “Lullaby to a Negro Baby.” Listen to the passage below by clicking here.

Sondheim said he had first used those chords for “Don’t Look at Me” in Follies, and then returned to them in “Wait”:

What in Follies belongs to Sally’s nervous exposure, in Sweeney Todd becomes coaxing, circling, faintly hypnotic. What persisted was something, a kind of harmonic pathway, that Sondheim had picked up and then held close.

The “South American” label is being applied very broadly here, it’s worth emphasizing: Montsalvatge was a Catalan composer, and that lullaby carries with it Cuban and Caribbean associations. Meanwhile, bossa nova is Brazilian, while tango, for example, belongs principally to Argentina and Uruguay. These are not interchangeable traditions, however readily people might once have blurred them together beneath overbroad and imprecise labels. But we are, after all, simply rifling through a drawer in Sondheim’s musical imagination: a loose collection of syncopations, bass patterns, harmonic colors and remembered sounds whose origins were themselves various and sometimes tangled.

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Here We Are… in Moranda?

And perhaps the last glimpse into that drawer comes, fittingly, at the very end.

Raffael in Here We Are descends directly from Don Rafael Acosta in Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: ambassador of Miranda, a fictional South American republic. David Ives makes an important change. Miranda becomes Moranda, and Raffael’s country is relocated across the Atlantic: in Here We Are, Colonel Martin describes it as a “Mediterranean rathole.”

Even the change of name has an intriguing resonance. Miranda is a Latin form derived from mirari: to wonder at, marvel at, admire — something, approximately, “to be wondered at.” Moranda, wonderfully, echoes morari: to delay, tarry, linger, remain. Whether deliberate or not, for a musical in which the characters spend one act endlessly delayed on their way to dinner, and another unable to leave once they have arrived, isn’t that delicious? Buñuel’s country of wonder has become, by the alteration of a single vowel, a country of lingering.

And yet something of Miranda may have crossed the ocean with Raffael. His recurring “I have to have you…” interventions threaded through the various “The Road” sequences — and especially his attempted seduction of Marianne (“Don’t you know that you are Versailles to me?”) — retain, to my ear, something distinctly tango-like: the rhythmic insistence, the seductive push and pull... I would not assert with conviction that Sondheim was consciously preserving Buñuel’s original geography in music, but the thought is worth pondering. Indeed, reviewing Here We Are at the National Theatre, Dominic Cavendish heard in “The Road” a “Latin American shuffle.”

That leaves us with a possibility rather than a conclusion. The finished musical has quite deliberately made the previously South American Raffael Mediterranean. Yet some trace of that earlier geography seems, perhaps, still to flicker in the music Sondheim gives him. Listen to Raffael whenever he surfaces in those sequences and see whether you hear it too.

If this belongs in Sondheim’s South American drawer, then it does so pretty abstractly: a remembered sound attached to a character whose country has changed both its name and its continent. Still, it’s worth considering.

Let’s end, then, with that drawer still ajar. Sometimes we can name Sondheim’s “South American” music precisely; sometimes a rhythm simply “creeps in.” Elsewhere, the trail leads us to music remembered from another place, another time… And sometimes, as in Here We Are, perhaps the most we can responsibly say is we hear something there.

But with that drawer invitingly ajar, I’d love for this to be the start of a discussion. Where do you hear South America in Sondheim’s work? All suggestions are warmly encouraged below…

Pilgrimage seems too grand (and loaded) a word for this easy day trip from Tokyo — but when, for the first time, you find yourself within touching distance of the history that animates Pacific Overtures, you have to take that train, don’t you?

The boy watching from the branches in “Someone in a Tree”, the “someone” of the title, is a beautiful invention. But the tree itself — this tree, at least — really did bear witness to the history that imagined boy relates. This particular tree, already growing, was here when Perry came ashore. Nearly two centuries on, it continues to grow. I am here still, it seems to say.

The Tamakusu stands today in the courtyard of the Yokohama Archives of History, on the site of the former British Consulate. It spreads its canopy wide, predating all that now surrounds it. We can see the tree in contemporary depictions of Perry’s landing at Yokohama. Look at the famous lithograph below, after a drawing by Wilhelm Heine, who accompanied Perry’s expedition to Japan. The Americans process towards the treaty site, the Japanese officials wait to receive them. Off to one side, a great tree completes the scene.

The tree in whose shade I sat has a remarkable history of its own.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of Pacific Overtures, a show you’ve had such a long relationship with. Before you were first cast in it, how aware were you of the show itself?

I had a wonderful high school teacher who, my sophomore year of high school, played a couple of songs from Pacific Overtures. He brought in his LP of the original cast recording, and I remember distinctly hearing “Please Hello.” This was for an English Lit class, and he was using it as an example of satire. It was a real mind-blowing experience.

I grew up in San Francisco, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. My high school had a handful of Asian people. It’s majority Asian now, but back then we were definitely a minority. I remember — it’s suddenly occurring to me — it was the very first time I had ever heard a story told from an Asian American point of view. It amazed me, and it pissed me off, and it impressed me that we’ve seen so many parodies of other people by white people, by European cultures, and I was used to that, but I had never seen the opposite. So my experience of Pacific Overtures went back to when I was 14, 15 years old.

That English teacher was also the head of our theatre program in high school, and so he cast me in my very first live show, which was My Fair Lady. I played a busker. I had to have a Cockney accent. When I was in 8th grade, the very first live musical I saw was The King and I. I remember, as a very shy kid who couldn’t talk to anybody, who was very down on myself and very insecure, just knowing that that was what I was meant to do — to be on stage and to tell stories. Even knowing nothing about it, watching kids play these really complex, mature parts, making me believe, and making me feel, and articulating things that I couldn’t articulate for myself — I knew that that was my tribe, and that in that environment I could learn to talk to people, and have friends, and express things that I didn’t know how to express.

When I was in college, I was still unable to audition for plays, because I couldn’t talk to people. But if you gave me a song, if you gave me choreography, I could do it. By then, I had been taking a dance class with San Francisco Ballet, with Connecticut Ballet, jazz studios in San Francisco, and so I found that I had a facility for physical theatre and for dance.

Somebody that I had never done a show with in college, but had graduated and had seen me in shows, was named David Loud. He had met Sondheim doing Merrily We Roll Along while he was in school, and he was the audition pianist and the associate musical director for the first revival of Pacific Overtures in 1984 at the York Theatre. They were having trouble finding someone to play the boy in the tree, so he called me at school, at Yale, where I was an English Lit major and had only ever been in the chorus of musicals, like Jesus Christ Superstar and Guys and Dolls. Even Ain’t Misbehavin’. I mean, that was college.

He said, “Are you in good voice? Do you want to come to New York and audition for Pacific Overtures?” And I said, “Wow, I didn’t think anyone would ever do Pacific Overtures again. Sure, I’ll do it.” So for the very first time, in my junior year, I took a train into Grand Central. David Loud picked me up, brought me to the rehearsal, to the audition. I sang a little bit of “Pretty Lady,” a little bit of “Someone in a Tree.” I sang — they all laughed — “Lucky to Be Me” as one of my audition songs, and suddenly they cast me as the boy in the tree, the Dutch Admiral, one of the Councillors, and the first British sailor who sings “Pretty Lady.”

I decided that I would commute between Yale and New York, so the next semester I scheduled all of my classes in the morning, got the train in with a boxed lunch from my Yale dining hall, rehearsed in the evenings and on weekends. It was my very first professional experience. Luckily, Steve Sondheim came to see the final performance. He talked to the Shuberts, and to a wonderful producing team, Nell Nugent and Elizabeth McCann, and they decided to mount a commercial run of what was then just a showcase. So I took a year off of school.

That was my first exposure to being in a professional show, joining the union, being in a room with people like Steve Sondheim and John Weidman, in a professional environment. Our wonderful director, Fran Soeder, from the very beginning said, “Look, I’m not Asian, so I want you to know that this is your story, and I’m going to need you to tell me how you want to tell this story, and what you think this story is.”

So my very first professional experience was akin to that mind-blowing experience of first hearing “Please Hello” in my sophomore year of high school, where I learned that, as an Asian American, I can have my own point of view, and I can be the center of a story. I can be a human being on stage, and not just a representative from some foreign culture, land, species, you know? It was the very best possible first professional experience I could have had, surrounded by Asian actors who, in one way or another, were all making it in the business.

So I learned very quickly, early on, that there are a million ways to be in this business, and that the key to finding my path forward was to figure out what motivated me. What was it that I needed? What was going to keep me coming back? And why? Why theatre? Why be an actor when there are a million other things you could possibly do?

I still didn’t believe that I could do it, so after the run of that show I went back to school, got my degree in English Lit, and went back home to San Francisco, where I got a job at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, as a secretary in their education department. It was the wonderful casting director Meg Simon, who had seen me in Pacific Overtures, who, five years later, in 1989, called me at the AIDS Foundation and said, “I will need a new understudy for the Broadway production of M. Butterfly. I don’t know exactly when, but I’m coming through San Francisco. Would you audition for me? I remember you from Pacific Overtures.” I thought it would be good practice, because I was still doing shows in the evenings after work. I read for her, she gave me a handful of notes, and she said, “I don’t know when or where, but work on this.”

Months later, I had forgotten it happened, but she called me again at work and said, “At the end of the week we’re having a callback on the stage of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway. Can you be here on Friday?” And I was like, “No, I can’t afford that. I work at an AIDS nonprofit.” So she said, “Can I put you on hold?” And within five minutes, she told me that our wonderful producer, Stuart Ostrow, was going to pay for my flight, for a night in a hotel, and for a ticket to see the show the night before my callback.

I flew into New York. I had a pad on my lap the entire show, and I wrote down all of the blocking. I stayed up all night at what was then the Milford Plaza Hotel, and the next morning I walked in, and I read four scenes for them, doing all of the blocking. The producer from the house asked me, “Do you think that you can do the choreography of the Beijing Opera?” And honestly, I didn’t think I could do it. I had no experience twirling spears. I had never seen Beijing Opera until I saw M. Butterfly. I didn’t even know it existed as an art form until then. But before I could say anything, David Henry Hwang, who was also sitting in the house, piped up and said, “Look, Stuart, he’s got all this dance training on his résumé, of course he can do it.” I was smart enough not to say anything. And I got the gig.

So, in 1989, I quit my day job, I’ve been an actor ever since, and I owe it to Pacific Overtures.

I’m really struck by something you said there: that you thought Pacific Overtures might not be put on again after the original production. Going into that first revival, do you remember feeling a sense of responsibility to the life of the show in that way?

I think there were multiple reasons why Fran Soeder and the York Theatre wanted to revive Pacific Overtures. I think that one of those reasons was that the original production was so spectacular. It was epic and gorgeous, and was trying, in a Brechtian way, to tell a story that was larger than any individual character’s arc through the show. It was episodic in that way. It tried to reinforce the fact that we’re dealing not just with human beings, but with the arc of history, the arc of how these people are perceived, and how they perceive their relation to the world, their relation to their humanity.

And Fran, I think, really wanted to hone in on this linear, parallel story of Kayama, a Japanese lower-level samurai who rises to great heights by becoming more Western, and this lowly fisherman, Manjiro, who rises in the ranks of Japanese society by embracing his own culture, with tragic results both personally and historically. The show really honed in on those parallel tracks, and anything that felt a little unattached to telling those stories, both on a personal level and on a global level, was cut from our revival. So there were certain anecdotes, certain fables that used to intermittently interrupt the show, that were excised, and the show had much more forward momentum. It affected people in a very different way.

Now, in 1976, it was also the bicentennial here in the U.S., so people were very rah-rah about the U.S., and didn’t want to hear anything that criticized America, Western culture, or what we think of as democracy. By 1984, some of that bloom was gone. In 1976, there were bomb threats sent to the theater. I have a friend who was in the audience of one of the performances where the entire theater had to be evacuated until bomb-sniffing dogs could clear the theater and they could resume the show.

In 1984, we were, of course, wary of what the response might be. There was one night when there were a bunch of Hell’s Angels in the audience, and we were warned that we should not leave the stage door alone. When we left the theater, these leather-jacketed, tattooed bikers were gathered around the stage door — but they were asking for our signatures, crying, having been affected so deeply by the show.

In 1984, one of the very first Japanese restaurants opened in Manhattan. It’s hard to imagine now. But I think, at the time, all of us just assumed that this was just the way it was: that Pacific Overtures was not going to be a show that was done all the time, that it was too hard for theaters around the country to cast, that it was not a perspective that people wanted to hear. Even in 1984, when we did it, there were critics who wrote about the show disparagingly — who didn’t write about the show the way that they write about other shows. They wrote about whether or not Asian Americans deserved their attention. Whether we were attractive enough to suffer watching for two and a half hours. I mean that literally.

I think that times have changed, and there are generations of Asian American theatre artists who expect more from the industry than they did when I was coming up, and I think that’s progress. But those expectations, I think, have not actually been met. I think we still have a long way to go. I mean, how many Broadway shows, how many West End shows, have there been that are told from an Asian point of view? How many benefits for Sondheim have been held where there are white people singing “Pretty Lady” or “Someone in a Tree,” when it would have been impossible, I think, for the producers of those benefits to cast Asian people who could also sing something, maybe, from Sweeney Todd or Into the Woods? How is it perfectly okay for non-Asians to occupy that space, of material that was specifically written from a particular point of view?

So I think that we have a long way to go, but I will also say that now is the best time in my lifetime to be an Asian artist in theatre. There’s never been a better time. But there are still certain limits.

That’s particularly interesting to think about in the context of Sondheim’s work beyond Pacific Overtures, because those of us who love Sondheim are quick to say that the characters in his shows are three-dimensional human beings rather than simplistic types — and it’s worth remembering that there hasn’t always been a parity of access to those wonderfully complex roles.

I think Steve saw humanity in us. When he first saw that showcase production of Pacific Overtures — and he told me this a year later, when we went out for drinks after a performance — he said, “I was having trouble. I knew that Bernadette Peters needed another song in the second act of Sunday in the Park with George, but I didn’t know what it should be. I was stuck. And then I saw you, Francis, in ‘Someone in a Tree.’ And on a cocktail napkin at intermission, I started writing the opening phrases and lyrics for ‘Children and Art.’”

Years later, I thought, well, did I just dream up that story? Because that just seems so unlikely to me. But the director, Fran Soeder, confirmed that that is what Steve told him as well. And when you think about the two songs, “Someone in a Tree” and “Children and Art,” they’re both about perspective: seeing and being seen, how we see and how we interpret what we see, how that forms not just our relationship to ourselves and our understanding of who we are, but how it informs our relationships with other people and our understanding of our place in the world.

And even the musical intervals, while they aren’t exactly the same, the shapes of some of those phrases seem to echo one another. [Mr. Jue sings a phrase, below, from “Someone in a Tree”] sounds to me very similar to when Dot sings, “Isn’t she beautiful […] Mama is everywhere, he must have loved her so much…” That rolling back and forth, the waves of those songs, how they’re bouncy lyrics, bouncy melodies, on a bed of something very lyrical. There’s an element of time in both of those songs that I find very similar.

Steve saw something else that he had written, being told by an Asian little boy and his future self, and he connected that to the very human story of Marie’s relationship with her background, and her perceptions of this painting that was, in essence, her life. Marie wouldn’t have been born in America — maybe she wouldn’t have been born at all — if that painting didn’t exist, if that story hadn’t been told.

So, I give Steve a lot of credit. That’s the man he was. And if we’re looking at generational knowledge, I think of Oscar Hammerstein as well, in that vein. Here’s somebody writing in the Golden Age of musicals, and how many different shows did he write that were populated by Asian stories? That’s mind-blowing to me — Flower Drum Song, The King and I — that that should have even been on his radar, except that he and his wife had adopted some kids from Asia. So, I think that he was also an advanced human being for his time. And I feel like I am a beneficiary of their evolved perspectives.

That’s beautiful. A lot of readers will have seen you accept your Tony Award a couple of years ago. I couldn’t help but wonder: standing on that stage, in that moment of recognition, was that early experience of Pacific Overtures on your mind at all?

I don’t know whether it’s just the way that I personally am built, or whether it’s because I’m an Asian American actor, but I never imagined being on that stage, accepting any award. Even when I was nominated, I didn’t imagine it. I went through all of awards season assuming that I was not going to win, so I should just have fun, and introduce myself to people who I have admired for a long time, and have this great excuse to say, “Hi, I think you’re really neat,” you know?

I also spent that time of awards season celebrating the fact that, for the very first time in 78 years of Tony history, there were multiple Asian nominations: from the music director or arranger of Buena Vista Social Club to the creators and performers in Maybe Happy Ending, to Yellow Face. I just thought it was this golden moment that we’d never seen before. Daniel Dae Kim was the very first Asian actor ever nominated for leading actor in a play. I was only the second Asian actor nominated for Best Featured Actor in a Play on Broadway. I guess that means we’re two for three, because with Conrad Ricamora, this was also the first time that there were two Asian people nominated in an acting category at the Tonys in the same year. That’s astounding to me.

I just spent that entire time celebrating that, and wanting people to notice that that actually was happening, and that it was not because there was a dearth of great projects or talent on Broadway that season. It was a jam-packed season with a lot of really wonderful, challenging, successful plays and musicals. It was such a joy to be able to celebrate that.

I did think a lot about Pacific Overtures, but mostly of the revival that I did in 2005. It was during that production that I got to meet Alvin Ing, who had been in the original production in 1976, and share the stage with him. And that’s when he tossed me, on a hanger, his tux — the tux that he had had built for him when he was opening Pacific Overtures on Broadway in 1976. And I don’t know why or how he thought I deserved it, but he literally said, “I want you to wear this when you accept your Tony Award.”

I was like, “Yeah, yeah, right, right…” And I had never worn it before. I put it in the back of my closet, thinking, well, I can’t just give it to Goodwill, because it’s really special. There’s a label embroidered inside the jacket that says, “Made for Alvin Ing.” And it feels to me, as an Asian American actor, like the legendary sword that was passed down from Burbage all the way to Olivier, you know? I want, eventually, to pass that tux on to somebody. I feel like it’s a legacy. So I thought a lot about Alvin, and what I owe to a lot of Asian American artists that have inspired me, and fought for me, and opened doors and encouraged me, even before I was a performer myself.

A Conversation Continued,
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In Pacific Overtures, we see one order confronted, unsettled, and eventually remade by another. Today, order of an alphabetical kind will serve simply as one of many possible routes through the musical: from Abe to zaibatsu, and from a floating kingdom to whatever comes Next…

Abe

Poor Lord Abe... Pacific Overtures keeps handing him problems that cannot be solved, then punishing him for failing to solve them. Manjiro brings warning of Perry, the Shogun’s court dithers — and then, in “Please Hello,” five Western powers arrive with fully armed battalions to remind him of their love… Historically, Abe Masahiro was the senior councillor who led the shogunate’s response to Perry, although the musical plays freely with offices and succession. Its Abe gradually comes to stand for the government itself: ceremonially important, theoretically powerful… but increasingly unable to finish a sentence.

Bowler Hat

Does anyone still wear a bowler hat? In Pacific Overtures, Kayama does. At first, it seems comic, out of place: a small, stiff, unmistakably Western object sitting atop a samurai. The pocket watch will follow, as will the cutaway coat, a pistol, spectacles, white wine. Sondheim lets the change happen item by item, and the slow creep is unsettling. Kayama has no Todd-like epiphany where he resolves to abandon Japan. He accommodates, acclimatizes, learns, makes himself useful. Each choice seems entirely reasonable. By the end of “A Bowler Hat,” those reasonable choices have remade the entire man.

Chrysanthemum Tea

The Shogun is ill, indecisive, seems incapable of responding to Perry, so his mother poisons him. Everything about “Chrysanthemum Tea” is decorous: the court, the serving ritual… Chrysanthemums carry associations of longevity and the Imperial House. Here, that promise is turned rather blackly on its head. Still, the tea is properly prepared. Government may be collapsing, but standards must be maintained.

Dejima

Dejima sounds like a theatrical invention: a fan-shaped artificial island, roughly the size of a city block, built for the Portuguese and occupied by the Dutch from 1641. But it was real. The island allowed Western goods and knowledge into Japan while keeping the Westerners themselves under extraordinary restriction. For two centuries, the Dutch accepted the indignities because the monopoly was profitable. Then Perry arrived and made the whole arrangement look quaint. The Dutch Admiral’s frantic “Don’t forget the Dutch!” carries that history inside it — a history we explored in depth in this recent essay.

Extraterritoriality

The only nine-syllable word in the Sondheim canon? Surely… Extraterritoriality meant that foreigners in Japan could remain beyond the reach of Japanese law, answering instead to their own consular authorities. A Russian sailor committing a crime in a Japanese city might therefore be tried by Russians, under Russian law. The Russian Admiral explains the arrangement in “Please Hello”: his countrymen, like his magnificent coat, are not to be touched. For more on this, see our full essay on the Russian Admiral.

Floating Kingdom

In the middle of the world, they float. In that single word, we sense both serenity and a kind of precariousness. Japan, balanced above depths and currents, believes the water has placed the world at a safe distance as Pacific Overtures begins. The opening number makes this existence sound complete: screens are painted, rice is planted, flowers are arranged, the moon is viewed. Elsewhere, kings burn and machines roar. Not here. But the same sea that protects Japan carries Perry towards it. One can float serenely only for as long as the current agrees…

Gunboat Diplomacy

In our essay series on “Please Hello” earlier this year, we became intimately acquainted with gunboat diplomacy. Perry, who carried a presidential letter, impressive gifts and proposals of friendship, also carried enough naval firepower to make refusing such friendship extremely unwise. In “Please Hello,” every explosion is larger than the last, while every Admiral continues to insist upon the peaceful and mutually beneficial nature of his visit.

Hanamichi

The hanamichi, literally the “flower path,” is a raised walkway running from a Kabuki stage through the audience. Depending on the scene, it can become a road, a corridor, a riverbank or the sea; an actor travelling along it seems to bring the fictional world through the spectators themselves. It’s too simple to call Pacific Overtures a Kabuki musical — Prince’s original production borrowed, adapted, and sometimes freely reinvented Japanese theatrical forms for Broadway. But the hanamichi is a useful reminder that history, not content to approach from a safe distance, can pass right beside us on its way to the stage.

Imperialism

Sadly, imperialism itself needs little explanation. What’s perhaps most noteworthy in Pacific Overtures (to use another “I” word) is how insidious it can be. In Pacific Overtures, it asks for a coaling port. Then an ambassador. Then another port, an extra clause, exemption from local law. Japan was never formally colonized by Western powers, but its sovereignty was steadily pared away through treaties it had little genuine freedom to refuse. And Japan’s eventual answer was to study the system thrust upon it very carefully. During the Meiji period, it built an empire of its own.

John Manjiro

It’s a name that has already crossed the Pacific before he enters the story. Born Nakahama Manjirō, he was shipwrecked as a teenager, rescued by an American whaling ship and educated in Massachusetts before returning to Japan in 1851. That made him extraordinarily useful when the country urgently needed knowledge of America. Pacific Overtures stretches his biography much further. Its Manjiro begins by loving the West, becomes Kayama’s friend, and ends as an anti-Western samurai who kills him. The real Manjiro did no such thing. Weidman turns him instead into one half of the show’s great reversal: Manjiro travels from West to East…

Kayama

… as Kayama travels from East to West. A samurai of little consequence, Kayama is made Prefect of Police and told to send Perry away — largely because more important men would prefer not to die trying. Kayama survives by recruiting Manjiro, covering the shore with mats, and building a Treaty House so the Americans can land without technically setting foot on Japanese soil.

Lion Dance

For a moment, the Japanese believe they have won. Perry has delivered his letter inside a temporary Treaty House; the building and its mats can now be destroyed, leaving the ancestral soil symbolically untouched. Then Perry reappears as a lion. Lion dances occur in several East Asian traditions and may promise luck, protection, or purification. The original Pacific Overtures twists the form into an American victory lap, ending in a flag-waving cakewalk. Perry, having entered Japan, almost immediately begins taking possession of the theatrical language used to represent him. Later productions removed the dance — but what a remarkable dramatic conceit.

Meiji Restoration

“Restoration” is doing quite a lot of heavy lifting here. In 1868, political authority in Japan was indeed formally restored to the Emperor Meiji after centuries of shogunal rule, but this was not a country turning back the clock. It centralized, industrialized, built a modern army and dismantled the samurai class. Pacific Overtures reaches this vast upheaval at tremendous speed. The Emperor reclaims power, orders the samurai to put aside their swords, and announces that Japan will master the methods of the West. Something old is restored in order to authorize something radically new.

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Next

“Next” is a tiny word that refuses reflection. Pacific Overtures’ finale rushes from 1853 to the Japan of 1976 (sometimes later in subsequent productions) through an onslaught of transactions and technological progress. Earlier in the show, a bow can take several seconds and a treaty meeting can be reconstructed from the memories of three partial witnesses. Now there is scarcely time to register one development before another arrives.

Overtures

Few Sondheim titles work harder. We register “overture” as being the music before the drama begins; it is also (more literally here, of course) an approach or proposal offered by one party to another. And “Pacific,” which places us geographically, also subtly seems to want to assure us that those overtures will be peaceful. Perry uses that very description in his journal, even as he reserves the right to impose his peaceful proposals by force.

Perry

And what of Perry himself? He is everywhere in Pacific Overtures, even before he appears. He is a rumor brought by Manjiro, a presidential letter, four black shapes on the horizon. The historical Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry entered Edo Bay with four ships in 1853 and returned with a larger squadron in 1854. The resulting Convention of Kanagawa opened two ports for supplies and assistance to shipwrecked sailors, although full commercial trade came later. The musical wisely declines to make Perry a rounded protagonist. Seen from the Japanese shore, he is closer to a natural phenomenon: smoke, noise, enormous scale.

Quake

“Quake” is not only here because every A to Z needs help with Q. Well... there might be a little of that. But while the various Admirals pile demand upon demand in “Please Hello,” Abe tries to explain that Japan has suffered a quake, a flood and a famine. Nobody is interested. And the detail has a grim historical basis. The Ansei earthquakes of 1854 and 1855 devastated parts of Japan during the treaty period; a tsunami at Shimoda even wrecked the Russian frigate Diana while Admiral Putyatin was negotiating nearby. The country was dealing with natural and diplomatic catastrophe at once.

Reciter

The Reciter begins the musical with his forehead touching the floor. From there he rises to introduce Japan, guide us through its history and, in the original production, become Shogun and Emperor too. “Someone in a Tree” is, in some ways, a direct challenge to his authority. There is no trusted Japanese record of the treaty meeting, so history must be assembled from a boy peering through branches and a warrior listening beneath the floorboards. The Reciter, telling the story, cannot make the story whole.

Sakoku

Sakoku, usually translated as “closed country,” describes the Tokugawa restrictions on foreign trade, religion and movement. Japan was not truly sealed, however. Dutch and Chinese traders came through Nagasaki, while other relationships continued through Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom and the northern borderlands. The serene, untouched country we encounter in Pacific Overtures’ opening number is partly telling a story about itself. The outside world has not entirely disappeared, but it has been channelled through a handful of heavily guarded gates.

Tamate

In the original staging of “There Is No Other Way,” Tamate moved silently while two Observers sang about her and voiced her thoughts. Soon-Tek Oh played the role under the production’s Kabuki-derived convention of casting men as women. By the time Kayama returns, unexpectedly alive and newly important, Tamate has killed herself in the belief that he is dead. The opening of Japan has already claimed a life, and no treaty records it.

Ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world,” were paintings and, most famously, woodblock prints depicting actors, courtesans, landscapes and the pleasures of Edo life. Their bold outlines and flattened, framed spaces became hugely influential outside Japan. Boris Aronson drew deeply upon this visual world for the original Pacific Overtures: screens open onto further screens, scenes appear like prints, and Perry’s ship unfolds into a great black image.

VOC

Behind the Dutch presence at Dejima stood the VOC: the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company. The VOC, which traded with Japan from 1609 and moved onto Dejima in 1641, was gone by the time of Perry, dissolved in 1799 under the weight of debt and corruption, so the Dutch Admiral is not literally its representative. He does, however, inherit its view of the world. Countries are ports, cultures are catalogues of saleable goods, and sovereignty is a lesser concern.

Weidman

Let’s not forget that Pacific Overtures began with John Weidman. While at Yale Law School, having majored in East Asian history at Harvard, he wrote to Hal Prince with an idea for a play about the opening of Japan. Prince commissioned it, then decided it should become a musical and brought in Sondheim. The resulting book, with additional material by fellow “W” Hugh Wheeler, is as daring as the score: the Japanese speak formal, elegant English; the Westerners are reduced to mangled national caricatures. Again and again, Weidman changes the scale and ownership of history.

Xavier

Walk with me here… Francis Xavier never appears in Pacific Overtures. He had been dead for three hundred years by the time Perry arrived. Yet the Jesuit missionary, who landed at Kagoshima in 1549, belongs to the history buried beneath the show’s opening decree. Portuguese trade and Catholic evangelism came to Japan together, and the growth of Christianity gradually became associated with foreign influence and divided political allegiance. Persecution, prohibition and the eventual expulsion of the Portuguese followed. Xavier did not single-handedly cause sakoku, any more than Christianity alone did. His mission does help explain, though, why the show’s Japan remembers its previous welcome to foreigners as something dangerous.

Yokohama

The Dutch Admiral almost loses Yokohama halfway through saying it. He wants two ports, one of them for cocoa, but must pause to remember what the place is called: Yoko—ah, yes—Hama. Two centuries of Dutch contact with Japan have apparently not encouraged him to learn much geography beyond Nagasaki. At the time of Perry’s arrival, Yokohama was a small settlement. Its opening as a treaty port in 1859 transformed it at remarkable speed into a center of international trade and foreign residence.

Zaibatsu

Zaibatsu is possibly the least immediately theatrical word in this alphabet. It refers to the family-controlled industrial and financial conglomerates — Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Yasuda — that became immensely powerful as Japan modernized. Their banks, factories, trading companies and heavy industries helped the country compete with the West and supported its later imperial expansion. The word never appears in Pacific Overtures, but lurks just beneath the surface of “Next.” How satisfying, though, to end both alphabet and show together.

As Dunkirk begins, Christopher Nolan sets three clocks running. “The Mole,” his story of soldiers waiting on the beach, will unfold across one week. “The Sea,” following the civilian boat Moonstone across the Channel, will take one day. “The Air,” with three Spitfire pilots flying toward Dunkirk, will last one hour.

Now. Later. Soon.

In A Little Night Music, Stephen Sondheim sets three clocks running too. The stakes are, it’s fair to say, different. In Dunkirk, the survival of hundreds of thousands of soldiers is on the line; in Sondheim’s “Now/Later/Soon” sequence, a spectacularly unfulfilled Swedish household is our field of conflict. But for Sondheim and Nolan alike, the formal challenge is similar: how do you make three interrelated experiences of time both legible and dramatically persuasive?

Nolan’s timelines begin at different distances from the same destination. The week contains the day; the day contains the hour. And crucially, time behaves (or seems to behave) differently in each.

On land, it is protracted and repetitive. Tommy queues for evacuation, boards a ship, returns to the beach, boards another. Escape repeatedly comes within reach, only for the sea to deposit him more or less where he began. The soldiers are waiting for something to happen, and the week threatens to become shapeless.

At sea, there is more forward momentum. Time is attached to movement. Mr Dawson and his sons leave England in the morning; with every hour, the Moonstone draws closer to Dunkirk.

In the air, time is a rapidly diminishing resource. Farrier’s damaged fuel gauge leaves him calculating what remains, each encounter with the enemy using up minutes he cannot recover. Farrier’s Spitfire is itself a kind of countdown clock.

A day, a week, an hour… These are objective measurements, but our experience of them is radically transformed by their superimposition in the film. We see how a single week on that beach, at that time, feels almost unendurable: repetitive, even static at times, but also continually on the verge of catastrophic rupture. In the air, the opposite pressure applies: the hour is stripped down to an impossibly tight sequence of urgent decisions. And as we take in these elastic extremes — expansion at one end, compression at the other — within an intercutting 106-minute film, our own sense of duration begins to warp.

In A Little Night Music, the clocks are less reliable still. “Now,” “later,” and “soon” are not measurements at all. And each word, as soon as Sondheim assigns it to a character, begins to slip. In a few short minutes, Sondheim expands an instant, telescopes a lifetime, and holds the future forever just out of reach.

Let’s look in detail at how this works.

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Note: This conversation took place before Ariana Grande’s decision to withdraw from the forthcoming Barbican production of Sunday in the Park with George was announced.

It’s so good to speak to you. You have such a deep and longstanding relationship with Sondheim’s work… Was your hope always that Sondheim would be so central to your creative life?

I chase it. I actively chase it. I first started listening to Sondheim when I was about 14. At my school, there was a little group of us, led by Matt Ryan, who’s now a director. He was 16, maybe, and he started a Sondheim group. I hadn’t heard of Sondheim, but my two solos — if you could call them that, because they were little snippets — were “Send In the Clowns” and “Getting Married Today.” And we did a 10-minute medley from Pacific Overtures. There were about eight of us, including the brilliant singer-actress Clare Burt and my best friend Johnny Barr.

That was my introduction to Sondheim, and I remember thinking at 14, gosh, this stuff’s really interesting. Honestly, I started listening to him because I wanted to impress Matt Ryan. I wanted him to know I was taking our little Sondheim group seriously.

You have those moments, don’t you, where you’re listening to something and it’s like a penny drops. Something happens. And I think I’ve only ever had that with Sondheim. You suddenly just get it, and... Well, you’re lost forever then.

But my proper, proper gateway into him was, like you, Sweeney Todd. My friend Russell came round with a three-cassette box, which I’ve still got, and we sat in my bedroom and turned the lights down. He said, “This is going to blow your mind.” I was like, “Okay…” The box came with a lovely booklet with pictures and the lyrics to follow. And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was like a bomb going off inside me. It was extraordinary. Extraordinary.

With Sunday returning to London next year, has all the anticipation brought back memories of your production, and of playing Dot?

Sunday is just one of those shows, isn’t it? I’m excited for the production next year. I mean, I probably will never be able to get a ticket. But I’d love to see it. I think Ariana Grande will be so brilliant. She’s a top actor. I can see her Dot being amazing — and actually, her Marie, I think, will be amazing too.

In 2005, I was doing Guys and Dolls, and Graham MacDuff was in the cast with me. His wife is Anna-Jane Casey. We were just chatting in the wings, and he said, “What are you doing this weekend?” He said, “I’m going to go and see AJ in Sunday in the Park with George.” And I went, “What? Where’s that happening?” He said, “A little theatre, a chocolate factory…” I said, “Who’s playing George?” He said, “Daniel Evans.”

I knew Daniel, and I rate him so highly, on so many levels. He’s extraordinary. When he sings, something so beautiful happens. So I was like, “Oh my god. I’m going to go.” So I said to Jane Krakowski, who was playing Adelaide, “Do you want to come with me to see Sunday?” She said yes. So we went along, and it must have been only their second or third preview, because it wasn’t full. It wasn’t the smash it later turned into. We sat down. I was with Ray, my other half, and Jane’s other half.

Even thinking about it now, it was so beautiful, the way it had been reimagined. The stage was a white box. Daniel used to come on with a pad and a pencil, and he’d start to sketch on a blank canvas. What he was drawing came up behind him, so you’d see the pencil drawing as Act 1 went on, and then you’d zoom in on little bits he was working on. It was so beautiful. We didn’t have the cardboard cut-outs they’d had on Broadway, and in the Stephen Pimlott production. It was just this beautiful design they’d managed to create, all done by an artist. It was mind-blowing.

But for me, what happened in Act 2, which I think is the tricky act, was managed so beautifully. I was blown away. You never actually saw the Chromolume, for example. There was a lot of that going on. You’d see what it was like through watching the actors’ faces watching it.

The show was extraordinary. I was ugly-crying, making noises. Jane was too. Sounds were coming out of me I didn’t recognise. I’d never cried like that in the theatre. It was a six-piece band, so delicate and beautiful. I waited to say hello to Dan afterwards.

And what a twist of fate — AJ, wonderfully, got pregnant, but that meant she couldn’t do the West End transfer. The producer asked if I’d like to come in and audition. I said yes. So I was in this position where I’d seen the show, knew how beautiful it was, and knew what I might bring to it. I loved it. It was heaven. And talking to Steve and James Lapine about it, I could actually talk to them about what happened visually, because I’d seen it. Daniel hadn’t been able to see the magic happening behind him. And it was all so clever. It was never fighting with George, just adding. You could see inside his mind, almost.

And stepping into a production you’d already seen and loved, when it came to finding your own Dot, did that create a certain pressure?

Well, it’s a weird one, isn’t it? We recorded the album before I’d even done a day’s rehearsal. But because I’d been singing it in my front room forever, it was kind of in my body. The beautiful thing about Sondheim is that it’s quite hard work when you’re learning it, but once you’ve learned it, it takes care of you so beautifully. Everything is written correctly. There’s not a false note. You never think, why aren’t I doing this or that? It just feels like, if you were speaking it, that’s how it would go. He’s so brilliant at that.

So yes, there was work involved, but also just a joy in getting to do it. It’s like what people say about footballers on a massive stage: it must be frightening to play a World Cup final. And you go, well, no, because this is what I’ve always dreamt of. To play any role in a Sondheim is always like sitting in a fantastically comfortable chair. With Sondheim, you don’t have to do much. Just don’t get in the way of the writing. That’s the thing I’ve always felt with his work, and I know Dan felt the same. We just served the writing — because when it’s so beautifully written, you let it sing, you let it speak to the audience, and it will have the desired effect. The less tricksy you are with it, the better.

Do you have a clear memory of the first time you met Sondheim himself?

Absolutely. He was my rock star. I couldn’t believe it. I was 20, and I was playing Young Sally in Follies. I was really struggling, because I’m not a dancer. It was the mirror number, and I was falling over all the time. But I remember having a chat with him during the tech. There was a doorway from the stage into the auditorium — most theatres have one, near where the bottom box is — and he was coming from the stalls onto the stage. We met in the middle. I said, “I just want to say it’s really amazing to be working with you, and oh god, I really loved Sweeney Todd. It really blows my mind.” We had a conversation about Sweeney Todd, and how it broke his heart, because he’d written it as a love letter to London, and it didn’t work as well in London, and he couldn’t quite understand why. And I’m standing there nodding, thinking, I’m just chatting with Stephen Sondheim! He was in a jolly, lovely, happy mood.

Of course, I’ve worked with him six times since, and sometimes he wasn’t as jolly. You’d think, okay, put your working head on. He was a tough cookie. His notes were always brilliant, but he didn’t mess about. If you got something wrong, he’d be straight on you: no, it’s not that, it’s this. The lyrics were everything to him.

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Since that Follies production, have you been conscious of the place Sondheim occupies in British theatre changing over time?

Oh, I was very much aware of how his work was becoming more and more… I wouldn’t say mainstream, because it’s still quite niche, but niche in the best possible way. People want to do it, and they want to put his work on in the most prestigious theatres. The best directors want to work on it, because there’s so much there. His work is everlasting. It never loses its impact.

Also, what I think is so beautiful about Steve, and what he’s left us all with, is that he was so brilliant about not being precious. He wanted his words said right, of course — but he was always open to a director’s interpretation, and I think he really enjoyed how European theatre dealt with his work, how we’d throw it around and wrestle it to the ground, and different flowers would pop up as a result. I think he really enjoyed seeing what people were going to do with it.

I think he enjoyed how British and European productions weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty with the material, and didn’t treat his work with kid gloves. Directors were really up for going, “No, get angry, really be angry. You hate being in the painting, you’re furious with that person.” It wasn’t polite. It was like: “Really, get out of my way, I’m sweating here, and he’s awful, and it smells...” We really threw ourselves into that part of the show, and I think he found that hilarious.

I wonder if your Merrily is maybe a particularly good example of that. Some of our readers might only be familiar with that production [directed by Maria Friedman] from its eventual Broadway transfer, but of course it started life with you in London. Do you recall the feeling you’re describing, of being able to be bolder with that show?

Oh, yeah. The brilliant thing was that I think it was James Lapine’s idea initially to cast older people. I think that bore great fruit for everybody. I think James was the first person to play with that idea of casting people the age they’d actually be by the end of the show, rather than at the beginning. It was a great idea.

When I heard I was doing it, I was going through quite a shitty patch of work. Things weren’t going great for me. I found out, just on the grapevine, that Maria was doing Merrily at the Chocolate Factory, and casting it with older people. I thought, do you know what? All she can say is no. And that’s not a bad thing. So I texted her — I said, “Look, I don’t know, but can I be seen for it? I love the show so much, it means a lot to me, and I could see myself doing it. Will you give me a shot?” And she did. She was really meticulous about her casting for everybody. She made me work hard for it, and I did. So it was really lovely when eventually she said, “Okay, come and play Mary.” I was like, “Oh my god!” It was fabulous to do.

And she’d played Mary herself too, so I thought it might be tricky. Of course it wasn’t. She really pushed all three of us to go to ugly, extreme places, which I think bore fruit: how broken Mary was at the beginning, how messed-up she was, the drink, the nihilism, hating herself, so sad and lost. And of course, by the end, when you see her completely joyful, meeting Frank, with just a little twinkle, you could hear the audience crying. It was beautiful. We had a great time doing it. It’s a shame we didn’t make an album of it, but there’d just recently been James’s album of the one he’d done with Lin-Manuel — they’d done it the year before, so that never happened. But Maria kept plugging away about wanting to get that production to New York, and she got it there, and it did brilliantly. Quite right.

I actually got tickets for Dan Radcliffe to see the show when we were at the Pinter. He had come to see our Sunday in the Park with George when we were in New York, and he was lovely, and then we got him tickets to come and see Merrily. It’s funny to think of that: he was in my dressing room going, “Wow, it’s amazing, I’d love to play that part…” And eventually, he did.

He’s a brilliant theatre animal, Dan Radcliffe. I love that he’s thrown himself so beautifully into theatre, and is doing so well at it. He’s such a nice guy, and he has that lovely, open quality that Dan Evans has too. That kind of clarity, that human quality of being so open, is beautiful for Sondheim, because it just washes through those types of people. They’re not getting in the way of it, they’re just letting it in.

Are you able to put into words what makes Sondheim’s women especially so rewarding to play?

He writes so brilliantly for women. No one in the musical theatre genre writes better, which is another reason I love doing his stuff. His women are complicated, they’re funny — they can be screaming with laughter one minute, and giving someone the best put-down ever written the next. They’re never easy. I love that he saw that and could write so beautifully for women, because so many people can’t. A lot of the time in musical theatre, you’re either an angel or a whore, basically. It just relies on singing prettily.

But look at the lyric for “Rose’s Turn.” It’s extraordinary — to trust a singer to do that, and to write that. She’s so ugly and desperate and sad, but defiant, and then hilarious, then self-deprecating. It covers everything, and it’s groundbreaking, because no one was writing lyrics for women like that. We were always “come over here and sit on my lap, I think you’re fabulous” or “I feel so sad.” Boring. These women are smart, knowing, brutal — everything. They’re brilliant to play.

And these roles grow with you throughout your life too, don’t they?

I know exactly what you mean. I’ve done Into the Woods twice. I played Cinderella at the Donmar, and the Baker’s Wife at Regent’s Park. I auditioned for the Witch once — not the one that’s just been on at the Bridge, another production. I thought, I could have a go at that. And I joked with James Lapine that I’m saving Jack’s Mother for my retirement. I look at those parts and think, I could do something cute with that when I’m about 75. That would be lovely. That’s the dream, isn’t it — to move through the shows.

But again, that’s why everyone wants to do his work, because there’s so much fantastic stuff in there. It’s always rewarding, and you never get to the end of it. You never, with Sondheim, ever go, oh yeah, I know what I’m doing. Because you don’t. “Everybody Loves Louis” used to sometimes break me, because she’s putting on this brave front of happiness, and I’ve moved on, everything’s fine — when of course she hasn’t. “You lose things, and then you choose things... And George has George, and I need someone…” It’s just heaven to play, because the characters are never quite settled. Never.

The whole point of a musical should be that the music pushes the narrative forward, and nobody does that better than Sondheim. Each song is a further delve into a personality, into the way they’re thinking, or how they’re growing. Speechless. Speechless. It’s brilliant.

Thank you so much, Jenna. It’s been wonderful to talk.

My pleasure. Sondheim was my first love, and I’m still madly in love. He was so brilliant, and his collaborators were so brilliant, and he loved them so dearly. I get emotional just thinking about it. There was a time I sat next to Steve in a theatre. He said, “Hi, how are you?” And I just remember going home to Ray, my other half, and saying, “It just means so much to me that my absolute hero knows I exist in the world.

I’ve shown him my heart by doing his work. And he was always so positive and appreciative of what I’d done. For me, that’s my career. My life goal. That and my child pottering around the house singing Sondheim. There’s nothing and no one better.

Children and art…

Exactly.

A Conversation Continued,
exclusively for Sondheim Hub members

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Sunday in the Park with George, Act 2. Curtain up.

A hundred years have passed during the intermission. Seurat’s painting is complete, his subjects forever fixed in place. They appear just as they did 15 minutes (or a century) ago, arranged in their famous tableau. And they are not happy.

“It’s hot up here,” they tell us, before cataloguing their various grievances. Franz dislikes his profile. Louise wants her glasses. Celeste #2 is aggrieved that the soldiers have forgotten her; the soldier is more concerned by the weight of his helmet. While they sweat, we can marvel at Sondheim serving up two perfect rhymes for “It’s hot and it’s monotonous” in “The soldiers have forgotten us” and “These helmets weigh a lot on us.”

But when their separate complaints converge, Seurat’s subjects describe the true source of their torment: “No change up here / Forever.” Heat might be unpleasant, but heat without the possibility of relief is hell.

“It’s Hot Up Here” belongs to a long and surprisingly rich tradition. It is hot, too, in New York tenements and backstage alleys, in drought-stricken towns and congressional chambers, in Saigon bars and the streets of Washington Heights. And rarely, if ever, is musical-theatre heat merely heat. More often, it passes into the bloodstream of the drama.

In Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, the sweltering summer evening helps to create the titular scene itself. Heat pushes the residents of a Manhattan tenement into a shared dramatic space, a pressure cooker in which all encounter the tragedy to come. “I just take off my corset and let myself spread,” announces Mrs Fiorentino, the heat already serving to dissolve the boundary between private discomfort and something more public.

The opening of 110 in the Shade performs a similar piece of atmospheric scene-setting on a broader canvas. Three Point, a small town in the American Southwest, is caught in a drought. “Underneath, the earth is burning”; the crops are bad and the land is dry. Overhead there is “not a cloud across the sky,” nor even “a sign on the horizon.” In the opening number, “Gonna Be Another Hot Day,” the townspeople imagine “what a revelation” rain will be:

And the whole darn town
Will pour into the street
To feel it streaming down.

That opening number gives the whole show its condition of want: land waiting for water, Lizzie Curry waiting to feel beautiful and loved. Drought and longing are established as versions of each other, and a travelling con man will claim that he can summon rain. In 110 in the Shade, it’s the heat that makes the hope necessary.

Then there is the sweltering congressional chamber of 1776. The musical opens with John Adams demanding a vote for independence and the other delegates demanding that he sit down. “Someone oughta open up a window,” they cry: it is ninety degrees and “hot as hell in Philadelphia.” But the windows cannot be opened because there are too many flies. This is funny, but it also establishes the show’s central dramatic problem with remarkable economy. Everything is stuck: the air, the Congress, the independence resolution.

Jason Robert Brown’s Parade provides a less literal variation. In “How Can I Call This Home?”, Leo Frank goes to bed hoping that Atlanta will disappear like a dream. “But then,” he sings, “the sun rises in Atlanta again.” Brooklyn would mean freedom from “magnolia trees / And endless sunshine.” Whatever else the song reveals about Leo’s contempt and defensiveness, the brightness of Georgia is, in his eyes, a kind of punishment: the Southern sun sharpens his sense that he is living in a foreign land.

Heat does not only irritate, of course. Musical-theatre temperature has always carried a sexual charge.

In the 1933 revue As Thousands Cheer, Moss Hart and Irving Berlin built their scenes around the contents of a newspaper: political stories, society columns, comic strips and, in “Heat Wave,” the weather report. Ethel Waters introduced a song in which a heat wave blows into town from Martinique in the form of a woman whose dancing sends the temperature soaring. “Her anatomy / Made the mercury / Jump to ninety-three.” Its “tropical” fantasy belongs recognizably to its period, but the conceit has proved durable.

Cole Porter makes the relationship explicit in “Too Darn Hot.” As Act 2 of Kiss Me, Kate begins, the cast and crew of the show-within-the-show are spending their own interval in the alley behind the theatre. It is, we hear, too hot for romantic activity: Porter even calls upon the recently published Kinsey Report as corroborating evidence. Yet the greater the company’s insistence that the heat has made physical exertion impossible, the more physically spectacular the number becomes.

The lyric itself is anything but languid. Porter keeps pointing to new forms of frustrated activity: “call on my baby,” “give my all to my baby,” “play ball with my baby.” Paul would like to “coo” and “pitch the woo,” before conceding: “But brother, you pitch my baby tonight.” A song about the body’s refusal to perform becomes itself a feat of performance.

The contrast with Sunday is irresistible. Both songs begin Act 2. “It’s too darn hot up here,” they collectively say. Both songs are sung by figures who have been serving someone else’s artistic construction: the company performing The Taming of the Shrew; the parkgoers arranged forever inside George’s painting. Both allow those figures to complain about the physical cost of the spectacle. But where “Too Darn Hot” releases its bodies into dance, “It’s Hot Up Here” centers on bodies that are forever unable to move.

Sondheim had explored the meanings contained within the word “hot” decades earlier. In West Side Story’s “Tonight (Quintet),” Anita looks forward to Bernardo’s arrival:

He’ll walk in hot and tired,
So what?
Don’t matter if he’s tired,
As long as he’s hot.

Three decades later, “The Heat Is On in Saigon” makes that metaphor considerably darker. In Miss Saigon’s opening sequence, American soldiers enter the Dreamland club during the last days before the city’s fall. The heat is sexual, commercial and political, all at once: “If I’m your pin-up, I’ll melt all your brass,” says Gigi. Women are being sold, and danger presses in. “But still at midnight the party goes on. / A good-bye party in hell.” The heat is certainly on, and time is running out.

Perhaps the most heat-soaked musical of all, though, is In the Heights. Take “Piragua,” a vendor’s cry offering scraped ice and syrup to a neighbourhood in need of relief:

It’s hotter than the islands are today
And Mr. Softee’s trying to shut me down,
But I keep scraping by ‘til I can say:
“Hey, ‘pana! I run this town!”

The Piragua Guy’s livelihood rises with the temperature, even as he competes with his mechanically refrigerated arch-nemesis Mister Softee. When the power fails, the balance shifts. The same blackout that leaves the neighbourhood sweltering gives the man with a block of ice his commercial triumph.

But the Heights heat is not confined to that refrain. It hangs over the whole show: over its streets and stoops, its crowded rooms, its tempers and romances. During the blackout, the neighborhood becomes simultaneously more fragmented and more communal. People lose one another in the darkness; fireworks help them find their way.

In “Sunrise,” the morning after the blackout, Nina teaches Benny Spanish:

Calor.
Heat.
Anoche.
Last night.
Dolor.
Pain.

Soon they arrive at ámame: love me. Their courtship draws together heat, pain, and love into something real, earned, and precious — as indeed does In the Heights itself.

Back to Seurat’s subjects, on their eternal Sunday afternoon.

Dot, as ever, occupies a space slightly apart. While the others squabble, she addresses the absent George:

They’ll argue till they fade
And whisper things and grunt.
But thank you for the shade,
And putting me in front.

“Thank you for the shade” reaches back to Dot’s first lines in the show: why does George always sit in the shade while she has to stand in the sun? At the time, he appears not to hear her. The finished painting suggests that he did.

It is a characteristically ambiguous act of love. George notices Dot closely enough to preserve what she wanted, but only inside the work for which he neglected her. He cannot put her first. But he can put her in front forever.

Musical-theatre heat usually contains the possibility, however remote it might seem, of change. Evening will come. Rain may fall. A window might finally open. The lights will return. Desire will either be consummated or cooled. There can be no such relief in the painted purgatory of La Grande Jatte. Seurat’s figures are simultaneously alive in their discomfort and dead in their inability to escape it. They have been blessed with immortality and doomed to a two-dimensional hell.

We should, at least, let them have the last word:

The outward show
Of bliss up here
Is disappear-
Ing dot by dot

And it’s hot!

Throughout Assassins, the Balladeer takes the lives of presidential killers and fixes them in song. John Wilkes Booth gets a ballad. So do Leon Czolgosz and Charles Guiteau. Events that might sprawl messily across history are given verses and refrains, beginnings and ends.

The Balladeer’s job is an old one.

As Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens, the bard Phemius (Travis Scott) stands atop a table at Ithaca’s royal palace, surrounded by the heaving mass of Penelope’s suitors. He pounds his staff on the table and cries out:

A face... A fleet... A war... A man... A thought... A trick... A trick to break the walls of Troy... and burn it screaming to the ground!

For thousands of years, we’ve turned to these kinds of figures to make the world around us legible — to mold recent, chaotic, even violent history into a shape we can make sense of. And, with one eye (cyclops-like) toward Sondheim’s work, it’s a tradition worth looking at more closely…

Because legibility is not the same thing as neutrality.

Phemius does not offer a sober accounting of the Trojan War. His is a language of montage: face, fleet, war, man, trick. He compresses vast armies and ten grinding years into a handful of images, chosen for their force. Before we meet Odysseus the man, we encounter Odysseus the myth, the legend.

The Balladeer in Assassins performs a similar act of compression. His title suggests impartiality, but he is anything but neutral. Booth wants Lincoln’s murder understood as a consequential political act; the Balladeer strips away the grand justification and supplies a rather less flattering verdict.

But traitors just get jeers and boos,
Not visits to their graves.
While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews,
Because of you, John,
Now gets only raves.

Assassins understands that any act, any event, is not enough. Immortality requires form: a story that can be repeated, a song that can pass from voice to voice. And throughout history, balladeers and bards have held the power to provide it.

Homer’s Odyssey is constructed around such acts.

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It’s so good to talk to you. Sondheim and Shakespeare have been two great touchstones throughout your life, and I’d love to explore both of those relationships today. Do you recall the first time you were in the same room as Sondheim?

I couldn’t not have been aware of it, because we were at the Donmar, in previews for Merrily We Roll Along. He’d seen the first preview, we were doing a work session the next day, and he walked on stage. We all applauded. And he said, “It’s okay, everyone. God has arrived.” We weren’t sure whether he was being ironic or not.

We had the most amazing week with him, because he would take us off one by one to have tutorials. I had a one-to-one with him on “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” which I’ll never forget as long as I live. It was just the specificity of it. There’s nothing like hearing it from the living writer, is there? And I’m especially drawn to that writer, because I think he writes like an actor.

Was it Sondheim specifically that drew you into a closer relationship with musicals as an actor?

I trained doing a classical theatre course at Guildhall — and while I sang as a teenager, in school and Eisteddfodau, these Welsh cultural festivals, I never thought I would sing professionally, ever. It was not in the cards at all. In fact, I would say that I harboured a view of musicals as being frivolous.

My first musical was Candide at the National Theatre. Of course, Sondheim’s in there too, because he wrote some of the lyrics, alongside seven other people. So when they asked me to audition for Candide, I couldn’t really believe it. I went out and got the Leonard Bernstein recording and said, “I can’t do this. That’s not how I sing.” And they said, “No, no, no. We want an actor.” So I had singing lessons.

And then, during the run of Candide, I heard they were doing Merrily at the Donmar. I asked my agent whether they would submit me — because I think of all the scores, it’s hard to have a favourite, but this one had touched me the most at that point. So I was absolutely thrilled when I was offered it.

Sunday in the Park with George is returning to London next year, of course — and you are our most recent West End George. How do you reflect on that role today? Is there any sense of ownership at all, even years later?

I think it’s dangerous to feel ownership, because it’s not yours. You were privileged to have George inhabit you for a while. And actually, when that production first started, it was a conversation between me and David Babani [Artistic Director, Menier Chocolate Factory]. We both happened to be in Chicago and we went to see the painting. This was before the production was even a twinkling in his eye. I said to him, “God, this is a part I’d love to play.” And then about a year later, he was asking me whether I would meet the director, and would I like to play it? It was a no-brainer: yes.

So, while there’s no ownership, these roles definitely live in you. I definitely feel such a deep connection to that score and that part. Having said all of that, I can’t wait to see Jonny [Bailey] play George. I think he’ll be amazing, and he’s an actor I love. I went to see Jonathan Groff in Merrily on Broadway, and saw Daniel Radcliffe playing the part I’d played — and that was surreal, because you’re seeing what’s in front of you and you’re also remembering your own experience. That makes for such a rich viewing.

So no, I don’t feel like George is mine. I feel like he was mine for a time, and that’s how it goes. Now he’ll be Jonny’s, and I can’t wait to go and support.

The Menier Chocolate Factory, where your Sunday began its life, is such a beautifully intimate space. For people who might be less familiar with the Menier, or with the idea of a Sunday at such close range, could you talk a little about what that intimacy offered the show, and you as a performer?

It undoubtedly intensified it. It meant that people were less than five feet away from us, and so the audience was almost in the painting at the end of Act 1. The band was to the side, we were all crammed in, and the Menier has quite a low ceiling. There was a challenge one night, I remember, because there’s a gay club next door. Especially during “Lesson #8” in Act 2, sometimes late on a Friday or Saturday, you could hear them starting to warm up. The beats would start coming through the wall…

But the intensity of George, the intensity of Dot, the intensity of their relationship together, and then the intensity of George’s search in Act 2… All I can say is this word that keeps coming to me: intensity. Here’s this lost artist trying to reconnect with his own art, but also with his heritage. And interestingly, when we transferred to Wyndham’s, where we were in a proscenium arch, within a frame, the production probably sat at its most beautiful in that frame. The audience there was five times the size, and I sat happily with that. We did miss a little of the intimacy, but we managed to transfer it. By the time we went to Studio 54, playing to ten times the size of the original audience, I really missed that intimacy from the Menier.

I think you’re right to focus on the space, because the space gave the show a depth charge, I think, that was emotional. It was so up close and personal.

There’s something about the original production of Sunday that feels so whole and unchangeable, especially because it’s preserved on that PBS tape. As you were finding your own George, were you conscious of needing to get through to something new while still somehow honoring what came before?

Oh, that’s a really good question, because if you’re not careful, you can get totally intimidated. In the same way that I couldn’t sing like the person on the Candide CD, I can’t sing like Mandy. Also, I’m not as tall as Mandy. So you have to find your own way through. I really believe this: you don’t inhabit characters, they inhabit you. If I was the puppet, George was the hand, and I just had to let him do his work on me, or through me, and hope I’d be doing something new.

Before we started rehearsals, I didn’t want to watch the video. Ever since I knew I was doing the show, I’d stopped watching it. And there came a moment where I also stopped listening to the CD, because I didn’t want to be too influenced. I think as an actor, you have to put aside every past production of a show and just start again. You have to have a beginner’s mentality.

But I agree with you, that video is astounding — because of the design, because of the casting, because of everything coming together. It actually helped that we were doing something very different with the design, because Sam Buntrock, our director, had this brilliant idea of using digital animation — pixels, as a kind of modern equivalent of dots. That was a very neat thing, and in the early days for video projection, too.

I’ll tell you a funny thing. I had a sense one night at Studio 54 that Mandy was in. And he was. He came to my room afterwards, and we both cried together. I was saying to him — interestingly, in relation to your last question — what an honour it’s been to take on this role that is his. And he was saying, “No, no, no, it’s yours.” The sense of a baton being passed was very moving to me. He’s an actor I admire so much.

And how lovely to think that next year, you’ll be able to to pass that baton on…

To Jonny? Oh yeah, I hope so. I really hope so.

So many people reading this will have seen Sondheim’ 80th birthday Prom, either at the time or on YouTube more recently. You were such a big part of that celebration. I wondered especially how it felt to sing “Move On” with Jenna [Russell] again, two years after you were on Broadway together.

Well, I’ve got to watch that I don’t weep, because there are these lines in the show… “We will always belong together.” That’s very true of me and Jenna — and of Anna-Jane, who originated Dot at the Chocolate Factory, too. There’s a sense that wherever you are in life, there’s always this person that you went through this thing with, whether that was the originating production at the Chocolate Factory, or indeed then the West End and Broadway.

The Sondheim Prom was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life, because the Albert Hall was full: more than 5,000 people. There was a 60-piece orchestra, it was live on the BBC, and Sondheim was in the house. There couldn’t be more pressure. And some of it I was singing for the first time, like the stuff from The Frogs with Simon Russell Beale at the beginning.

So in a way, coming back to Sunday during that moment was… God, it’s so hard to describe the feeling. It was a return to something. I suppose it’s tied up with those lyrics, as George is reaching for this connection and having this breakthrough, seeing her ghost, or however you want to interpret it, that something is reconnecting. And at that moment, Jenna and I were reconnecting.

And then “Sunday” itself… I mean, it’s no coincidence that it came second in your World Cup. There’s something in the piece that goes beyond reason. It’s not rational. It’s emotional. When those chords come in, in the introduction, something happens. It’s subliminal, and yet not.

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I think there was something else as well, for me and Jenna, because we got to sing it at the Tonys, so we’d already sung it at Radio City Music Hall. That was also highly pressurised, live, a full house, and all those stars watching. And here were us two Brits, over there on Broadway. So there was also something about us saying, “Gosh, here we are again, and we are still connected to these parts, and we are connected to each other.” And that will probably never go away.

That’s beautiful. Turning more toward Shakespeare, I couldn’t resist asking you about the claim so often made about Sondheim — that he is “the Shakespeare of musical theatre.” You’re Co-Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and you’re so deeply steeped in Sondheim. What do you make of that comparison?

I understand it, because in their respective genres — Elizabethan theatre and 20th-century musical theatre — there’s no doubt these two people were at the forefront of their fields. So that’s one easy comparison, and I think a very valid one.

The thing that I think is great about both Sondheim and Shakespeare is that they understand that form and meaning have to come together. As I’m prepping for As You Like It, which Jonathan Groff is playing Rosalind in, it’s been really interesting: Jonathan’s never done Shakespeare, but I don’t need to talk to him about rhythm and rhyme and metre and all those things, because he gets it — because he’s done so much Sondheim.

What I’m getting at is this: there were these two men who understood that when you can match form and meaning, then the piece, the language, the music — and I mean the music in Shakespeare as well as the spoken language, because there is music in his language — can work on a totally different level. It connects with us deeply. There’s a chiming that happens deep within us, because they touch on something that goes to the root of the condition of being alive.

You mentioned As You Like It, which opens at the RSC in September. I think there’s something really nice, by the way, about a Charley directing a Frank.

Ha!

Where are you in the creative process right now?

I’ve been wanting to do this production for a while, because it’s a play about a woman who dresses up as a man who pretends to be a woman — and of course it was originally done with all men, because women weren’t allowed on the English stage in the very late 16th century. This is a play from 1599. I’d been thinking about who Rosalind is, and I hadn’t quite found her until I saw Just in Time. I’d seen Jonathan in Merrily the year before, but there was something he did in Just in Time… It’s a show about Bobby Darin, and it was a complete and utter triumph for Jonathan. He rarely left the stage, he had this connection with the audience, he could turn on a dime so quickly. It seemed to me like his intellect and his technique are so together.

I’d actually met him after the show, but I didn’t mention anything because I was too shy. So I wrote to him about three days later and said, “This is a mad idea...” And he literally wrote back with the subject line reading, “Holy fucking shit.” So we Zoomed three days later, and he said yes. And since then, every Friday, we go through the play, we do Shakespeare, and we’ve done that for the last six months without fail. He’s always there. He’s a theatre actor through and through, even though he’s doing two films at the moment, back to back — the one with Lin-Manuel, and the one with Dan Radcliffe. But he gets it, and he’s curious, and he’s passionate, and he has deep insight into the emotional lives of characters and plays.

The theme I’m loving exploring in the play is that there are all different kinds of love. People identify in all kinds of different ways in the play, but there’s a sort of subliminal message that says: we change. We’re not the same people throughout life. Things come in. We sometimes surprise ourselves with who we fall in love with. And whether you’re gay or straight or bi, or however you identify, you go for it. That’s all well and good. And if that’s important to you, say so. But there’s this other, greater thing, which is love, and we can’t predict where love goes. And that, I hope, is the joy this production will bring this autumn.

And that feels as Sondheimian as it does Shakespearean, doesn’t it?

Well, I’m thinking about “Our Time” at the end of Merrily, and how there’s a kind of return to innocence. Or I’m thinking about Follies, and how it’s an analysis of regret — of how one didn’t live one’s life the way one could have done, had one keyed into who we really were. And Into the Woods is all about wants and desires, and those primal things we sometimes chase and then regret. And about eroticism, too, and the fear of the other. And of course those themes run all the way through As You Like It too.

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En route to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, I found my thoughts drifting toward Sondheim. This was in part because of something I’d heard Nolan say, in a recent Empire Film Podcast interview:

I’ve spent decades doing interviews like this. I’m often asked about nonlinear narratives. I’m often asked about my approach to time. Of course, then you go to the oldest foundational text of all Western literature, and it has the most radical nonlinear structure you’d ever encounter. It’s stories within stories. It’s flashbacks within flashbacks. There’s something pretty humbling about that. Because you go, yeah, this is not a new idea in literature. This is in fact the oldest idea.

Time and time again, Christopher Nolan has conjured with… well, time and time again. The thrill of his films is as much about structure as spectacle. And it’s humbling for us, too, to recognize that nonlinear storytelling is an itch we’ve collectively been scratching for thousands of years.

After all, why do we love stories? What keeps us glued to the page, the stage, the screen? What we’re told is part of it, for sure. But I’d suggest that we care about the what only insofar as we’re sufficiently gripped by the why, the how, and — crucially for today — the when. Information is withheld and revealed, teased, manipulated, obscured, all at the discretion of the storyteller. And great storytellers — auteur writer-directors and our parents at bedtime alike — know that a little narrative sleight-of-hand, a little chronological creativity, can go a long way.

On the musical stage, few writers have been as alert to the dramatic potential of when as Sondheim and his collaborators. Theirs is a body of work every bit as structurally adventurous as Nolan’s. And their temporal trickery, crucially, is never frivolous. The flourish is not the magic itself.

Today, let’s set stage and screen side by side. Let’s explore how Nolan’s films and Sondheim’s shows negotiate our access to cause and consequence. As Eliza Hamilton might say, it’s only a matter of time…

So let’s begin, naturally enough, at the end.

Memento begins with a Polaroid photograph of a dead man. As we watch, the image fades rather than develops; the photograph slips back into the camera, a spent casing leaps back into the gun, the man returns to life. Cause and effect, reversed. Nolan destabilizes, but does so with absolute clarity.

You might already be thinking about Merrily We Roll Along. And, while that will indeed be our Sondheim touchpoint here, Memento does not simply run backwards. Its color sequences proceed in reverse chronological order, while a second, black-and-white strand moves forward. Eventually the two meet, completing a story that has been assembled from opposite directions. At its center is Leonard Shelby, who has lost the ability to form new memories. Each time we rejoin him, he must work out where he is, what’s happened, who he can trust. And because the scenes are presented in reverse, we share his disorientation. Nolan does not allow us to know what Leonard cannot remember.

Merrily We Roll Along’s reverse structure, which originated in the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play, became the animating principle of Sondheim and Furth’s musical. But where Memento deprives us of the past, Merrily burdens us with the future.

Leonard does not know what caused the situation in which he finds himself. The increasingly young characters in Merrily do not know what their choices will eventually bring about. As the years slip backward, every deed un-done, every decision un-decided, those of us watching on retain everything we’ve learned. The characters become less informed as the evening proceeds; we become (painfully) more so.

This, of course, is what gives “Our Time” its extraordinary double effect at the end of the show. Frank, Charley, and Mary look out across New York with their lives and careers ahead of them. “Something is stirring,” they sing, “shifting ground.” To them, the future is unwritten. To us, it is carved in stone. The young trio’s optimism is genuine, but we cannot receive it innocently. A musical moving backward gazes eagerly forward, two trains hurtling toward each other on the same track.

Memento and Merrily both give us consequence before cause, then. But they use that reversal to place us in opposite relationships to their protagonists. Memento builds ignorance into its structure; Merrily does the same for dramatic irony. One tells its story with causes withheld. The other asks what hope feels like when the consequences are not.

Moving backward is one way to disturb chronology. Another is to make more than one experience of time available at once…

In Inception, each dream level possesses its own rate of time. The deeper the characters travel, the more time dilates. A few seconds at one level can accommodate a much longer passage in the next, which in turn expands into something longer still below it.

During the film’s climax, Nolan cuts between a van falling from a bridge, a hotel corridor without gravity, a fortress in the mountains, and the expanse of limbo. These actions are taking place simultaneously, but across radically different subjective durations. Shared goals, synchronized “kicks,” and the recurring musical signal of “Non, je ne regrette rien” bind them into a single gesture.

The musical stage has its own ways of achieving such simultaneity. Sondheim and Goldman’s Follies refuses to neatly house the past within conventional flashbacks. Younger and older selves occupy the same stage, variously shadowing one another, passing beside one another, remaining visible only feet apart, allowing us to see at once what these people were and what they have become.

Inception works hard to distinguish its realities so that we can follow their interaction. The threat is that its characters may forget which level they inhabit and lose their route back. Follies allows its own realities to bleed into one another. Its characters have spent thirty years carrying former selves who cannot be held safely in the past. By the time we enter “Loveland,” memory, fantasy, and theatrical performance have overwhelmed “real” time altogether. The past, not content merely to comment on the present, takes possession of it.

So far, we’ve looked at the ways in which temporal acrobatics can speak to private experience. But chronology can also determine how public history is understood — and, perhaps, how it is made.

The narrative challenge facing Oppenheimer is obvious. We know that the bomb will be built. We know that the Trinity test will succeed. Nolan cannot depend upon the ordinary suspense of making us wonder what will happen. Instead, he asks how what happened acquired its meaning, and who was permitted to determine that meaning afterward.

The film is divided between two principal strands. “Fission,” presented in color, adheres closely to Oppenheimer’s subjective experience. (Nolan, delightfully, went so far as to write those portions of the screenplay in the first person, as Oppenheimer.) “Fusion,” in black and white, centers upon Lewis Strauss: his relationship with Oppenheimer, his role in Oppenheimer’s downfall, and the later Senate hearing that brings about his own. Within this braided structure, Nolan plots a broadly chronological path through Oppenheimer’s education, his work at Berkeley, the construction of Los Alamos, and the Trinity test. But that forward movement is continually interrupted by the 1954 security hearing and Strauss’s 1959 confirmation hearing: later scenes in which earlier decisions, both personal and professional, are variously reinterpreted, judged, and weaponized.

Trinity is therefore not a final sequence toward which the whole film builds. The explosion occurs, but its consequences (appropriately enough) continue to radiate outward: through Oppenheimer’s conscience, his public reputation, the political machinery gathering around him, and the still more destructive weapons that will follow.

A conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein provides us with the clearest miniature of this method. We see it early from Strauss’s distant perspective but cannot hear what is said. He watches Einstein leave the conversation looking troubled and constructs his own explanation: Oppenheimer has turned Einstein against him.

When Nolan returns to the same encounter at the very end of the film, it serves both to expose the inadequacy of Strauss’s interpretation and to transform the scale of Oppenheimer’s story. For the first time, we hear their exchange:

Oppenheimer: “Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...”

Einstein: “I remember it well. What of it?”

Oppenheimer: “I believe we did.”

Those are the final lines of the film. Nothing about the conversation itself has changed. What has changed is our access to it, and therefore what we understand it to mean.

In Assassins, Sondheim and John Weidman perform a comparable act of reinterpretation. Across a nonlinear succession of scenes and songs, nine assassins and would-be assassins coexist, unburdened by chronology. The arrangement is sometimes playful, even vaudevillian, but its effect is cumulative: these characters look less and less like isolated aberrations, and more and more like expressions of the same recurring national impulse.

That argument comes most fully into focus on November 22, 1963, a date that occupies something like the place in Assassins that the Trinity test occupies in Oppenheimer. Kennedy’s assassination is not the show’s sole concern, any more than Trinity is the film’s. But each becomes a point of historical convergence, gathering everything the work has been exploring into one terrible, history-making act.

In the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald is urged to pull the trigger not only by those who preceded him, but by Fromme, Moore, Byck, and Hinckley, whose own crimes lie in his future. “Without you, we’re just footnotes in a history book,” Moore tells him. “With you,” Hinckley adds, “we are a force of history.”

The chronology is impossible. But the argument? The argument is exact. Oswald’s act reaches backward, gathering his predecessors into a recognizable lineage, and forward, providing his successors with a story to inhabit, to belong to. Through this temporal impossibility, decades of anger, isolation, thwarted aspiration, and despair collapse into a single moment. Here, as at Trinity, history reaches critical mass.

At Los Alamos, years of scientific inquiry, political compromise, personal ambition, and private dread acquire physical form in a single detonation. In Dallas, the disparate grievances of a potpourri of assassins acquire their own defining image. Neither event concludes its story. But in both cases, the event reconfigures everything around it. What came before seems to have led inevitably to that point; what comes after cannot escape its shadow.

And so we return to Nolan’s humbling encounter with Homer. Later in the same interview, he describes the structure of The Odyssey as “there for the taking.” (We’ll explore how Homer’s Odyssey resonates across Sondheim’s body of work in this week’s member-only essay.) Its flashbacks and stories-within-stories are already intrinsic parts of the form in which this ancient story reaches us.

Sondheim’s own formulation, (almost) needless to say, was “Content dictates form.” It was the first of three principles that he always stressed were, above all, “in the service of clarity.”

And clarity matters here. Are the films and shows we’ve looked at today structurally adventurous? Sure. Formally ingenious? Thrillingly so. But in each case, the complexity exists not for its own sake, but to make the work legible.

A chronological Memento could tell us that Leonard is disoriented; the film Nolan made makes disorientation our experience. A chronological Merrily could show relationships deteriorating, but its backward journey makes every hopeful moment ache with foreknowledge. The ghosts that haunt the stage of Follies make the past impossible to suppress or ignore. And both Oppenheimer and Assassins force us to grapple with the history itself, sure, but also how that history acquires its shape.

The best nonlinear storytelling makes us newly, thrillingly conscious of narrative itself. Wide awake long past bedtime, or awestruck at the IMAX, or heartsick at the theatre, we crave the total immersion of great storytelling. And we do not think in sequence. Our memory, our recall, certainly isn’t linear. So why should stories be?

In Dave Malloy’s 2024 musical Three Houses, there is an intoxicating and beautiful song called “Birch Trees.” Here is how it begins:

my grandmother’s house
stands beyond a grove of thin white birch trees
you can peel the bark;
it rolls up like a cigar
you can press it to your lips
whistle a birch bird song

Susan, singing, describes these birches as something tangible: their bark can be peeled, rolled, touched to the lips. But as the song draws to its close, she describes the trees quite differently:

and the birch trees stand like ghosts
oh the birch trees stand like ghosts

Birch trees do seem particularly capable of such transformations. Their pale trunks are somehow both solid and spectral; gathered together, they seem already to be passing into memory. And more than half a century before Three Houses, Boris Aronson found in these trees the governing image for the original Broadway production of A Little Night Music.

The trees had a personal source. Aronson drew upon a vivid memory of white birch groves, believing that birches would give the production the lyrical quality it required. Painted onto sliding panels stretching to the height of the proscenium, Aronson’s trees could glide across the stage as one scene dissolved into another — a fluid and theatrical world through which the characters of A Little Night Music could move.

For the visual logic of that shifting forest, Aronson turned to René Magritte’s 1965 painting The Blank Signature. Magritte’s painting depicts a woman on horseback passing through a forest — or it seems to. Look more closely…

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Last week, we looked for Sondheim in unconventional but theatrically irresistible places: Sweeney Todd in a pie shop; The Frogs in a swimming pool. In both cases, the site sharpened aspects of the show: Sweeney was claustrophobically thrilling, The Frogs equal parts ridiculous and ritualistic.

But no Sondheim title offers a more obvious invitation than Into the Woods. So obvious, in fact, that a site-specific or site-responsive production risks being a too-literal (albeit fun) gimmick. At their best, though, these productions extend a double invitation: enter the woods, yes, but understand them too…

It’s worth being precise about what the woods actually does in Into the Woods, because the argument for site-specific staging only holds if there is something in the material the space itself can unlock.

In the first act, the woods is a place of possibility: dark, possibly dangerous, but navigable. The various characters enter with wishes and, against considerable odds, they get what they think they want. The woods, then, is the shared space the show’s intersecting narratives require: strangers’ paths cross, social rules loosen, fears and desires are heightened.

In the second act, the enchanted forest becomes a crisis zone. Adults and children alike find themselves unprotected, vulnerable, exposed to consequence. But in neither act is this shared territory neutral. The forest of Into the Woods is, I’d suggest, a kind of teacher — a sort of god or spirit hanging over the show like, as a certain prince might say, “a fine morning mist.”

The question an outdoor production gets to ask is whether a real landscape — one that can darken, grow cold, send wind through branches, and make sounds beyond a designer’s control — can do some of that teaching itself.

Camp Pouch, Staten Island: into the forest as pilgrimage

The purest recent example of site-specific Into the Woods may be the 2025 production at Camp Pouch on Staten Island, which transformed a 140-acre woodland camp into a living fairy tale. The audience size was kept to 25 people per performance, closer to the scale of the Tooting pie shop Sweeney Todd than to any conventional staging. The orchestration was newly arranged by Lena Gabrielle for an acoustic ensemble: guitar, bass, violin, melodica, accordion, and hand percussion, with musicians doubling as narrators and guides.

Fairy tales are, among other things, a technology for managing fear of the dark — for telling children, gathered perhaps around a hearth, perhaps around a campfire, what the wood can contain and how to survive it. The campfire opening at Camp Pouch restored that original context.

Then, as the story deepened, the audience followed along, literally; by lantern light, they were guided deeper into the woods as the plot moved forward. And with just 25 people in each audience, there’s something more communal than theatrical about this. It’s closer to the oral tradition from which these stories came than to the Broadway tradition which birthed the show. Something about that smaller scale, the same scale that made the Tooting pie shop Sweeney Todd so remarkable, returns the material to human dimensions.

Talk Is Free Theatre: from Barrie to Auckland

The production of Into the Woods that Talk Is Free Theatre brought to Auckland in January 2024 had, by that point, already had a life. Michael Torontow’s staging began indoors at Barrie’s Georgian Theatre in November 2019. It was remounted outdoors at Springwater Park in August 2021, before transferring that October to Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre, where it earned seven Dora Award nominations. Then it went into what TIFT artistic producer Arkady Spivak described as a kind of “repertory closet.”

In January 2024 that closet was opened again. The venue was a clearing in the wooded grounds of Corban Estate Arts Centre in Auckland’s west end, presented by local company A Mulled Whine. Billed by the presenters as “Broadway in your backyard,” the production used the surrounding landscape as frame rather than labyrinth — less a journey into the forest, as at Camp Pouch, but a gathering within it.

What the Auckland transfer makes visible is the seriousness with which TIFT approaches site. Four company members had flown to New Zealand the previous June, six months in advance, specifically to assess the location: not only the space itself but the light, the humidity, the timing of dusk. “We wanted to look at certain locations so that they could be soaked organically and brewed over time,” Spivak explained. “We also considered things like sunlight, because we’re doing Into the Woods in daylight and wanted to make sure the audience and the cast had the opportunity to leave before it got dark.” Costuming was planned with the summer humidity in mind.

Spivak’s description of TIFT’s touring ambition catches something important: “What’s amazing is we get to invent the world from the beginning every time.” That is, in miniature, what site-specific theatre is. The world is not given. It is found, then made.

Regent's Park, 2010: theatre using nature’s own timing

Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is an established London venue with a fixed stage, a ticketing infrastructure, and a history going back to 1932. A production of Into the Woods there is not site-specific in the way that Camp Pouch or Corban Estate were site-specific: the audience knows exactly where it is going, the stage is a stage, and the production does not ask anyone to follow lanterns through the dark. So why include it here?

Because the 2010 production of Into the Woods at Regent’s Park is one of the strongest arguments for what we last week called site-responsive theatre — and because it would be absurd to talk about outdoor Into the Woods productions without it.

The production was staged to mark Sondheim’s 80th birthday. It won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival in 2011, and at the time of its run it became the highest-grossing production in the theatre’s history. Those are measures of popular success, but they are also signals: audiences responded to something that they found genuinely compelling, and the outdoor setting was central to that response.

So central, in fact, that the production found another outdoor life across the Atlantic. In 2012, the Public Theater presented a new incarnation of the Regent’s Park staging at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, with Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel returning to re-explore the production for Shakespeare in the Park. The cast included Donna Murphy as the Witch, Amy Adams as the Baker’s Wife, Denis O’Hare as the Baker, and original Broadway Baker Chip Zien as the Mysterious Man. Soutra Gilmour’s design, now created in collaboration with John Lee Beatty, rose more than 50 feet into the air, with tree-covered catwalks and pathways. Beyond the stage, the trees of Central Park remained visible — as did Belvedere Castle.

What Regent’s Park, and later Central Park, offers Into the Woods specifically is time. Outdoor theatre has a dramaturgy that indoor theatre cannot replicate: the light changes. A production that begins in the early evening at the height of summer will open in daylight and close in darkness. That’s a compelling prospect for almost any show. For Into the Woods, with its structural pivot from sunnier wish-fulfilment to night-world grief, it is almost too perfect.

Darkness arriving in real time means we experience Act II as a real-world change, beyond and yet inseparable from the shift in the show’s emotional register. Act II of Into the Woods casts shadows, with or without a lighting designer’s help. We are conscious of actual shadows, cast by actual trees, in the actual park. Into the Woods, in Regent’s Park and then Central Park, could not help but let the real world cast its own spell.

Three productions: a pilgrimage through a 140-acre Staten Island woodland camp; a clearing in the grounds of an Auckland arts centre, reached after six months of scouting and preparation for four nights of performance; established open-air stages in the heart of London and New York. They differ considerably in what they ask of the audience and what they ask of the material.

But they understand the same thing. The woods of Into the Woods is where theatrical distance collapses, where our safety and the characters’ safety can be made to feel like the same thing. A real or responsive outdoor environment can make that collapse physical. In darkness, in weather, with trees at the edge of our vision and sound coming from places not fully planned for, we share something of what the characters are moving through: the experience of being in woods that, to borrow Frost’s line, are lovely, dark and deep.

That is what site-specific staging can offer this particular show. A traditional theater building reassures us. It tells us we are in a safe place, that the journey is performed, that the exits are lit. The wood itself makes no such promise.

So, having flown in at such short notice, tell me about meeting Elizabeth Taylor at the recording sessions for the A L…

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Mr. Cariou, it’s an honor to meet you. First and foremost, thank you — the Sweeney Todd original cast recording opened up the whole world of Sondheim for me, and I know that’s true for so many people.

Bless you. It was an extraordinary time in my life. It was an absolute gift from the universe, as far as I’m concerned.

I’d love to begin at Sondheim’s townhouse, the day he first played you parts of Sweeney Todd. What do you recall most vividly about that day, and about your first encounter with that extraordinary score?

Well, to give you some background to that day, I was set to do a film in Canada. Rehearsals for Sweeney were due to start in December — but because I had this film in Edmonton, Alberta, I was going to miss the first week of rehearsals.

And so I went to Hal Prince and I said, “This is the situation I’m in. I don’t want to be behind the eight ball when we start rehearsal. Will you ask Steve — or I’ll ask him, but I think it would be better coming from you — if he’ll play me some of this stuff that he’s written, and then I could maybe take it with me and learn it while I’m sitting on set, waiting to do the next scene?” It was sort of a joke.

Hal made the call — and Steve, to my surprise, said, “Okay.” I was very excited, and we set the date when I was going to come to the house.

So the day arrives and I get to Steve’s house. I had never been in the composing room. I had been in the house many times for parties and the like, but I had never been in the room where the piano was. We sat down and said hello, and he said, “Okay, come on, let’s go in.” And we went into the inner sanctum.

I sat across from him, and he was at the piano. He sat down, and he seemed distracted. I’m sitting there thinking, is he nervous? I thought, I’m the one who’s nervous. My stomach was going, my heart was going. And Steve said, “Damn it. Excuse me.” He gets up and he leaves the room.

And so I’m looking around the room for the first time: on one wall, he’s got music by all of the great composers in the world. So I’m sitting there, looking around and thinking, and then Steve comes back into the room, sits down, and pulls out a joint. He lights it. He offers it to me. Well, am I going to say no? So we have a couple of tokes and chat a bit. And he says, “Okay, all right. That’s better.”

Steve sits back at the piano and says, “You know the Catholic Mass for the Dead?” I said, “Steve, the Dies Irae?” I said, “I’m an Irish Catholic. Of course I know it.” And he says, “Well, listen to this.” He played something, and I said, “Yeah, okay, I don’t get it.” He said, “That’s Dies Irae backwards.”

And I said, “You’re pretty sick, aren’t you?” He had a good laugh at that. So that’s how we started.

He said, “At the end of this, you come in, and you’re coming up out of the grave.” So I thought, well, that’s pretty wild. These guys aren’t kidding around. And I said, “So what else can I hear?”

Steve said, “This is Anthony asking you about why you’re here, and why you escaped to come back.” And then he sat and played “The Barber and His Wife.” And when I heard the passage that goes like this [Mr. Cariou sings this music]:

… that music hit a chord in me that almost made me tear up. Then he played it again, and I said, “Stephen, that melody — the introduction to that — is so beautiful.” It’s the most beautiful thing in the score, in my opinion. Just that passage. And still, just sitting here telling you about it, I get goosebumps. It was one of those things that just hit me, and I went, “My God. Oh my God.”

And by this time, you were already so familiar with Sondheim’s soundworld. Were you struck by Sweeney straight away as something new — something special, even for him?

Yes. I thought, I’m in a room here with this guy, and this is historic, I think. Historic, what he’s doing musically.

So he played the scene for me, and at the end of it, he said, “Now you and Anthony depart.” And he played that exit: “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And it’s filled with people / Who are filled with shit, / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it…” and the music that follows. And I thought, oh my God. I couldn’t tell whether maybe the joint was taking over in the room.

Anyway, he finally turned to me and he said, “Pick up that manuscript there.” It was like the phone book. It was huge. “What is this?” I said. He said, “It’s the first-act finale. It’s called ‘A Little Priest,’ and it’s a duet for you and Angela.” And he started to play it. Well, you can imagine hearing that for the first time.

I knew it was a work of genius somehow. Even then, I went, “My God.”

When Steve played “A Little Priest,” and it gets to the part where she goes, “If you get it... Good, you got it,” that struck me as hugely funny. I started to laugh, and he stopped, and he looked at me and said, “It gets better.” Then he continued to play it through to the end. I thought, oh my God, I’m a lucky son of a bitch that we’re doing this.

So I took some of the music with me. Funnily enough, of course, we got to Edmonton, and film being film, the money evaporated, and we had to abandon the thing in the middle of it. We never finished it. The film was never made. So I had gone out there, and in less than a week I was back in New York.

But then it turned out that someone on the Sweeney creative team said, “Why are we doing this, going into rehearsal just before the holidays? We’re nuts.” So I get the call: “We’re putting it off until the New Year.”

All of a sudden, I get a letter from my daughter. She says, “Hi, it’s me. I think it’s time we met.” She had been adopted by her mother and her new husband, and I hadn’t seen her in 15 years, except for photographs here and there — and obviously, my family kept me abreast of what was going on. She was now 18, and she said, “It’s time we met.” And because we were now not going into rehearsal, I said, “By God, I’m free to go home to Winnipeg for Christmas,” which is where she was. So that was truly serendipitous. It got us started on what is now a wonderful relationship.

I’d love to zoom in on “Epiphany” specifically. What was it like to see that extraordinary sequence on the page for the first time, and to learn it?

What’s the best way to put this? See, I had just played King Lear at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. So when I saw “Epiphany,” I said, “Ah, this is Lear on the heath.” That was something that I could easily embrace when I sang it. And I think that kind of put everybody on their heels, because they didn’t know that I could be that committed to it that early.

I remember Judy Prince happened to come in on a day when we were doing “Epiphany.” She was in the rehearsal room when we did it. She stood up and applauded. I didn’t even know she was there, but she said, “My God, that was extraordinary.” We were in a rehearsal room. It was nowhere near what it was going to be. But it’s such an extraordinary piece of writing. Every night, you just can’t wait to do it. You’re just thinking, wait until you see this happen.

And you know the setup, of course: he’s got the Judge in the chair and he could have killed him, and he missed the chance. That’s the big turning point for him. And then afterwards, of course, Lovett says, “Well, hey, you killed him, and things aren’t so good in the pie department, so what do you think about this?”

Would you say in general that you’re a fast learner? How challenging was it to fully internalize the role, and that score?

It was very easy, somehow. Nothing seemed to surprise me except how extraordinary the music was. The “Barber and His Wife” passage, along with “My Friends,” was such a natural setup for the turning point when I finally get the Judge in the chair and I blow it. It came easily to me. Let me put it that way.

I don’t know what everybody thought, actually, except for Harold, who I think had said, “Well, you can write this for him. He can handle it.” I think Stephen and Hal were having that conversation, and I think Hal was a great champion of mine too. “Write whatever you want. He’ll take care of it.”

I had said to Steve when we went into rehearsal, or at some point before we started rehearsals, “I see how you’re writing this guy. I’ll give you two octaves.” He said, “Okay.” And I think we covered that span.

However confident you felt in the material, was there still some anxiety about how audiences would respond to the show?

The first preview was one of those magic kind of moments. We were all very trepidatious, of course, because of the nature of the content. Are they going to get it or not? It’s a brilliant piece of writing, but are they going to understand it?

At the end of the first preview, after the bows, we were all pretty excited. We were backstage, patting one another on the back. About 15 minutes later, I’m walking back to my dressing room, and Steve is standing outside the dressing-room door. He looked at me and he said, “They understood it. They fucking understood it.” We had a great hug and congratulated one another.

That was huge for me too. For him to wait and say that to me, it helped me a lot. It was like receiving a blessing. I said, “Well, okay. Now let us run it for a while so we can show the world.”

The Todd-Lovett relationship is so crucial, of course. What do you recall about developing that rapport with Angela Lansbury, both onstage and off?

One of the things we were very proud of was the fact that we resisted going over the top with that relationship and letting it get melodramatic. You could so easily do that. I guess because we’d both been, in our own way, around the block quite a bit, we seemed cut from the same cloth.

We said to one another, “We’ve got to be careful not to overdo this thing,” especially when you get to “A Little Priest” and the beginning of the second act with “God, That’s Good!” We didn’t want to go over the top, so we said, “Let’s keep ourselves a monitor: you for me and me for you.” That was something that I think we both thought was a great idea: to keep one another in line, if you will.

Because once you get doing that stuff, it can get pretty easy to do it by rote. It’s impossible to do that over a long period of time. You have to guard against becoming rote-ish.

Sweeney Todd came six years after you created the role of Fredrik Egerman in A Little Night Music. With not just Sondheim but Hal Prince and Hugh Wheeler back in the room, did it feel from your perspective as though no time had passed?

Yes. Because remember, we did the film of A Little Night Music in between, too. Yes, it was kind of like family: Hugh and Hal and Stephen and me. It was great fun. I thought, what a collaboration. This is a room I’m familiar with. I remember thinking, we’re quite a team. So let’s keep at it.

In between, when they made the film of Night Music, I of course was not the first choice. They called me, finally, in the middle of the night in New York. Hal called and said, “Can you get on a plane and come over here and save our ass?” So I did, the very next day.

They were in the recording studio with the symphony, and Elizabeth and the whole cast were recording the entire thing, so we’d have playback for the scenes on film. Gemignani was there too, of course, conducting the orchestra. They were doing a session the next day. They picked me up at the airport. I went directly from off the plane, went to the hotel, dropped the bags off, and Hugh met me there. We had a bite to eat, got in the car, and went to the recording studio. And that’s how I met Elizabeth Taylor.

Our extended conversation with Len Cariou concludes next week. But if you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to read Part Two of our conversation this Friday.

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Part Two of our conversation with Len Cariou begins exactly where we leave him: in the recording studio, meeting Elizabeth Taylor for the first time. From there, Mr. Cariou reflects on the experience of watching other actors play Sweeney Todd and Fredrik Egerman, Sondheim’s Shakespearean stature, the extraordinary circumstances that brought him to A Little Night Music, and how he reflects on Stephen Sondheim five years after his passing.

Two years ago, we spoke to Jeremy Secomb, who played the title role in Tooting Arts Club’s Sweeney Todd, staged inside that working pie shop. Sondheim, he told us, sat in the closest possible seat when he came to see it. Just one blood bag was used in the production, for the Judge’s death; because Harrington’s still served pies by day, splatter had to be kept to a minimum.

On the night Sondheim attended, something went wrong.

“The blood went through my fingers,” Secomb told us in our 2024 interview, “so I snapped the bag and the blood spurted forwards. And because Steve was sitting so close, it literally just went over the top of him. There’s a massive big red light behind me, but all I can remember is a snapshot of Steve sitting in front of me with the blood going towards him in slow motion, and him leaning back, watching what was happening.”

After the show, Sondheim told the cast that this — this small, close, 34-seat version — was how he had imagined the show. He said it was 50 times scarier than any production he had ever seen.

Today, as we look at site-specific Sondheim, we’ll explore the relationship so vividly captured above: between theatrical space and dramatic effect. Because the most interesting question here is less “was the show staged somewhere unexpected?” and more: did the place change the meaning?

What we mean when we say site-specific

Before we proceed, it’s worth drawing a line (not a sharp academic line, but at least a working one) between two things that often get conflated:

A site-specific production is one built around a particular place: the space is a structural part of the show, rather than just a backdrop. A site-responsive production may be more portable, but still draws something essential from its environment; it might travel between spaces while retaining a quality that a conventional theatre couldn’t produce.

In practice, many productions blend both. What matters for our purposes is the question underneath: did the building, the room, the outdoor landscape do anything to the show that a proscenium couldn’t?

The pie shop as dramaturgy

When Bill Buckhurst staged Sweeney Todd at Harrington’s Pie and Mash Shop, audiences were first gathered at Anton’s barber shop across the road before being led into Harrington’s to become Mrs. Lovett’s clientele. The gas lights, the tiled walls, the marble counters, the ovens… Harrington’s looked like the world of the show because it was the world of the show, and had been for more than a century.

Secomb is the best witness to what that did to the material.

“The big difference in our production to a normal theatrical production,” he says, “was that we had access to the audience.” In a conventional theater, when Sweeney threatens the audience in “Epiphany,” there is usually a buffer — the dark, the stage, the proscenium arch — between the character and the people watching him. At Harrington’s, of course, there was no such thing. “I literally could eyeball people — and people would get uncomfortable because they knew that I was just there. I wasn’t behind a proscenium. I wasn’t up on a stage.”

“We had so many different reactions from people. People would laugh because they were uncomfortable. People would shout because they got scared. You never knew what you were going to get from them.”

Sweeney Todd swirls with questions surrounding who is responsible for what happens in a corrupt and hungry city — who enables it, who profits from it, who looks away. And in a pie shop, “you became complicit in the story,” Secomb says. “In the murders, in the love story. Everything that happens in the show, the audience become complicit in it.” That word — complicit — is the key to the whole production.

Tooting, Shaftesbury Avenue, Barrow Street

The Tooting production transferred first to the West End — a run at a venue on Shaftesbury Avenue, where Harrington’s interior was meticulously recreated as an exact replica — and then to Barrow Street Theatre in New York, which was completely transformed into a working pie shop for the run there. The show could leave Harrington’s, but it took Harrington’s with it.

John Rapson, who played the Beadle both at Barrow Street and in the most recent Broadway production, can speak to what that physical environment did to the music. The scale of the space created specific, practical challenges that a Broadway house simply doesn’t generate. “When a high baritone or a tenor is singing a G-sharp, it’s going to be really loud,” he told us in our interview last year. The “Kiss Me – Part 2” quartet had to be calibrated differently in a tiny room. “Figuring out that balance of how much to sing — and because it’s so exciting, not over-singing it — was a hard thing to learn.”

Secomb described the emotional stakes of the pie-shop environment. Rapson gives us a window into the craft detail: the way the scale of a space rewires vocal performance, changes the feel of the music, makes demands that a large theatre would never make. Together, they describe a production in which the venue functioned as an active creative force.

Sondheim recognized this. He came to Barrow Street multiple times, and his behavior during performances became something of a feature. “Every single time,” Secomb says, “you would just hear that laughter during the show. He would just find it funny.”

Bodies in the water: The Frogs at Yale, 1974

Let’s now look at site-specific Sondheim in an altogether stranger mode: not blood on the tables, but bodies in the water.

The original production of The Frogs, Shevelove and Sondheim’s adaptation of Aristophanes, was staged in the pool at Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium in May 1974. Shevelove directed; Carmen de Lavallade choreographed. The cast ran to dozens of performers plus 21 members of the Yale swim team, playing the frogs. Among the singers were Christopher Durang, Meryl Streep, and Sigourney Weaver. MTI records eight performances, beginning May 20, 1974.

But the strangeness of that setting was not without precedent. It had a Yale history of its own. More than three decades earlier, when Shevelove was himself a Yale drama student, he had staged Aristophanes’s The Frogs in the exhibition pool of the very same gymnasium. A photograph (below) from that 1941 Yale Dramat production appeared on the cover of the Yale Alumni Magazine, showing a young Shevelove already imagining Aristophanes as something to be plunged into. Then, as later, the frogs themselves were played by members of the Yale swim team.

So when Shevelove returned to Payne Whitney in 1974, now with Sondheim, he was returning to a theatrical memory — and to a Yale joke that had become almost ritualistic. The frogs’ ancient cry in Aristophanes, “Brek-ek-ek-ex, ko-ax, ko-ax,” had long since entered Yale culture as part of the “Long Cheer” performed at athletic events. The eccentric staging, then, was layered with local resonance. The pool was a pool, yes — but it was also a campus amphitheatre, an athletic arena, a house of echoes, and a place where Aristophanes had already somehow become watery Yale property.

There is something wonderfully Sondheimian about that collision of elements: Aristophanes, Yale athletics, Greek chorus, musical comedy, university ritual, swim-team spectacle. In that sense, The Frogs may be one of the purest examples of site-specific Sondheim precisely because it is so peculiar. It uses site to create event, to create spectacle — to create a kind of inhabited absurdity.

And perhaps that is where site-specific Sondheim really lives: in the gleeful collapse of categories, more so than in the promise of greater realism. Not in the piece of theatre made real, but in the real world made theatrical.

The story of site-specific Sondheim does not begin and end with pies and pools. Next week, we head into the woods…

Now, let’s dive deeper into one particular aspect of the role: what Anthony’s music reveals about him, and what it asks of the performer…

Anthony sounds, as well as seems, deceptively straightforward.

He does not have Sweeney’s thunder, Lovett’s manic velocity, or Johanna’s caged-bird flights into the upper reaches. His most famous song is one of the most immediately “beautiful” melodies in the score: ardent, repetitive, apparently direct. Quinn Welder put it plainly: “‘Johanna’, Anthony’s most famous song, is quite vocally simple, especially by Sondheim’s standards.”

But, as so often with Sondheim, there is more here than meets the eye…

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First, congratulations on being crowned Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year! Let’s start with the competition itself, which runs annually: how would you describe the competition to someone who isn’t yet familiar with it?

It’s a competition, but it’s honestly more about showcasing new talent. There are 12 finalists; we all sing a chosen Sondheim song and a piece of new writing. We sing those two songs, and we’re judged by a panel of industry professionals.

I actually hadn’t heard about SSSSPOTY until I got to drama school. When I was in my first year, I heard about the third years getting chosen for the Sondheim competition. I thought, I would love to do that. Sondheim’s always been my favourite composer to sing.

BIRD, the college that I go to, has a kind of in-house process as well. There are quite a few rounds before you’re put forward for the self-tape that they professionally film to go off to the Sondheim Society. We send in our self-tapes, then work further with the acting teacher on our songs, and then perform it in a Sondheim evening at BIRD, which is so much fun. Five people are chosen to be put forward to the Sondheim Society. We film a professional self-tape — mine is on the BIRD Instagram now [at this link], which is so cool — and then that gets sent off to the Society, where you then go for live rounds leading up to the final.

I originally sent in a tape for a different song — it was “Stay With Me” from Into the Woods. But then my acting teacher said he felt I’d get a lot out of “I Read” from Passion. Passion is one of my favourite Sondheim musicals, but I didn’t think I would be able to sing that song. I got the sheet music and thought, yes, this is as difficult as I thought it would be. So we spent about a month working on it before I even taped it, which was so helpful. And it paid off, so I’m very happy about that.

For people who know Passion but aren’t performers themselves, could you speak a little more about what makes “I Read” specifically challenging? It’s easy to understand the challenge of something like “Getting Married Today” — but the demands of “I Read” are quite different, right?

Passion is one of those shows where I can never just pull out a single song to listen to. With Passion, you kind of have to do the full thing to really get why it’s so impactful. When I first listened to the original cast recording, I was just blown away by Fosca. I knew it was a difficult part, but until I really got the sheet music, I didn’t fully understand how difficult it actually was.

There are so many different time signatures in that one piece. It starts with 7/4, then 5/4, then 7/4, then 5/4 — two unorthodox time signatures. With Sondheim, it’s really important to honour what he put on the page, so I wanted to get as close to what he’d written as physically possible. It was hours and hours of writing out what was on the page — counting “1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a” — and working out how I was going to switch meters in my mind throughout the song.

It’s not only that, but it’s also quite vocally challenging. The only way I can describe it is jumpy — it moves from one register to another quite quickly, and that’s testament to Sondheim’s writing, because she’s in and out of her head constantly. Playing a physically and mentally ill character, it’s quite easy to fall into the trap of making it too overt. I wanted to keep it as truthful as possible whilst also doing it justice, and I think Sondheim gives you that all on the page. That’s what he does as a writer — he gives the actor so much.

Keeping “I Read” as natural as possible was difficult within the parameters of the music, because it is so here, there, and everywhere. It’s not like a big, belty number where the challenge is external and everyone can see it. What I wanted to do was make it as conversational as possible, so it didn’t sound like it was in 17,000 different time signatures. I wanted it to sound like a conversation, which is how it came across to me when I listened to the cast recording.

I didn’t realise how difficult that was going to be, so I am very, very thankful for the sessions I had with Ed Goggin, my acting teacher, and also Simon Gray, my wonderful MD, throughout the process. There were so many sessions of note-bashing — because the intervals are also very complex — and then clapping through the entire thing and changing the meter and getting that into my body. It was very challenging, but so rewarding.

You clearly have such a deep admiration for Sondheim’s work. Among your peers at BIRD and in your wider circle, do you feel that love is widely shared?

I think for a lot of people, when they hear Stephen Sondheim, they think it’s some higher-brow, unattainable version of musical theatre. There can certainly be that energy around it with some of the people who talk about it. But he’s actually completely easy to listen to. I think some people get intimidated by his works without realising that once you listen to one song, you’ll want to listen to all of them.

A lot of my really close friends absolutely love Sondheim. But I think nowadays, the direction of musical theatre worries me a little, for my personal taste. There are a lot of jukebox musicals — and of course they have their place, but that’s not what I’m interested in. And the direction vocally is: sing higher, belt more, and riff.

With Sondheim, it’s very lyric-focused, and I’ve always been a lyric-focused listener. All of my favourite artists are lyric-focused — like Hozier. I absolutely adore Hozier; in my mind, he’s one of the most amazing writers in modern pop culture. He is so poetic, but he manages to be poetic while still making the melodies really intricate and listenable, which Sondheim does for musical theatre. So Sondheim and Hozier are kind of my great loves.

I wish more people listened to Sondheim. I do think it’s because of the perceived highbrow-ness of it, when really, his lyrics aren’t pretentious or fancy in any way. They’re often so syllabic and to the point, and that’s what makes Sondheim so brilliant — there’s no fluff.

Exactly. Even just within Passion, take the lyrics to “I Read,” or “Loving You” — it’s not like he’s throwing the thesaurus at you.

No, no. The first verse is: “I do not read to think. I do not read to learn. I do not read to search for truth. I know the truth. The truth is hardly what I need.” Sentence by sentence by sentence — it is not intimidating at all. I wish that pretence of pompousness would just be punctured.

Let’s talk about SSSSPOTY itself. One of the cool things about the competition final is that you have Nigel Lilley [MD for Follies and Here We Are at the National Theatre] sitting at the piano. Did working with him bring out something more in your performance?

When I found out it was Nigel Lilley, I got so nervous. I was so worried about disappointing him — it really weighed on me! But I went in, and he has this calm presence that almost makes you forget how brilliant he is.

I sang it through with Nigel playing, and I was nervous because, as I’ve said, the time signatures are so difficult — I really wanted to get it right. We worked through it, Hannah [Chissick, director] gave me some direction, and then Nigel was really insightful. He gave me, I think, two notes. The first was about the introduction and the first two lines. He said it’s written in semiquavers, but he felt I should take my time with it a bit more, because what she’s singing is a response to a conversation.

I was so fixated on the counting, so he suggested: what if you gave some breath to it, and let it flow like an answer? So instead of rushing into “I do not read to think,” he was like, what if you just — “I - do - not - read - to - think” — and really let it breathe? That allowed me to spit every word out so that people knew immediately what was going on, because the opening arpeggios already establish a conversation. He was saying: this will give you the chance to explain to the audience what is going on, without that introductory conversation as context.

I sang it through a second time and it just helped so much. Then he gave me some timing notes, and one gentle note on pitch, in such a gracious way. I felt completely held by him, because he’s so brilliant. He played so beautifully, which really gave me the platform to sing truthfully. A good accompanist is so important to a performance. When someone plays something really, really well, you feel completely safe.

And clearly, the real joy of a competition like this is experiences like that. But you did win, and there is a prize and the recognition that comes along with that. Have you had time to reflect on what winning this really means to you?

I have never felt like that in my entire life, on that stage. First of all, just singing in that theatre was completely singular, because that is the theatre I saw my first ever musical in. I watched Les Misérables there — back when it wasn’t the Sondheim Theatre, when it was the Queen’s Theatre. When we were in the tech, I looked out and I could see the seat where I’d sat. I was sat over there, and now I’m about to sing on this stage.

And I feel like I really, truly did sing it the best I could. I’m so happy that I could walk away thinking: I did my best up there. There was nothing I wish I’d changed. Of course, there’s always room for improvement, but in that moment, on that stage, that was the best I could have done it. It was completely nerve-wracking — you never know what’s going to happen with your breathing and your technique — but I sat down afterwards and I thought: that was the best I could have done it.

I have a wavering sense of self-belief, and I think every performer does. As much as you try not to compare yourself to other people and their successes, you always do — it’s completely human. So I finished and I thought: right, that’s the best I could have done, and if nothing comes from it, then nothing comes from it. I’d already won just by being there, on that stage. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

I went backstage and felt good, just hanging out while the other performers were on. I was thinking: there is so much talent on this stage, so I’m not getting my hopes up. Because — as I’d just sung in “I Read” — “If you have no expectations, Captain, you can never have a disappointment…”

I went back onto the stage for the announcement. I was with my friend Taziva-Faye [Katsande], who came second. Me and Taziva are so close, and I’m so glad I got to do it with her. I was stood next to her, thinking: right, whatever happens, happens. And then they announced third place, and then second — Taziva-Faye. I immediately burst into tears because I was so proud of her. And then I thought: would they give BIRD both first and second? I didn’t know if that was something that was considered at all.

And then they called my name, and I felt so much adrenaline immediately course through my body. I started shaking — I’ve never shaken like that in my life. It wasn’t until I was eating dinner with my family afterwards that I really began to contemplate how amazing it was.

I’d just finished my third-year musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, in which I played Jesus, and that role was so demanding and took quite a lot out of me. Getting crucified every night for two weeks was kind of difficult. And because of my wavering sense of self-belief, I was asking myself: is this the road I want to go down? Is this seriously what I want to do? Because that role was so difficult, and it was so far outside my comfort zone. I’m very much jazz-focused — if I were to go down any route, it would probably be Golden Age musicals, or Sondheim, or straight acting. Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock opera, and it was so out of my comfort zone. I had to train a lot for it, and it took so much out of me that I was genuinely asking: do I take a year out after drama school? Do I go and do something else?

And then, winning this competition, I thought: I think there might be a place for my kind of acting and singing. It gave me that fire in my belly again, which I think I’d kind of lost. Because, as I’ve said, the direction in musical theatre right now seems like who can sing the highest, who can belt, who can riff — and I’m not that kind of girl. It was starting to bog me down: is there a place for my kind of acting in this industry? I was slowly believing that less and less.

And I think this just… reassured me. Validated the hard work I’d put in over three years. That was very nice to feel.

I still believe in a place called Hope.

Board a ship across the pond and back in time, and you might well meet a young man named Hope. As you sail together toward London, leaving all thoughts of Arkansas behind, ponder this: how much do you know of your companion?

The Anthony Hope we come to know in Sweeney Todd seems simple enough: the sailor, the lover, the nice young man, the ardent tenor standing beneath Johanna’s window. (We explored that trope last year, in this essay.) In the oppressive darkness of a blood-soaked London, Anthony seems to bring light. Having rescued Sweeney from the sea, he falls in love with Johanna, and tries to rescue her too.

But in performance, this seeming innocence can become something more layered: hope, yes, but also urgency, obsession, entitlement, fear, moral clarity, naivety, resilience, and loss. Today, in conversation with seven performers who’ve played Anthony on stage, let’s look a little more closely at the young man named Hope.

First impressions and assumptions

For several of the performers we spoke to, Anthony first appeared as exactly the type he is often assumed to be.

Patrick Mullen, who played the role at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, remembers his first impression as “surface level”: Anthony was “simply this lover boy. That was his trope, and he stayed within it.” Mullen knew he fitted that type, but was interested in what might be found beyond it: “I wanted to see what I could do with something that was not already given to me in character terms.”

Quinn Welder, of Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, says, “I knew Anthony as the man who sings ‘Johanna’, if I’m being honest. I didn’t know much about him beyond that.” For Welder, that very absence became part of the fascination: “I find it interesting that he is often left out of deep thought,” he says.

Others found the role unexpected because they did not see themselves in the archetype. Cathal Walsh, who played Anthony in an amateur production in Tipperary, Ireland, had assumed he would never play him. With a lower voice and a performance history that leaned more toward “Seymour-type characters, the nerdy character, or the sidekick,” he did not feel Anthony was in his wheelhouse. “I struggled for a long time to find a characterization and to assume that heroic type,” he says. The way in was not to impersonate a romantic hero, but to locate the part of himself that could understand hopefulness.

Aidan Dillen also began with the broad category of romantic lead. “He seemed broadly like a romantic hero to me,” he says. “I thought he was a Romeo type.” But that first impression quickly became frustrating. “I saw him as a very base-level character. I was a little frustrated with him at first because I didn’t feel there was much depth to him.” The work, then, became a kind of excavation: watching productions, skipping to “Ah, Miss” and “Johanna,” making notes, and looking for the edges beneath the apparent simplicity.

Declan Feldhusen, who played Anthony at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide, entered the process without much prior attachment to Anthony, despite being, as he puts it, “very nerdy when it comes to musical theatre.” The callback room gave him his first warning. After singing “Johanna,” he was told: “You sound great, but you look far too nice. You’re far too happy to be there. There is no edge to it.”

And for Lucius Wagner, who played Anthony at St. Augustine High School in San Diego, the role began as a simple idea and then deepened through rehearsal. He knew nothing about Sweeney Todd at first. Then, listening to Anthony’s music, he thought: “Wait, this is good music. This is really good music.” As he researched the show, one thing above all became clear: Anthony is “almost the only character who doesn’t do some kind of evil.” Even Johanna shoots Fogg. Anthony, by contrast, seemed to offer the audience “one hope — appropriately, given his name.”

Anthony Hope

The name is obvious. That does not mean it is easy to play.

Again and again, our Anthonys spoke about this character as a figure of light in a dark show. Wagner was told by his director “never not to be smiling” unless the moment demanded particular seriousness. His foundation for the role was “the really optimistic kid who has gone to a new school and is eager to make friends with everyone.” Anthony assumes Sweeney is his friend because, to Anthony, friendship is still a reasonable thing to assume.

Mullen also returned to the name. “Anthony Hope is such an inspiring name,” he says. In his version, hope took on a more resistant quality too. As a performer of color, he found himself thinking about what it means to move through a world that may not be built for you. “Empathy was what led me to the character,” he says. “Anthony chooses to be kind and to love rather than allowing the world, and all the evil of London, to get to him.”

Walsh admired Jay Armstrong Johnson’s Anthony in the Emma Thompson/Bryn Terfel production because the purity seemed to “radiate from him on a personal level,” rather than appearing as a performed idea of innocence. That was what Walsh wanted to find. “He is Anthony Hope; they did not hide what the character represents.” But the work was to make that hopefulness a living quality.

Nick Gundrum, who played Anthony at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, saw that hope as something gradually broken. His director, Vincent DeGeorge, had previously coached darker readings of Anthony — as a man whose desire to “steal Johanna” might not be wholly unlike the Judge’s desire to possess her. In this production, though, Gundrum found him “the sliver of hope in London”: genuine, youthful, naive. What interested him was the process by which that hope is knocked down.

He identified three blows. First, Anthony sees Sweeney shaving the Judge and realizes the Judge is still in the way. Then, at the asylum, he discovers that the system itself makes no moral sense: Johanna is not “mad,” and yet she has been locked away. Finally, when Sweeney gives him the gun, Anthony believes he can act — and cannot. “I really fucked up,” Gundrum imagined him thinking. “This isn’t fair. This isn’t what I grew up with. This wasn’t as easy as sailing. The world kind of sucks.”

Several performers were alert to the danger of making that hope too clean. Dillen made a deliberate decision that his Anthony was in the Navy rather than simply a merchant sailor. He was “not just this naive little boy.” That choice gave the character more steel, and it led Dillen to one of his central discoveries: “my Anthony was someone who hadn’t been told no a lot.” Not necessarily because he wanted everything, but because he was unused to failing to get the things he did want.

Hope, then, is not the same as harmlessness. Anthony’s optimism can be beautiful, but it can also be forceful. He believes in possibility. He also believes, very quickly, that possibility should bend toward him.

Love, rescue, and control

The central question with Anthony might be what kind of love the show permits him to have for Johanna.

Welder calls it “definitely a love-at-first-sight trope,” but immediately complicates the point. Anthony sees Johanna, buys the bird, gets her attention, and then, after witnessing the Judge’s treatment of her, begins to see himself as someone who can help. “I don’t want to call it a savior or hero complex,” Welder says, “but I think that is part of it.” Later, he goes further: “There is definitely some obsession in Anthony.”

Wagner received a similar note from DeAndre Simmons (who we interviewed back in 2024). Until “Searching,” Simmons suggested, it is not really love but lust. Anthony and Johanna do not know one another. “The most personal information he gives away is his name.” Only later, after the fantasy has collided with pursuit, danger, and loss, does something more mutual begin to emerge.

Dillen’s reading also centered on rescue, but with a sharper question underneath it. What compels Anthony may not be Johanna herself so much as Johanna’s situation. He sees someone trapped and imagines himself as the person who can save her. But Dillen was also struck by the parallel between Anthony seeing Johanna in her window and Judge Turpin seeing Lucy in hers. “A big part of my process,” he says, “was interrogating why those two events were different and why they were treated so differently.”

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Anthony is not Turpin, of course. He does not have Turpin’s age, power, violence, or predation. But the echo is unsettling. Anthony’s gaze may be more tender, younger, more romantic — but it is still a gaze that becomes action almost immediately.

The beautiful melodies, Feldhusen argues, can disguise the fact that Anthony is also a man of his era. He may be a better option than the Judge or Sweeney, but that does not make him free of possession. “All of Anthony’s idealism, beauty, and way of seeing the world are true,” he says, while simultaneously his attitude can be understood as: “All these other men want to control you, so let me control you so that they cannot hurt you.”

That is the richest complication in the Anthony material. He is not the villain. He is not Turpin. He is not Sweeney. But the show’s world of male possession does not leave him untouched. He can be sincere and still controlling; loving and still presumptuous; hopeful and still naive about the violence embedded in rescue.

Mullen had to navigate another dimension of that rescue narrative. As a non-white Anthony, he thought carefully about how to make the character a sailor without implying a colonial or indentured position the text does not address. Dillen, too, found racial context newly present in the role, especially because his production coincided with the Broadway revival in which Jordan Fisher was playing Anthony. In a predominantly white production, he found himself newly aware of being a non-white lead in a role historically coded as white. Anthony was, for him, a role that did not announce itself as culturally specific, but still taught him something about who gets to occupy romantic centrality.

The role may look old-fashioned, then, but it keeps producing modern questions: who is allowed to be innocent, who is read as threatening, who gets to be a rescuer, and what rescue costs the person being rescued.

Sweeney, Anthony, and the younger man

One of Feldhusen’s sharpest observations was that Anthony’s relationship with Sweeney is often neglected.

“Sweeney is brooding and always has a million different things going on in his head,” Feldhusen says, while Anthony follows him “like a puppy dog.” Anthony assumes friendship. Sweeney, despite himself, responds. Before he even knows Johanna is his daughter, he helps Anthony.

That opening mattered particularly to Wagner, whose Anthony began from the assumption that Sweeney was his friend. This is part of the character’s hopefulness, but also part of his danger. Anthony trusts quickly. He takes people at face value. He enters London with an almost reckless willingness to attach himself to others.

Mullen found Anthony’s second act crucial for similar reasons. In the first act, Anthony arrives, sees Johanna, and centers himself on her. But when he loses her, the audience begins to see “what makes him tick and what he is fighting for.” In the “City on Fire” sequence, when Anthony and Johanna run into Sweeney’s barbershop, Mullen realized that Anthony had never been in a situation this intense. The task was to play him as “scared shitless” while still trying to be strong for Johanna.

Gundrum also saw Anthony as a younger version of Sweeney. Sweeney once had Lucy, a child, a home, a life; then his world was violently overturned. Anthony, by the end of the show, has also had his innocence shattered. The crucial difference may be the gun. Anthony cannot fire it. “The fact that he cannot fire the gun may be a sign that he will not lead the same life as Sweeney,” Gundrum says. “He may respond with dejection rather than vengeance.”

Anthony may be damaged by the events of Sweeney Todd, but the show does not turn him into another Sweeney. His failure to shoot may be weakness. It may also be salvation.

After the curtain

Nobody imagined an uncomplicated future for Anthony.

Walsh was perhaps the bleakest. In his production, the ending was played not as romantic escape but as desolation. During the final reprise of “and we’ll sail the world and see its wonders,” he felt that “perhaps it is completely a pipe dream.” Act One’s lovers had been placed into the real world. “For Anthony,” he says, “it is a death of innocence.”

He did not imagine the relationship lasting. The horrors Anthony and Johanna endure together might bind them, but not necessarily healthily. “Is there a trauma bond between them, and is that a good or bad thing? I do not think it is good.”

Gundrum imagined something more dutiful than romantic: Anthony taking Johanna back to Plymouth, trying to care for her, whether or not that was still love. “Saving and healing her was his goal,” he says. But survival changes him too. Anthony’s automatic trust is gone; he no longer takes everything at face value.

Dillen also found it difficult to imagine a clean romantic future. Johanna, he thought, would be profoundly traumatized by what she has experienced, and Anthony would not necessarily be equipped to handle that. He imagined that Anthony would not stay still for long — he is too well traveled, too restless — while Johanna might become more reclusive.

Wagner’s final theory was gentler but still marked by damage: they stay together, but both are deeply changed by the room full of bodies, the boy with the razor, and the machinery of horror into which they have stumbled. Welder, more logical than romantic, thought they probably make it out because neither has anyone else. Whether they are compatible is another question. “They have a great deal to unpack together,” he says.

Perhaps that is where Anthony finally lands: not as the opposite of Sweeney Todd’s darkness, but as one measure of its cost. His hope is real. His goodness is real. So are his naivety, his obsession, his need to rescue, his capacity for control, and the damage done to him by the end.

So, do we still believe in a man named Hope?

The challenge of Anthony is to preserve the doubleness we’ve explored: to play hope without emptiness, innocence without stupidity, romance without denying possession, beauty without ignoring danger. Anthony may look like the young man who carries light into the story. From the inside, he appears more complicated, more fragile than that: not simply hope, but hope under pressure.

After 64 songs, 16 groups, multiple knockout rounds, and more imaginary sporting drama than any of us could reasonably have anticipated, that is all that separated the winner of our World Cup of Sondheim from the runner-up.

On Instagram, where poll percentages are displayed only as whole numbers, the final result appeared as a perfect dead heat: 50% to 50%. The bars met in the middle. Nothing divided them. Only the vote tallies revealed that the winning song had edged ahead by the smallest of margins.

Had seven voters changed sides, “Sunday” would have won by a single vote. Instead, “Being Alive” has been crowned champion of the inaugural World Cup of Sondheim.

Yes, the tournament remains ludicrous. But having taken the whole enterprise very seriously for several weeks, we are certainly not going to stop now.

The road to the final

For much of the tournament, “Sunday” appeared unstoppable.

It began by taking 68% of one of the strongest groups in the opening stage. By the Round of 16, it was dismantling formidable opposition. “Send in the Clowns,” Sondheim’s most famous song beyond the boundaries of musical theatre, received just 24% against it. “Sunday” took 76%, the second-largest victory of that round.

In the quarter-final, “The Ladies Who Lunch” — which had already defeated “Old Friends” by 54% to 46% — managed just 30% to “Sunday”’s 70%.

Then came an all-Sunday in the Park with George semi-final against “Move On.” That song had dispatched “No One Is Alone” by 53% to 47%, then beaten “Losing My Mind” more comfortably, 58% to 42%. But against “Sunday,” even “Move On” could gather only 37%.

“Sunday” entered the final having taken 76%, 70%, and 63% in its previous three rounds. Its opponents were gaining ground, certainly, but none had come close to catching it.

The progress of “Being Alive” was less serenely consistent but at times even more emphatic. In the Round of 16, “Being Alive” defeated “No More” by 82% to 18%, receiving the highest individual vote tally of the round.

Its quarter-final against “Finishing the Hat” presented a far more serious challenge. “Finishing the Hat” had just swept aside “Not While I’m Around” by 71% to 29%, and its formidable reputation made the tie feel genuinely heavyweight. But “Being Alive” won 60% to 40%.

Then came the semi-final. “Another Hundred People” had been one of the tournament’s most impressive competitors. It won 62% of its group-stage vote, defeated “Pretty Women” 58% to 42% in the Round of 16, and survived an extraordinarily close quarter-final against “Your Fault.” That contest was decided by 51% to 49%.

But the semi-final itself offered no such suspense. “Being Alive” defeated “Another Hundred People” by 85% to 15%: the largest victory of the entire concluding phase.

So: one finalist arrived having won 63% of its semi-final. The other arrived with 85%.

Then they divided the electorate almost exactly in half.

From squeakers to slaughterings

The later rounds produced a fascinating mixture of near-ties and landslides.

The Round of 16 began with “Losing My Mind” defeating “Getting Married Today” by 51% to 49%. The difference was 22 votes. Something simpler, almost unbearably exposed, met that famously virtuosic comic breakdown — and, on this occasion at least, the quieter kind of emotional directness narrowly prevailed.

In another close tie, “The Ladies Who Lunch” beat “Old Friends” 54% to 46%. But elsewhere, the same round was ruthless. “Your Fault” beat “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” 72% to 28%. “Finishing the Hat” beat “Not While I’m Around” 71% to 29%. And “Being Alive” delivered that 82% to 18% defeat to “No More.”

The matches became no more predictable in the quarter-finals. “Sunday” and “Being Alive” continued their advance, while “Move On” ended the run of “Losing My Mind.” But the finest quarter-final drama belonged to “Another Hundred People” and “Your Fault,” separated by only two percentage points.

It offered a neat warning against treating the previous round as any kind of prophecy. “Your Fault” had just won 72% of its vote; “Another Hundred People” had won 58%. Judged solely on momentum, “Your Fault” appeared stronger. In direct competition, it lost.

That has been one of the tournament’s most persistent lessons: a percentage measures only how a song performs against that particular opponent, among those particular voters, on that particular day. Routes matter. Matchups matter. The apparent force of a victory can vanish as soon as the opposition changes.

The Company–Sunday championship

By the quarter-finals, something remarkable had happened. Six of the remaining eight songs came from only two shows. Company had “The Ladies Who Lunch,” “Another Hundred People,” and “Being Alive.” Sunday in the Park with George had “Move On,” “Sunday,” and “Finishing the Hat.” Only “Losing My Mind,” from Follies, and “Your Fault,” from Into the Woods, stood outside that duopoly. Both were eliminated in the quarter-finals.

The World Cup of Sondheim had become, in effect, the Company–Sunday in the Park with George Invitational.

That concentration builds on a pattern visible much earlier in the tournament. As I noted after the group stage, affection was not distributed evenly across Sondheim’s canon. Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park with George had supplied 12 of the original 32 knockout qualifiers. Add Company, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sweeney Todd, and 24 of the 32 came from five shows.

By the semi-finals, even that core repertoire had contracted dramatically. Merrily was gone. Sweeney was gone. Into the Woods was gone. And consider the final four. “Move On” is about art, relationship, continuation, and the necessity of proceeding without certainty. “Sunday” gathers disconnected figures into a completed work. “Another Hundred People” locates loneliness and possibility amid the endless movement of a city. “Being Alive” moves, as Sondheim so famously put it, from complaint to prayer.

These are all, in different ways, songs about how we exist among other people.

Perhaps the final rounds revealed something more specific than meets the eye about the emotions to which voters responded most powerfully. Connection. Isolation. Community. The desire to be seen. The fear of being known. The need to move towards other people despite everything that other people can do to us.

By the end, the tournament had discarded most of its comic songs, its elaborate theatrical machines, and its numbers most dependent on dramatic context. What remained were songs that could function as declarations of belief.

And then two of those declarations met.

Why “Being Alive”?

There is often a temptation, after a result, to invent an explanation so complete that the outcome begins to feel inevitable. We should resist that. “Being Alive” did not win because it possesses some measurable quality that “Sunday” lacks. A margin of 13 votes is not enough to support any such claim. A slightly different set of voters, a different posting time, seven people changing their minds: any of these could have produced the opposite champion.

But the result does seem consistent with what the tournament has shown us from its beginning.

“Being Alive” is exceptionally portable. It emerges from a precise and sophisticated dramatic situation, but its emotional argument travels easily beyond it. A listener does not need to know every detail of Bobby’s life to understand the movement from self-protection towards connection. The song has become an anthem because we can all enter it ourselves.

Its contradictions are also central to its power. To be connected is to be crowded, frightened, disrupted, disappointed. The song passes through that ambivalence and decides that life with others is worth its dangers.

“Sunday” is no less emotionally direct, but its effect is different. It asks us to stand before an act of creation and witness separate fragments becoming whole. It is theatrical transcendence: many voices, many colors, many lives arranged into one luminous image.

The final whistle

So, what has the World Cup of Sondheim established?

Not that “Being Alive” is definitively Sondheim’s greatest song. Not that “Sunday” is his second-greatest. Not that “Another Hundred People” is objectively superior to “Finishing the Hat,” or that “Your Fault” has been permanently ranked below “Losing My Mind.” The bracket was shaped by its groups, its routes, its pairings, and the peculiar pressures of Instagram polling. Run the same tournament again, and we could produce a substantially different result.

What it has established is that thousands of us were willing to gather around these songs, argue over them, defend them, and make painful choices between them. It has shown us the enormous continuing strength of a core group of shows, while reminding us how differently songs function when separated from their theatrical surroundings. It has suggested that familiarity matters, portability matters, and emotional immediacy matters.

Most of all, it has shown that, when forced into a direct choice between two of Sondheim’s most beloved songs, we could barely choose at all. The trophy is imaginary. The 13-vote margin is real.

It is cruel. It is absurd. It is magnificent sporting theatre.

And along the way, if this tournament prompted even a handful of voters to discover new Sondheim or rediscover old favorites, the whole ludicrous enterprise has been worth it.

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Your production of A Little Night Music has just opened in Cape Town — and before we go any further, the fact that this show is happening again in South Africa is pretty special, isn’t it?

Yeah — the last production here was over 50 years ago. One of our luminaries, Taubie Kushlick, brought the production here soon after it was first on Broadway, partly because she wanted to play Madame Armfeldt. She could spot a good part a mile away. That production was a great success, and then it’s almost as if people forgot that it was a great show. I think over time, A Little Night Music seemed to be put on a kind of plinth, because it’s this beautiful piece of serious theatre, but people weren’t aware of how light and funny it is.

I think with the advent of Bridgerton and Downton Abbey and all that sort of thing, A Little Night Music is very much in the taste at the moment. It’s interesting, from that point of view, to see a story that’s essentially about timing, good or bad, being so relevant again now. From the two previews we’ve had so far, it’s been fascinating to see people of so many different ages and backgrounds come and see the show, and respond so positively — which I think is a testament to the writing.

And with the theatre being located in Camps Bay, in Cape Town, the story could be happening in any one of those luxury mansions just above us.

Did you have a particular entry point for this show personally, and specifically for finding your Fredrik Egerman?

In the past, with other composers, I tend to watch whatever material there is to watch online. But with Sondheim, I’ve found that it actually doesn’t help at all, because those interpretations are so tailored to those productions. As you know, one of his mantras is content dictates form. I think in those cases, director dictates production — and so what’s relevant to one production isn’t necessarily relevant to ours. So I specifically stayed away.

I went back and read the book, and I watched the original Bergman film. And as magnificent as Sondheim’s work is, for me, this show really is just as much Hugh Wheeler’s. The book is often the grouting between the numbers in musicals; in this show, it’s almost the case that the songs are the grouting. At least, that’s what I initially found — and then the more I worked on it, the more you realise how specific the language is. I actually started watching a lot more material on European households and those protocols, because then you really start understanding people like Petra, and why her moment is so specific in the show.

The entry point for me, really, was realizing just how normal a guy Fredrik is. There’s nothing really extraordinary about him. In the past, the shows I’ve done, I’ve generally played parts that are quite bravura — traditional leading men — and Fredrik really isn’t. He’s just a lawyer. He’s just a guy. And the whole midlife crisis thing is interesting. I turn 40 next year, and Sondheim pitches him around 42, 43, so I’m not far off. Everything that he’s going through, I think, is what I’m finding in my life — in terms of timing, at least. And it’s fascinating that, without a few period words, the things I say in the show I sometimes find myself saying in real life. So as an entry point, that’s very interesting to me.

Do you see your opening number, “Now,” as a kind of microcosm of who Fredrik is throughout the show?

Yes — if you consider that those opening moments are essentially little five-second periods in those people’s lives, and that Fredrik’s is the most dense, that’s already the clue. He’s constantly overthinking and weighing up his options, whether to try and consummate his marriage or have a nap. And there’s a whole tangent about how he views himself, his own self-esteem: his body’s all right, but not in perspective and not in the light, all of that stuff. It’s a nemesis of a song to get down, because it can’t be showbiz. It’s just consciousness. You’re talking to yourself, as we all do, and then suddenly someone says, “hey,” and you snap back, like, “oh, sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”

And I think it’s so interesting that the only time he has clarity is when he looks at her. But as soon as he’s on his own, his world is chaos. And you listen to Henrik’s theme — very long and labored, and a bit indulgent in his own misery — and then Anne’s is so surface-level, sweet, but then there’s this strange question underneath it all. When it all comes together at the end, in the trio, it’s absolutely glorious. But I’ll tell you, from my point of view, that has been one of the hardest things to learn ever, and I’ve done Sweeney.

“Now” is still one of the hardest songs I’ve ever had to learn, because by the end of the trio, when we all have our different lines, if you play those lines separately, it’s nonsense. Seeming nonsense. And the minute you put it together, you go, oh. And then, when you get it right, it’s just glorious. I was laughing with Liné, who plays Anne, and William, who plays Henrik, that it was torture initially learning it. The minute you get it right on its feet, it’s like Stockholm syndrome — you fall in love with your captor all over again. So rewarding. But gosh, I’ve never, ever had to deal with that before.

Is it useful, in some ways, that “Now” comes so early in the show? Is it helpful to get locked into that headspace before the show begins?

Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s like a mental institution backstage — everybody’s wandering around, going over and over their lines, one person going “now…” and the other going “later…” and another going “soon…” It’s just crazy, and we’re all in our own worlds. But when we come together, every time the lights go down at the end of the trio, you can feel all three of us either extraordinarily chuffed or absolutely crushed. So it’s all or nothing.

Now that the show’s on its feet and you’re living the full arc of the character on stage, has anything surprised you? Something that didn’t seem as technically demanding on the page, perhaps, but where you’ve found there’s more to it than meets the eye?

Yeah. Musically, I’d say the melody to “You Must Meet My Wife.” When you first hear it, it sounds so pretty and easy, almost Schubert-esque. And then you actually look at the melody and the chromatics in it, and it’s so angular and so difficult. It made me wonder, initially, whether or not Fredrik meant what he was saying. He’s making it up, in a sense — but on the other hand, he does love her. So that was an interesting moment for me. But the way we’ve staged it is that neither Desirée nor Fredrik see each other’s faces. I’m standing just behind Desirée, leaning against the dresser, talking about Anne — but I’m looking at the back of Desirée, and she doesn’t see my face, so the duplicitous nature of those lyrics comes through in that moment.

Scene-wise, it would be easy to talk about the scene before “Send in the Clowns,” because that of course is the iconic song in the show. Everybody’s waiting for it. It drives me mad actually, in some of the publicity for other productions, when it’s billed as the “Send in the Clowns” musical. So it’s easy to talk about that scene, because that scene is what turned “Send in the Clowns” into Desirée’s song, as you know.

But for me, scene-wise, it’s the scene on the bench with Charlotte, when he says, “How strange that one’s life should end, sitting on a bench in a garden.” He has these moments of such clarity. When he’s talking about other people, he’s so able to understand them. He says that marriage isn’t one of the easy relationships, you know? There are some lovely moments where he’s just sitting, observing everything around him, and he has such clarity in those moments. You sort of want to say to Fredrik, “You’re such a great lawyer with everyone else, but you’re a terrible one for yourself” — and I think, again, that’s so intensely human. It’s the same principle as cobblers’ kids going without shoes. And again, that’s Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim being so on the same wavelength in what they were doing.

But I’ll tell you what I’ve found the most interesting: seeds of Sweeney all over, both in score and in the book. To me, it makes sense that six years later, Sweeney Todd would happen between Wheeler and Sondheim. There are moments where I think to myself, gosh, this is really satisfying, looking back at both shows now.

You mentioned your experience playing these bigger, more bravura characters — Sweeney, the Phantom, and so on. Have you found it refreshing, as an actor, to access such a different place as you’ve come to find Fredrik?

Initially, when I got the call about this show, when they said they’d like to offer me a part in A Little Night Music, I instantly assumed it would be Carl-Magnus. I thought that would make the most sense: that’s Sondheim’s Gaston, right? When they said Fredrik, I initially thought they’d made a mistake. It’s not traditional casting. But it’s also not lost on me that the original Fredrik was Len Cariou, who was the original Sweeney too, so perhaps there’s something in that.

There have certainly been elements in this rehearsal process where it was hard to fight against instinct. Fredrik is very much the willing wallflower, in a sense. But in some ways he has the most to do in the show. It’s a mountain to climb in terms of words, and stillness, and seeming nothingness.

I’m playing the invisible man, in a sense. It’s the most exposing thing to do as an actor, because you start realizing what your defaults are, what your natural impulses are — and when you’ve played parts where you’re accustomed to perhaps a little bit more flash, suddenly there’s nothing like that in the show, and you don’t really get many laughs. You certainly get a big lump-in-the-throat moment at the end of the show, but my God, you work your butt off to get to that point. How like life that is…

So as an actor, it’s a very, very interesting challenge. “Challenge” even sounds negative, but the gauntlet thrown is so interesting. I want you to shine without any light is essentially what you have to do with Fredrik. And I know so many people like him. I think we all know more people like Fredrik than we do who are like Sweeney.

I’d love to know more about your own personal Sondheim journey, especially as you’ve had such success with a variety of non-Sondheim roles throughout your career.

My journey with Sondheim was hilarious. When I auditioned for my first big musical, which was Beauty and the Beast, I was auditioning for Gaston. I was 20 or 21, and I did “Agony” as my audition song. I didn’t know much about Sondheim at all. I remember when I put the sheet music down in front of my audition pianist, who was going to be in the room with me, he just put his head in his hands. He was like, “Dear God, never give an audition pianist Sondheim.” We sat down and wrote the chords down instead of the actual dots.

I came to the Sondheim party very, very late. My friend said, “Oh, go watch Into the Woods,” so that was the first Sondheim I got into. As I went through the show, I realized that my ambition one day would be to play the Witch, not the Prince. I was very disappointed that the song didn’t belong to a character I’d want to play. Then I went down the rabbit hole — Into the Woods, Sunday, Sweeney, and then I discovered Company. That’s the way it went. Whereas with Lloyd Webber, you do generally start with Joseph and work through his stuff chronologically. It’s fascinating that they have the most opposite sort of journey when you discover their work. But I also find it so fascinating that Sondheim is Hammerstein’s boy, and Lloyd Webber is Rice’s boy, in a way. So it’s all linked, somehow. But yeah — learning “Agony” for a Gaston audition is how my Sondheim journey started.

A Little Night Music plays in Cape Town until July 12. More info and tickets here.