For a character so often described in passing, Johanna proves remarkably difficult to describe well. From a distance, she can seem simple: the pretty soprano, the girl at the window, the captive ingénue whose music floats above the grime and blood of Sweeney Todd. Johanna is, perhaps, as easy to flatten as to embody.

But what looks on paper like innocence can, in performance, become anxiety, curiosity, damage, wit, survival instinct, longing, volatility, or defiance. Today, in conversation with 10 performers who’ve played Johanna, we’ll trace the inner life of a character who proves far stranger, darker, and more resilient from the inside than her reputation might suggest.

First impressions and assumptions

Lucy May Barker, who played Johanna in the 2012 West End revival opposite Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton, remembers arriving with assumptions the rehearsal room quickly challenged. “I saw that surface sweetness of Johanna,” she says, “and in rehearsals I tried to play that — and they would stop me. ‘Stop it, you don’t need to do that. You can give the grit of her.’”

Looking back, Barker is candid about how young she was then: “I too saw her as quite sweet and innocent — and she is all of those things — but I don’t think I saw the true depth of her at the time. Maybe that was the point.”

The progression from sweetness to grit recurred across these conversations. At the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music this year, Maya Sharma found herself revising an initial impression she now calls “so misguided.” Her Johanna had seemed “a typical princess-type ingénue — this innocent and passive sort of myth-like thing, because people only talk about her as this idealization.” Once rehearsal began, that reading started to fall apart, and the work became something more precise: analyzing Johanna “as a full person, not as a projection of a person.”

Miriana Pavia, in London, describes something similar: at first, Johanna looked like “the damsel in distress, the princess.” But rehearsal made another Johanna visible: “really quite a strong character,” who “goes through hell and back” and, Pavia notes, possesses “really good survival skills.”

For Michelle van de Ven, who played the role professionally in the Netherlands across more than 150 performances, the trap was partly musical. Because “Green Finch” is “a very pretty song, and it’s about birds,” she says, “at first you don’t feel the anxiety, the feeling of being so captured.” Only in rehearsal did that prettier image give way to something darker and less stable.

Having often played the kind of lyrical soprano role people are quick to dismiss, Matilda Collard was alert to the assumptions gathered around Johanna before she played her in Bristol earlier this year. “So many people just write her off as the pretty role, the lyrical soprano role that has no depth. If you actually, even for a second, think about her story, it is so nuanced.” Isabella Dippel, who played Johanna in Wisconsin last fall, places her in a wider lineage of young heroines too easily patronized, even by theatre people: “I’ve been Juliet. I’ve been Cosette. There’s a lot of depth there if you just look at the text for more than three seconds. Johanna is definitely another case of that.”

Even when performers began by stressing Johanna’s innocence, the word rarely survived unqualified. Anya Bryant first saw her as “this beacon of naivety and hope,” someone with a “gilded-cage quality” — but is careful to say that innocence did not mean blindness. “She was aware of the fact that she couldn’t leave, which is why she was yearning so much.”

And Lilly Foo-Black was drawn to the gap between Johanna’s composed surface and the disturbance underneath: “she seems so pristine, so put together, and then you delve into the music. She’s got all these thoughts going everywhere but with no real output.”

The girl at the window

Detached from the rest of the show, “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” can seem to confirm the cliché: the beautiful captive soprano in a beautiful captive aria, all wistfulness and suspended longing. Several of our Johannas spoke about having to resist precisely that.

Collard puts the problem bluntly. “‘Green Finch’ is so often sung as an ‘I Want’ song — and it is, in that she’s dreaming about freedom — but sometimes people lose the absolute devastation of it, because they sing it in a Disney princess way.” The dreaminess had to be there, certainly, but so did something harder. “The audience needs to understand that she’s absolutely trapped, and so alone. The loneliness of it needs to come through.”

Sharma’s route into the song lay in its grammar. “She’s not passively singing. She’s not making statements. Every single one of her thoughts is a question.” In rehearsal with director Vincent DeGeorge, she kept returning to the idea that Johanna’s purity was not innate but manufactured: “It is curated by the Judge and her environment. Her knowledge, her identity, everything about her is a product of her environment.” That raised an urgent question: what, then, belonged to Johanna herself? The answer she arrived at was “her need for connection, her curiosity, and this fire that lives in her that keeps her going.”

Sharma was also struck by what the song’s imagery encodes. The caged songbird, familiar from literary tradition, models a particular idea of femininity: value lies in beauty and in producing a pleasing sound, while freedom, autonomy, and interior life are restricted. “She’s not just dreaming about being free — she’s studying the birds. She’s trying to understand how something so trapped can still survive, let alone sing.” And then there is the darker paradox the song contains: that the caged birds are blinded, which is why they sing at all hours. They sing because they cannot distinguish night from day. “Because she is not blind,” Sharma says, “that’s exactly why she can’t sing.”

For Erin Rose Doyle, the song became a study in volatility and interruption. Her Johanna had not suddenly broken in the asylum — she had already been broken by confinement, years before the story begins. That shaped everything vocally. “She has these intrusive thoughts, and then all of a sudden it’s, ‘Just kidding!’ And then an intrusive thought comes back.” The instability was, for Doyle, also specifically adolescent: “She’s 16. She’s becoming a woman, and I wanted it to show in my voice.”

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Anya Bryant thought vocally in terms of a journey, too: the bright, clean sound of “Green Finch” gradually becoming “less childlike and more grounded” as Johanna begins to understand the darkness beyond her window. Dippel built something similar into the body, playing Johanna with “a little bit of a nervous tremor,” treating the trill as a failed effort to steady herself: “She’s trying to get ahold of herself, trying to just sing normally, and then the hand starts shaking.” Foo-Black, too, heard disturbance in those ornamental figures. The trills and repetitions felt to her like “a glamorized mental breakdown” — not decorative detail, but a mind in the act of “driving herself crazy.”

Zoë Meier Juhlin, also playing Johanna at CCM this year, was struck by how much the music is already carrying before the performer does anything at all. “Even in ‘Green Finch,’” she says, “there’s a hint of depression and melancholy. There’s something much deeper and more nuanced, because she’s gone through things that a normal 16- or 17-year-old wouldn’t have.”

Van de Ven felt that the anxiety was there all along but fully revealed itself elsewhere. “It was ‘Kiss Me,’” she says simply. “It was the anxiety of it, the quickness of the song — that, for me, captured the character.”

The voice as character

Several performers went further, describing the vocal score not merely as a vehicle for character but as character itself — a map of Johanna’s interior that a singer has to read as carefully as any stage direction.

Collard spoke in close technical terms about a single phrase in “Green Finch” she found especially revealing. She made a gradual progression: “‘Dreaming’ — very light in head voice, very minimal vibrato, almost suspended. Then I brought in a little more. And then ‘screaming’ — a very fast vibrato, really big, sort of unhinged.” The escalation, she felt, was a window into what Johanna is working to contain: “one of those small moments of being able to see what is inside her.”

Van de Ven observed that much of the role’s difficulty comes from where it sits in the voice — specifically the passaggio, that technically vulnerable place where registers shift. Her solution varied by song: in “Green Finch” she kept the sound smaller and more contained; in “Kiss Me,” she was able to open up more.

Meier Juhlin, coming to the role as an opera singer, found it a genuine crossover challenge. Johanna, she argued, needs both classical security for the soaring upper writing and theatrical flexibility for the middle voice — “where she lives a lot of the time, especially in ‘Green Finch.’” She was particularly drawn to the dramatic demands of the Act 2 sequence, where Johanna moves from the fragmented, speech-driven anxiety of the “Kiss Me” reprise into the exposed soprano lines of the “Searching” passage — all within a matter of minutes. That sudden shift in vocal technique, she felt, makes Johanna’s emotional dislocation physically audible.

Anthony, escape, and the question of love

The tension between surface and inner life runs through Johanna’s relationship with Anthony, too. None of these performers seemed interested in treating him as uncomplicated romantic fulfilment — not because they denied the emotional truth of the connection, but because “real” and “simple” turned out to mean very different things.

Pavia puts it most directly. “Was he really the love of her life, or was he her first way out?” Anthony’s appeal is inseparable from what he represents: a route beyond confinement. “A part of her is experiencing, for the first time, a boy her age giving her that attention,” she says. But another part is thinking clearly: “He might want to marry me, so this is a really good way out.”

Sharma arrived at a similarly layered formulation. “He’s infatuated with her, and she knows she can’t escape alone. He says, ‘I’ll steal you,’ but she’s dropping the key. He says, ‘I’ll save you,’ but she’s the one that shoots Fogg.” That asymmetry, for her, was not a reason to doubt the relationship’s emotional reality — it was the relationship’s emotional reality. “It’s not just a love story — it’s a collision between projection and strategy. Anthony sees a fantasy; Johanna sees a possibility for escape. And that’s layered in with whatever infatuation they feel for each other.”

Collard agreed that the romance, whatever it becomes, begins in necessity. “He is her only way out. He is her vehicle to escape. That’s what’s exciting. That’s where the infatuation and the love come from.” Van de Ven heard both things at once: genuine attraction and pragmatic calculation running alongside each other, inseparable. Meier Juhlin found herself drawn instead to what Anthony carries atmospherically — something that has nothing to do with romance in a conventional sense. “His name is Anthony Hope for a reason,” she says. “There’s this intention and hopefulness about him that draws her in.” For a young woman raised in controlled ignorance, that quality of hopeful forward motion may matter more than anything else.

Bryant, meanwhile, noticed how differently each of the men in the show regards Johanna — and what that multiplicity does to her sense of self. To the Judge, she is an object of possession; to Anthony, an idealization; to Sweeney, a child. “She might not know who she is,” she says. “And each person looks at her differently.”

Doyle found yet another dimension in the dynamic, choosing to withhold information from her own performance in a way that mirrored Johanna’s experience. The actor playing Judge Turpin had detailed discussions with the director about the backstory — discussions Doyle was deliberately kept out of. “Not only was Johanna kept in the dark, but I was kept in the dark,” she says. “Which added another layer.”

“Kiss Me” itself is hardly a simple outpouring. Nearly everyone described it as technically formidable and psychologically compressed. Pavia found it the most challenging song she has ever had to sing; what helped, she says, was the pulse underneath it — “our MD said it’s the heartbeat.” The trick was to let that heartbeat drive the scene without allowing technical anxiety to crowd out dramatic urgency.

The asylum, Fogg, and agency

Again and again, our Johannas identified Fogg’s Asylum sequence as the place where the myth of her passivity finally collapses. Pavia remembered the realization precisely: “The point where I really went, ‘Oh, she’s actually so much stronger than him,’ is the scene in the asylum, when she’s the one who shoots. He tries, but she’s the one who goes through with it.”

For Sharma, Fogg’s Asylum is the next apparatus of control in a long sequence of them: another institution trying to define, contain, and erase Johanna. And, she says, “she refuses that erasure.” Doyle, meanwhile, found in the asylum not the origin of Johanna’s instability but its first point of recognition. Surrounded by people whose minds work the way hers does, she is — for the first time — met rather than managed. “It’s like the birds are singing back to her.”

Foo-Black thought about it in terms of the show’s broader architecture: Mrs Lovett pulling strings behind the scenes, Johanna’s apparent serenity concealing disturbance, the gap everywhere between surface and interior. “Johanna as a character seems so pristine, so put together,” she says, “and then you delve into the music and it’s all over the place.” The asylum is where that gap closes, where exterior and interior finally align — violently, irreversibly, but honestly.

Dippel’s experience of the final sequence preserved, above all, the texture of Johanna’s thinking. The half-recognized lullaby. The shadow of the Beggar Woman, who in their production would sleep beneath Johanna’s window during “Green Finch,” listening to her daughter sing. The moment alone in the barbershop — that breath, that look around, that careful handling of the razor. “It was the first time in her entire life that she had a moment to herself,” Dippel says. And then the return: the “Kiss Me” fragment, the kiss, the switch. Not collapse, but reorientation. She was the one pulling Anthony back onto the stage. After the kiss, she says, it was clear: they needed to go.

What these performers return to, in different vocabularies, is the difficulty of preserving complexity in a role the culture keeps trying to simplify. The challenge of Johanna is to sing beautifully without smoothing away fear; to play innocence without emptiness; to let lyricism coexist with anxiety, curiosity, damage, and will.

Johanna may look, at first glance, like one of Sondheim’s more archetypal figures. From the inside, she appears to be something else entirely: a role that keeps asking to be rescued from its own reputation.

With immense thanks to Lucy May Barker, Anya Bryant, Matilda Collard, Isabella Dippel, Erin Rose Doyle, Lilly Foo-Black, Zoë Meiher Juhlin, Miriana Pavia, Maya Sharma, and Michelle van de Ven, for their time, generosity, and insight.

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Putyatin arrived in Shimoda harbor in October 1854, aboard his flagship, the frigate Diana. He had already been negotiating with the Japanese for over a year, having first appeared at Nagasaki in August 1853 — earlier than Perry’s famous second visit, though less noticed by history. The shogunate had stalled him, as it stalled everyone; the Crimean War had complicated his position (Britain and France were now his enemies at sea, and British warships patrolled the Pacific); and the Convention of Kanagawa, signed by Perry in March 1854, had changed the terms of every subsequent negotiation by establishing that the door, once forced, could not easily be closed again.

Putyatin arrived at Shimoda knowing that Perry had already been there, knowing that Britain had followed, knowing that the window for Russia to extract comparable terms was narrowing. The talks resumed. Progress was slow.

Then, on the morning of 23 December 1854, the earth moved.

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It’s so good to meet you. Let’s start with Sweeney Todd. Is it a show you’ve known ever since you first started falling in love with theatre, or did you come to it more recently?

Of course! In 2019, a theater near me was doing the show. I was in the ensemble, understudying Johanna. I actually had to leave that production because I was cast in something else, but that’s when I was first introduced to Sweeney Todd. I mean, how can you listen to “God, That’s Good” and not become obsessed with the entire show? I loved the music — especially any of Lovett’s numbers, actually. They are just so fun to sing. There are so many little earworms that get stuck in my head when I’m cleaning.

And then, when I was in Parade, Sweeney was running at the same time. Gaten [Matarazzo] was at City Center with me, and then he went to Sweeney and I went to Parade for the transfer. We would get out before them, so I would leave the theater, stop at Sweeney’s stage door, say hi to all my friends, and then go home. I became really good friends with Jordan Fisher as well, and those two guys became my rocks during the Broadway run. Both of them had done it before, so I was able to talk to them and ask for advice. But that revival really ignited something in me about Sweeney, and I re-fell in love with it.

Then all of a sudden, last semester, I got word that my school was putting it on this current semester — directed by the incredible L Morgan Lee, Tony nominee — and I was lucky enough to get cast as Johanna.

Most people train and then might one day make it to Broadway. For you, it’s the other way around. I’d love to know a little more about that journey, and why the musical theater program at Pace spoke to you post-Broadway.

I was cast in Parade on Broadway when I was a senior in high school. I actually never saw myself going to college in New York City — I’m from Houston, Texas, so I never really saw myself moving to New York ever. During the audition process it became very important to me to find a musical theater BFA program that also allowed me to continue my career. A lot of programs are very strict: you can’t audition for outside shows, you have to finish in four years, or else you can never come back.

What stuck out to me about Pace’s program is that so many Broadway kids have gone there and still been able to work. They have a wonderful program called the Learning Experience Program — you get one semester where, if you book something, you can go online and do your math, your science, your whatever. Then you’re able to work in the city. That was so important to me, and I was lucky enough to do that when I was cast in The Hills of California.

It’s been so cool to go the opposite way: Broadway to school instead of school to Broadway. I was able to learn from the greats. My first show was with Ben Platt, Micaela Diamond, Howard McGillin, and all of these Broadway icons I’ve always looked up to. And the real-world experience before coming to school has made me appreciate the education process even more.

Also, industry people work here. Tony nominee L Morgan Lee is my professor. Shonica [Gooden] is one of our dance teachers and she was in Hamilton for ten years. That’s something so special about Pace: you have all these professors saying, “In the real world, this will happen” — and you can trust their knowledge because they are in the real world. It’s people being like, “Yeah, when I was in A Strange Loop, this happened, so you have to do this in order to prepare.”

Zooming back in to Sweeney, how did you feel about Johanna as you prepared to play her?

I was so determined to make her a four-dimensional character. Johanna can be so easily written off as the love interest: she’s there, she sings pretty, she has a couple of ditties, and that’s all she has. I was so determined not to have her be two-dimensional, because there are so many layers to her that, if you’re just looking at her on the surface, you don’t notice.

I had a lot of conversations with L Morgan Lee about this. She had such a cool vision: that we were all spirits trapped in this cycle of telling this story, in hopes that one day the cycle will be broken by Sweeney realizing that the Beggar Woman is Lucy before killing her. Having that vision already in my mind, I was so excited to play around with Johanna. I realized that so many people have her be just this naive girl who then goes crazy in the asylum. My take on her was: she’s not necessarily naive — she’s 16, but the only thing she knows is the stuff that Judge Turpin allows her to know. She is confined to one room her entire life. She’s already crazy. She does not magically turn crazy in the asylum.

So my vision for Johanna was that the asylum is the first time in her life that she feels sane. Because she’s surrounded by people whose minds work like hers — everyone is crazy around her, so she’s finally heard. It’s like the birds are singing back to her. “Green Finch” is all about her wanting the birds to sing back to her — she’s singing at them, help me sing, let me sing. And finally, in the asylum, she’s surrounded by the lunatics who are singing.

Thinking about your voice type and potential future casting, do you feel a responsibility to advocate for characters like Johanna? Because we can all think of other characters like her, perhaps dismissed as ingenues but who actually have a great deal going on beneath the surface. Are you conscious of that as you think about repertoire and auditions going forward?

Oh my goodness, yes. That’s why I love Into the Woods so much. Characters like Cinderella and the Baker’s Wife are given an arc that in other shows they wouldn’t have been given. People hear “soprano” and write them off as, oh, they sing pretty, they’ll wear a pretty dress, I’m sure there will be a kiss or two, and then they get to bow.

As much as it’s so nice to have a princess track, it is frustrating, and honestly a little misogynistic, that the second we hear a high voice, we can be like, oh, they probably have nothing else to them except being a love interest — when there’s so much more depth. That’s why I love specifically Cinderella and the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods, because yeah, they sing pretty and they have some of the best songs in the show, but my god, they have trauma.

It’s a bit like when someone sings a belty song and they just add a bunch of riffs. Yeah, it sounds great, it sounds cool, but you need to justify them. It can’t just be five million notes on every word. It needs to be justified through emotion, or through movement, or something. One of my favorite things to do right now is to take soprano-y songs and soprano-y characters, and figure out what’s going on in their brain.

So I do feel a sort of responsibility — and it’s also fun. It’s so fun to take a character that’s usually two-dimensional and give her this crazy arc, so that people are like, I never used to pay attention to that character, but now I love her. When I saw Sweeney Todd for the first time, I didn’t care about Johanna. I was more worried about this poor Toby kid. He’s going through it! He needs therapy! But then the second I got my hands on the score and the script, I was like, oh my god, this poor girl is suffering.

I really hope I get to do that more in the future, because sopranos are written off and they need to not be. Those songs are hard — but I want the juiciness. I want: why are they hitting a high C? Is there a reason?

When you think back to Parade now, do you have any sense of a through-line between Johanna and Mary Phagan?

With Mary Phagan, obviously I had to do so much research. I thought it was very important to play her as her family saw her, because I know that a lot of people took her story and used it for the worst. The Knights of Mary Phagan, who then turned into the KKK a few years later, took it and ran with it that way. I just wanted her to be this light. Because she’s talked about in such a sad, dark way throughout the entire show, I wanted the second you saw that purple dress to feel like you could breathe. Even in the darkest part of the show, I wanted the audience to be like, okay, we’re good.

She’s not in the show a lot, but she is talked about on every single page of that script. It was so important to me to justify both her absence and her presence, because Michael Arden had me present in a few extra places. I was present in the courtroom at the end of Act 1, and that was so special as an actor. I heard from a few audience members that seeing Mary Phagan watching over what her death had resulted in added so many more layers.

Mary Phagan was only 13, and it was a long time ago. But being able to give her even the slightest bit of an arc was really important to me, so she’s not written off as “the 13-year-old that died.” She’s one of the most important 13-year-olds in history. You have to think back to when you were 13: how did you move? How did you talk? How did you see the world? And the same is true with Johanna: how was I when I was 16? How did I move? How did I see the world? How did I react to adults?

I had flashbacks of researching Mary Phagan while I was researching Johanna. Jordan Fisher was so sweet when I told him I got the part. He gave me The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia and said, “Use it.” As I was going through it, I had flashbacks of scrolling the internet at 2:00 a.m., finding Mary Phagan’s autopsy report and little bits of information. I am a research girly — I think it’s the psychology minor in me. I just have to know everything.

Both of your Broadway shows involved the creators being in the room with you — Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry on Parade, and then Jez Butterworth on The Hills of California. How important was that creative collaboration for you?

I was so blessed to be in rooms where the shows were still, in a way, being workshopped. Yes, Parade was a revival, but Alfred Uhry, when he came and saw our run, went up to Michael and JRB afterwards and was like, “Here’s a new scene.” People think of revivals and assume it’s just going to be a new vision of an old show, but Alfred was still wanting to make it better and more heart-wrenching. It was so cool. And at City Center, Jason came in one day with two pages added to “That’s What He Said.”

With The Hills of California, we started rehearsals and I got the script — but I had bought it beforehand, because I couldn’t wait, and Act 3 was completely different. I found out that after the West End production closed, Jez and the four sisters got together and rewrote Act 3, which is just insane to me. It made it even more heartbreaking.

I love Jez Butterworth. He is one of the sweetest souls ever. Every time he was at a rehearsal there was just this light in the room — and he’d come back with so many notes. During previews, some jokes would not land, and then we’d get an email: here’s the new script. I think we had six or seven or eight different scripts throughout previews.

It made me so excited about the collaboration of this industry. A lot of times it can feel very scary — if I don’t do exactly what the director wants, they’re going to hate me and I’ll never get cast again. When in reality, if the actor’s not comfortable, the director doesn’t want that either. It was so eye-opening to realize that’s what the industry really is — not this looming, scary thing where you never see the director and never see the writer. No, we were all in the same room, all in conversation with each other. We all have each other’s numbers still. I was just so blessed to be in such a collaborative space on my Broadway debut.

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The pattern in “Please Hello” has been growing clearer and darker. Each demand has been furnished with ideological wrapping — a story told about why each country’s presence is not only inevitable but, in some important sense, good. The USA arrived with progress: kerosene and grain elevators and that machine you can rent called a train. Britain arrived with civilization: letters from Her Majesty, the machinery of diplomatic process, the promise of permanent institutional representation. Even the Dutch Admiral, for all his desperation, arrived with at least the gesture of a gift — chocolate, windmills, tulips, a wooden shoe.

The Russian Admiral arrives with something different. He arrives with a clause — and, uniquely among the Admirals, he arrives already bleeding.

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“Are We the Fourth? I Feel Depressed”

Russia in the mid-nineteenth century was a peculiarly anxious empire: the largest by land mass on earth, expanding continuously across Central Asia and into the Pacific, and yet perpetually uncertain of its standing among the Western powers. The humiliation of the Crimean War (1853–1856) runs as a parallel timeline to the negotiations dramatized in “Please Hello.” Admiral Putyatin was conducting the talks that would result in the Treaty of Shimoda while Russia was losing a war to Britain and France in the Black Sea. He returned a count, lionized in St Petersburg, partly because the treaty was one of the rare Russian diplomatic victories of that era. The empire was winning on its eastern frontier because it was being battered on its western one.

This Admiral’s directional comedy — “Start looking East / Or closer West— / Well, farther North—” — points to a geographical truth. Russia’s relationship to Japan was structurally awkward. The two empires shared a border in the most contested possible sense: the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, the southern reaches of what would become Hokkaido — all of it unmapped, negotiated, disputed. Russia didn’t quite know where it stood in relation to Japan because the line between them hadn’t been drawn yet, and the Treaty of Shimoda’s attempt to draw it merely deferred the argument to future generations. The Northern Territories dispute that to this day clouds Russian-Japanese relations has its legal origin in that treaty — in the very clause the Admiral is, in this moment, working up the nerve to introduce.

Great Game anxiety is central here. Russia was always measuring itself against Britain, always chasing a warm-water port, always expanding but never quite arriving at the table with sufficient prestige to feel secure. “Are we the fourth?” is the question of a power that has been growing for centuries and still cannot shake the feeling that someone else has already claimed the best seat. Little wonder, then, that he feels depressed.

Extraterritoriality

The Russian Admiral introduces a nine-syllable word to “Please Hello.” (As far as I’m aware, there’s only one word in Sondheim’s canon that’s longer. Do comment below if you know what that is…)

Coming next
Is extraterritoriality.
Noting text
Say “extraterritoriality.”
You perplexed
By “extraterritoriality?”

Extraterritoriality, in the context of the nineteenth-century unequal treaties, meant this: a foreign national on Japanese soil was not subject to Japanese law. If a Russian sailor committed a crime — any crime — in a Japanese city, he would be tried by Russian consular authorities under Russian law. Japanese sovereignty was rendered formally incomplete over its own territory. The arriving power had carved out a permanent legal exception for itself, a mobile envelope of impunity that travelled with every one of its citizens wherever they went.

This was not Russia’s invention. Extraterritoriality had been extracted from China by Britain following the Opium Wars, and would appear in virtually every subsequent unequal treaty across East Asia. But the Russian Admiral, more than any of his predecessors, is willing to say, in plain language, what it means:

Just noting clause
(Don’t touch the coat!)
Which say your laws
Do not apply
(Don’t touch the coat!)
When we drop by
Not getting shot
No matter what—
A minor scrape
A major rape
And we escape
(Don’t touch the cape!)
That’s what is extraterritoriality

This might be the most naked statement of imperial logic in “Please Hello.” The Russian Admiral wants to be exempt from the law of the land he is visiting. He wants his countrymen, no less than his coat, to be untouchable.

The Paradox of the Most Honest Imperialist

There is a thread running through this series about honesty and ideology. Last month, we explored how the Dutch Admiral, in his commercial shamelessness, accidentally stripped away the ideological costume that the American and British Admirals had worn, exposing the skeleton of imperial demand underneath.

The Russian Admiral does something similar but differently. Where the Dutch Admiral’s honesty was commercial — empire is fundamentally just supply-chain management — the Russian Admiral’s honesty is legal-nihilist. He strips away ideology and reveals something more unsettling than commercial greed: the frank assertion that consequences, for his people, simply do not apply.

Every previous Admiral has gestured at reciprocity. Even their threats maintained the fiction of a transaction: you give us this, we do not fire our cannons. There is, in that fiction, at least the shadow of a negotiation.

The Russian Admiral’s “fair is fair” section abandons even that shadow:

Fair is fair—
You wish perhaps to vote?
What we care
You liking what we wrote?
Sitting there
Is finest fleet afloat

Fairness is is a concept he is dismissing in the act of naming it, not a principle he is appealing to. This is, in its way, the most intellectually honest thing any Admiral says. Britain was not fair. America was not fair. Neither was the Netherlands. The Russian Admiral is simply the only one who says so, even as his method of saying so is to fire the largest explosion yet and gesture at the fleet. The most nakedly nihilistic of the Admirals is also, in a strange sense, the most truthful.

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What Happens Next

Once the Russian Admiral has secured his clause, the other Admirals’ responses are revealing.

The British Admiral objects on the grounds of precedent: “The element / Of precedent / Imperils our neutrality.” The phrase “imperils our neutrality” is gloriously dishonest from a power anchored offshore with warships and a permanent ambassador in place — but the real content is clear enough. Britain does not object to extraterritoriality. Britain objects to Russia having it first.

The Dutch Admiral makes no actual argument: “We want the same / What the Russkies claim! / Why you let them came? / Dirty rotten shame!” The subjunctive is gone entirely, the grammar worse even than the American Admiral’s condescending pidgin, because this is a tantrum, plain and simple. The incumbent has watched the newcomer extract the prize and can only stamp his foot.

This is the hinge of the number. Everything before Russia is, however violent, sequential and structured. An Admiral makes his case; Abe signs; the next Admiral enters. Everything after Russia is simultaneous: the Admirals sing over each other, their competing demands dissolving into a general roar and Abe nearly buried under the accumulating paperwork. The Russian Admiral caused this chaos not through aggression, but by introducing a concept — legal immunity — whose logic, once inside the treaty framework, obligated every other power to demand the same, immediately, all at once. A clause that sounds procedural turns out to be a structural detonator.

The coat cannot be touched. And once that is established, everyone wants the same protection.

A Historical Coda

The aftermath bears this out with particular clarity.

The treaty that the Russian Admiral’s historical counterpart, Admiral Putyatin, eventually secured was in one respect unique among the unequal treaties of this period: it was, technically, reciprocal. The Treaty of Shimoda’s extraterritoriality provision extended to Japanese citizens in Russia as well as Russians in Japan. This was the only one of the Bakumatsu-era unequal treaties to contain such a provision.

Sondheim’s Russian Admiral offers no such reciprocity. He presents a one-sided immunity and doesn’t care whether Japan likes what he wrote. The gap between the technical legal fact (reciprocal extraterritoriality) and the dramatic representation of it (one-sided impunity) is itself instructive. Reciprocal extraterritoriality, on paper, sounds like equality. In practice, it meant something quite different: a Japanese citizen in Russia was in no position to invoke legal protections before a foreign consul in a foreign city; a Russian in Japan was in a very strong position to do exactly that, backed by a warship in the harbor and the threat of a larger explosion. Formal reciprocity and actual reciprocity are very different things.

Putyatin was celebrated on his return to St Petersburg, elevated to a count — and then criticized for failing to secure a commercial agreement, and sent back to Japan twice more, in 1857 and 1858, to extract further concessions. The first treaty was tentative, a foundation for the next demand — secured, as we will see in this week’s paid-subscriber essay, under circumstances almost impossibly dramatic.

The clause sat quietly in the treaty text, and the precedent it set — that foreign nationals in Japan were exempt from Japanese law — would not be fully revoked until 1899, after decades of Meiji-era legal reform specifically designed to demonstrate to Western powers that Japan’s legal system was sophisticated enough to be trusted with their citizens. The coat could not be touched for over forty years.

Next month, our “Please Hello” series will conclude with the French Admiral, Napoleon III, détente, and the number’s extraordinary collapse into simultaneous chaos.

🚨 Starting tomorrow, I’ll be teaching a series of 3 Zoom classes for The Broadway Maven. All are welcome:

Sondheim for Musicians | 3-week course

Three one-hour sessions, each taking a different angle on how Sondheim’s music works — structurally, historically, and dramatically. You don’t need to be a performer or instrumentalist to attend, but the material will assume a basic familiarity with musical ideas, and will lean into the technical side of things.

Schedule (Mondays, 7pm ET):

May 4 — Into the Woods: Beyond the Bean Theme We’ll start with the famous five-note motif, but move beyond it — looking at how patterns recur, evolve, and accumulate meaning across the score.

May 11 — Borrowed Voices: Sondheim in Dialogue with Musical History What does Sondheim take from earlier traditions — and what does he do with it? We’ll look at Assassins, Pacific Overtures, Follies, Passion, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd, alongside figures like Britten and Stravinsky.

May 18 — The Architecture of Feeling: Canons, Counterpoint, and Form A closer look at the structural devices — canon, imitation, nested forms — that shape how Sondheim builds dramatic meaning in music.

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Other essays you might like:

It’s not surprising that readers of this particular publication hold Sondheim’s words in high esteem. But what so often shines through, in any discussion of the lyrics that mean the most to us, is not just love but utility. His words become equipment for our lives. We can talk endlessly (and boy, do we) about the beauty or the wit or the technical sophistication of his work. But today, consider something just as keenly felt: the capacity of certain lines to detach from their dramatic source and continue to work in ordinary life. To become, as it were, portable.

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The most literal form of that portability is ritual. The lyrics we respond to most deeply can become folded into the ceremony of life. And ritual language has to survive repetition: it must mean something the first time and still mean something the tenth. Andy Twigg-White described proposing with a pocket watch engraved with the words “Marry me a little?” and later walking down the aisle to a piano arrangement of the song. Their rings, he wrote, bear initials from the same lyric. Sondheim’s language has entered the marriage itself: the proposal, the wedding, the object worn every day thereafter.

Elsewhere, readers wrote of lyrics they return to in bereavement or separation, lines that help them speak about the persistence of love and presence. “Sometimes people leave you / Halfway through the wood” became, for a reader in London, a way of holding onto the fact that grief does not simply end a relationship but can transform it. The utility of a lyric like this is, I think, born of that fact that it is emotionally precise without being sealed. Such lyrics arrive from a specific character in a specific dramatic situation, but they are phrased in such a way that the specificity becomes a door rather than a wall. You enter through the character’s feeling and find your own on the other side.

They also become a way of instructing the self.

Read more

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To start at a high level, as you reflect on your journey with Merrily We Roll Along, what stands out to you most clearly?

We all had a sense of being part of something really special. There was immense gratitude to be in that production. For me especially, that was my Broadway debut, and I’m no spring chicken. I’ve been working at this for quite a while, and to have it happen in my mid-30s was really exciting. We all recognized how special it was to be on stage every night.

Since the show closed, I’ve been personally reflecting on how this one show helped me check so many boxes of things that I dreamed to do and goals I hoped to reach. I got to be on an original Broadway cast album. I got to perform at the Tony Awards. I got to make my Broadway principal debut. I got to make my Broadway debut, period. I got to work at New York Theater Workshop, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. To have one job, one show, encapsulate so many firsts and goals was so mind-blowing. All of those things happened because of one job.

You’d lived with this production off-Broadway, honing and developing it. Do you have a clear memory of when the transfer was confirmed? And in that moment, were you conscious of all that would likely follow?

Honestly, I think I actually took all of those things for granted. It took doing them to be like, oh yeah, this is not everyone’s reality when they make their Broadway debut. There are a lot of really quirky little traditions that happen. There’s a robe that gets passed from show to show, to company members in the ensemble, and that’s part of the Broadway opening. Debuts are celebrated. All these things are so special and community-based.

Those things just didn’t register in the moment until after the show was up and running, and I was like, wow, how lucky am I that this has been my experience? I can move forward knowing that I’ve had that. But I am so grateful for those little things.

The offer for New York Theater Workshop came in May 2022. They told us that, if it transfers, it’s going to be in this time period. It wasn’t concrete. And also, for me, I have been a part of shows off-Broadway that have transferred and not all of us got to go with it. I’d been burned before — so I wasn’t going to believe anything until actually setting foot on that Broadway stage. That, to me, is confirmation that it is happening. Because I’ve learned my lesson in the past that even with paperwork, even with legal jargon saying that you are a part of this company, there are always workarounds, and they can be enforced if they decide they want to take something in a different direction.

I remember hearing rumblings of a transfer when the contract first came through in May of 2022. Fall of 2022 is when we started rehearsals and the run of the show. We closed January 2023. And they had told us all at that point, during the run, that everyone was being offered their jobs and it was transferring. Our entire company from off-Broadway moved. That was magical, and so special, because again, nothing in this industry is ever guaranteed.

In the six months between off-Broadway and your Broadway opening, did the show still feel very much in your body? When you were back together as a company on day one of Broadway rehearsals, how quickly did things click back into place?

Being in the rehearsal room for Broadway, the big thing for us was that New York Theater Workshop has something like 190 seats — and we went from having this beautifully intimate show, where the direction, especially for the opening number and all the transitions, was to make direct eye contact with the audience. It was so easy to do that there, and it was all about welcoming them into our show and making them feel like they were part of this experience with us. We could see every single person — last row, front row, everything in between.

And then to go to a Broadway house where we had a mezzanine and a balcony, we all were like, oh wait — is part of the magic going to be gone? That was a big conversation. And we quickly learned that, no, we can still make that magic happen, we can still have that invitation, we can still look up and connect with each person. That was a really big thing to play with in the rehearsal process for Broadway.

Do you see a through-line between that off-Broadway intimacy and the way the show was captured on film, with the proshot’s emphasis on close-ups and individual moments?

I think that was something that was very important to them to capture for the proshot. I remember a lot of conversations about it. The way we filmed it was that we had three days where, during the daytime, the whole cast would be there and we would have specific scenes and numbers that they wanted to shoot. The cameras were on stage with us, moving around between us and getting really specific shots. And then at night, they would put cameras in specific places in the audience, and we would film the show start to finish with the audience there. We did that three times.

I remember specific times when we were doing the show in the evening with the audience there, being told: there’s going to be a camera stationed here — you’re going to look for a red dot. I need you to stare down the barrel of the lens. We are capturing all of you looking into the camera, so that we can invite the audience in that way when they watch the proshot. That’s going to be the equivalent of our off-Broadway invitation. That was something they were really intentional about in the filming of the proshot.

I’d love to ask you about making your principal debut. Could you talk me through those hours between receiving notice and stepping onstage as Mary for the first time?

I can never stress enough how incredible understudies and swings are. You can think you’ve prepared for everything, and then you’re in the middle of doing it and you’re like, nope, I actually never thought about this one little thing. And you’re there for a paying audience who, for our show, paid quite a bit of money to see it — so you really want to deliver. They don’t know how much or how little you’ve been rehearsed, or if it’s your first time going on or your fortieth.

We opened the show in mid-October. I went on in mid-November. At that point, the way our understudy rehearsals had been scheduled, I had had about two or three understudy rehearsals as Mary, totalling around six hours, I think. I had walked through the traffic of the show. I knew where all the props were. I was tracking, like: she has the red folder and she has to put it here. There’s a lot of business with Mary’s purse. I have to have the cigarettes here, and the lighter is in this pocket. I’d tracked all of those details. But I’d never done it in costume. I’d never done it all the way through without stopping. I’d never done it with a full cast.

I found out Tuesday evening, after the show, that I would be going on for the Wednesday matinee. It’s interesting to track how the brain and body work in these moments. I’d been an understudy one other time, and both times, my brain did the same thing: instead of panicking, everything went very calm and very focused. I said, “Okay, thank you for the heads-up,” went home, and I did the show maybe four times in my living room by myself. Just the traffic through of, you’re going to walk here, you have to watch out for this person, they’re crossing in front of you. I said it all out loud to make sure I felt secure on everything. I tried to get a little bit of sleep.

They had called me in a little early, because I had never done it before, to run a couple of quick changes, to make sure I knew the choreography of, “You’re going to use your right foot first to step into the dress because your left shoe is getting taken off. And when the dresser is putting on your sweater with your right hand, you’re grabbing the purse with your left, and that’s your chance to grab a bottle of water and take a sip before you have to come back on stage.” Little things like that. I remember getting to the theater early, having done the show again in my living room first, running the quick changes, and again everything just felt very calm and very focused.

Good lord, I was the luckiest person ever to have Daniel and Jonathan as scene partners. I don’t think they even realize that they are genuinely just the kindest people, and so generous on stage. I was asking them, “Is there anything that you really need in any scene? Please let me know.” And they were like, “No, of course not, we’re here for you. Whatever you want to do, we’re following your lead!” They couldn’t have been more on board, and kind, and encouraging. Same for our whole cast.

I kind of blacked out once the show started. I remember waiting in the wings to make my first entrance, and telling myself, you have to walk, and you have to open your mouth. You’ve prepared a lot — something’s going to come out — but you have to do those two things, because right now your body is a little nervous and kind of wants to just stay here, and you can’t, you have to enter. So I don’t fully remember what happened. I remember coming to at bows, with people smiling, and assuming that it had gone well.

I’m thinking of a number like “Opening Doors,” which must be challenging enough when you’re locked into it eight times a week. But to slot into that trio must be quite something…

Absolutely! I remember Lindsay once asked me, is “Opening Doors” the scariest thing for you to do as an understudy? And it is pretty scary — but for me personally, “Now You Know” was the most stressful. Because the fact is, I played Scotty every night, and Scotty starts the song. It’s a weird thing for my body to be on stage, and to be like, who are you singing? Are you singing right now? No, you have to wait.

There was one week where Lindsay was in her second trimester, pregnant, and she didn’t realize it at the time, but she had full-blown pneumonia. She was trying to power through and be the leading lady of all our dreams. She’s incredible. But that week, I switched between Scotty and Mary literally every performance. by the end of the week, my body was like, do you even know the words to this song? Do I come in on beat 1, or beat 3, or beat 4?

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That, for me, was the scariest part of the show. That was the number that made my heart really, really race. During that week of back and forth, there was one time when I was on as Scotty, standing next to one of my castmates, and I went to open my mouth and sing, but it was a Mary part. I just stopped myself — and my castmate slowly turned and looked at me like, what just came out of your mouth?

For “Opening Doors,” I was usually an auditionee — isolated — so it was easy for me to figure that out. And what was lucky for me was that almost every single night, I was able to stand in the wings and watch it. I had the gift of observation, listening to so much of that song, versus being a part of it. “Opening Doors” was certainly stressful the first time, with all the various elements like a cigarette you have to put out at a certain point, and the typing that needs to be in rhythm. Sometimes a typewriter would get stuck and you had to problem-solve and fix it really fast, without getting distracted or messing anybody up. Those little things were harder than actually just locking in and learning the notes.

Zooming out a little, where did Sondheim fit into your story before Merrily? Were you surprised that a Sondheim show and your Broadway debut arrived in the same package?

It felt so meant-to-be, to be part of this show, in so many strange little ways. When I was 14 and first started getting involved with theatre and falling in love with it, the very first Sondheim show I learned was Merrily. Two upperclassmen at my school came and told me, as if they were bestowing the greatest honor upon me, “We would like to sing something from Merrily We Roll Along. I’m going to be Charley, he’s going to be Frank, and we would like you to be Mary.” And I said, “I don’t know what any of this means!”

They gave me the original cast album. They said, “Go home, listen to this — these are the songs we want to sing.” It was “Old Friends,” “Good Thing Going,” and “Our Time.” I took it home, and I fell in love with the show. I was like, this is a thing? I didn’t know this type of musical theatre existed! And that was my gateway into Sondheim.

That cast album stayed with me — little bits of it would always just live in my head, rent-free, that I could conjure at any moment. And then one of the projects I did right before Merrily was a production of Kismet, directed by Lonny Price. When that audition hit my inbox, I was like, Lonny Price! How crazy would it be to work with this man whose voice has been in my ears since forever? I sat on my bed as a kid and listened to that album and fell in love with this art form. And I’d been such a fan of his directing for so many years as well.

That show happened, and I got to be a part of it, and I was like, “I’m Lonny Price’s leading lady? This is insane! I never thought I could experience this! Lonny Price knows my name! The voice that sang “Our Time” in my head a million years ago is saying my name.” And he is the kindest, most wonderful man. What a treat to work with him.

To check that box, and then have the next thing be Merrily — crazy. Those moments of, I can’t believe this is my life. I can’t believe I get to work with this man who I’ve known of for so many years. I can’t believe I’m now doing Merrily. I can’t believe I’m emailing Lonny saying, “Isn’t this crazy? I’m in callbacks for Merrily We Roll Along.” And one of the first people I got to tell when I booked Merrily was Charley Kringas himself.

Fast-forward to him coming to see the show, and getting to hang in Jonathan’s dressing room and have him tell us stories of the original production — so insane. In my brain, I couldn’t calculate it. I couldn’t believe this is my life right now. I can’t believe this all worked out this way. Who would have thought? It was crazy. And so magical.

In the completely unstable trajectory of a career in the arts, all of the nos all of a sudden were worth it. All of the heartbreaks of things that didn’t work out — things that before had felt like they could have been life-changing — were worth it, because they made this yes possible. That is so magical, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

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What follows is the first volume of Nondheim: an occasional series of playlists for those of us with Sondheim-trained and (crucially) curious ears. Below, we offer a guide to this first curated offering. (You can listen to the full playlist on Spotify here — or click each title below to find the relevant track on YouTube.) Please feel free to add your own suggestions for future Nondheim playlists in the comments below!

1. “The Whole World Changed” (The Connector)
→ music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown

Jason Robert Brown is one of the first names many reach for when asked to suggest a contemporary writer with Sondheimian craft instincts — and with good reason. Today’s playlist begins with his 2024 musical The Connector. As an opening number, “The Whole World Changed” does the kind of heavy lifting Sondheim and his collaborators excelled at: it establishes a publication, a lineage, a mythology, and a moral fault-line, all while moving at a propulsive lick. The territory the show inhabits — idealism surrendering to ambition, the gap between truth and performance — feels palpably Sondheimian too.

What looks at first to be remarkable, bizarre
Will soon reveal itself to be part of a pattern.
And we who stand outside identify the history
In the seemingly unprecedented thing.

2. “Hosing the Furniture” (The Jonathan Larson Project)
→ music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson

Jonathan Larson is often discussed in relation to Sondheim because of lineage, and sometimes too loosely. Here we can hear a more specific affinity. “Hosing the Furniture,” now more widely known thanks to The Jonathan Larson Project, comes from Larson’s 1989 revue Sitting on the Edge of the Future, a piece prompted by the 1939 World’s Fair and its visions of domestic modernity. You can hear Larson using an unmistakably Sondheimian device here: a comic surface that keeps cracking under pressure. The song starts as chirpy household bustle and gradually reveals panic, resentment, delusion, and violence, all through a woman’s spiralling interior monologue. Larson is brilliant at the fake-out: “I’m singing in the living room” (as opposed to the rain); “Raindrops are falling on my couch” (rather than my head). The lyric swerves, again and again, and that unstable moment-to-moment surprise is part of what makes the number feel so rich:

Tom likes cocktail
Onions
Tom nodded off again
Last night
Was it me?
Was it-
I get treated like dirt
Oh dirt, dirt
Here’s a squirt
What a glow

3. “You’re Nothing Without Me” (City of Angels)
→ music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel

The central conceit of City of Angels is gloriously Sondheimian: a 1940s noir murder mystery and the story of the Hollywood screenwriter adapting it unfold simultaneously on a split-stage, the fictional characters bleeding into the writer’s real world. “You’re Nothing Without Me” is a duet of mutual contempt between a writer and his fictional detective. It is a song about authorship, ego, dependence, and the humiliating fact that creator and creation need one another. Stone (the fictional hard-boiled detective) and Stine (the writer who invented him) debate mutual indispensability, and the lyric is as ingeniously funny as anything in the canon:

You are some gumshoe.
You just don’t think. Well
Get this, dumb gumshoe,
You come from my inkwell.
Is your mouth lonely
With one foot in there?
Stone, your brain only
Holds thoughts I put in there.

4. “Birch Trees” (Three Houses)
→ music and lyrics by Dave Malloy

Dave Malloy may be the major contemporary musical theatre writer who most consistently treats form itself as an adventure. Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Ghost Quartet, Octet, Preludes: each show invents a different architecture for feeling and thought. Three Houses, which premiered at Signature Theatre in May 2024, is a pandemic parable about three people isolating in three different locations, each forced to face personal demons while sheltering from the world. “Birch Trees” traces the interior journey of Susan, who has retreated to her late grandmother’s home in Latvia, an inherited place full of emotional residue. Malloy builds his portrait with a beautiful observational specificity:

​and the birds;
​the air is latticed with birds of brilliant colors
​cerulean crests
​vermilion breasts
​and butterflies flutter by
​in bursts of ochre and amber

5. “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” (Only Murders in the Building, Season 3)
→ music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul

Is this the best patter song of the century so far? I sincerely think it has a claim. In season 3 of Only Murders in the Building, the fictional murder mystery musical “Death Rattle Dazzle” is at the center of the intrigue. This song, from the in-show musical’s score, sees Steve Martin attempting to identify which of a set of infant triplets is guilty of matricide. It’s ludicrously fun, intricate, and inventive. Here are some lyrical highlights:

In this picaresque puzzle of the Pickwick pack
Will a lighthouse shed some light
On which kid gave ol’ mom a whack?
There’s an infant to indict
I’ll book this little crook tonight

[…]

Like a forensic pediatrician, I’ll complete this inquisition
I will name the neonatal from the cradle that proved fatal
I will find the perpetrator who did murder to their mater
Or
Coochie-coochie-coo
What if none of it is true?
Has my inspection been too cursory
Should I look outside this nursery?

6. “The Light in the Piazza” (The Light in the Piazza)
→ music and lyrics by Adam Guettel

Adam Guettel’s relationship to Sondheim matters here — not in a reductive sense, but because Sondheim recognized something in Guettel’s writing. On his list of “Songs I Wish I’d Written (At Least in Part),” he included Guettel’s “The Riddle Song” from Floyd Collins. The Light in the Piazza, which opened on Broadway in 2005, is a show poised between musical and opera. The title number is essentially an aria, Clara’s surrender to a love she can’t fully articulate. Like the most moving Sondheim set-pieces, it earns its ecstasy as much through what it withholds as what it releases:

Tiny, sweet...
And then it grows
And then it fills the air!
Who knows what you’ll call it
I don’t care!
Out there somewhere
I have something I have never had...
As sad, as happy...
That’s all I see

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7. “Four Sea Interludes: IV. Storm” (Peter Grimes)
→ music by Benjamin Britten

Sondheim was clear that he was no indiscriminate opera devotee, but he was certainly an admirer of Benjamin Britten. “There’s always some acid and unexpectedness and drama,” he said in 2009, when asked what attracted him to Britten’s work. Peter Grimes, Britten’s 1945 opera about a misanthropic Suffolk fisherman hounded to self-destruction by his community, is among the great operatic works of the last century, and its Four Sea Interludes are orchestral portraits of both the sea and the characters’ inner worlds. The “Storm” interlude is a thrilling example of dramatic orchestral writing — and, to Sondheimian ears, unmistakably Sweeney Todd weather. An outsider condemned by society, the same musical “spiking” of beauty with acid…

8. “Talking Business”
→ Dessa

Dessa is a Minneapolis-based rapper, singer and writer, a member of the indie hip-hop collective Doomtree. “Talking Business,” released in 2021 as part of her IDES singles series, is a masterclass in lyrical economy, and it achieves that economy through a brilliant formal constraint: the lyric all but dispenses with verbs. The story arrives in shards, but with complete clarity. That is a deeply Sondheimian pleasure: economy that does not simplify, compression that intensifies. By withholding the usual grammatical machinery, Dessa forces every noun to work harder, as evidence, clue, and atmosphere. The result is a miniature crime film assembled from props, gestures, and traces:

Cash fare
Rideshare
Taxi to the airport
Gate 5
On-time
Baggage just a Jansport
Business-class so rum and cola
Guiltless sleep til Mexico then
On the beach like any other rich resorter’s doctor’s orders

9. “The Games I Play” (Falsettos)
→ music and lyrics by William Finn

There is an obvious Sondheim-world link here in James Lapine, who collaborated with Finn on the book of Falsettos. But the real interest of “The Games I Play” lies in how unmistakably William Finn sounds like himself while still offering pleasures a Sondheim-attuned listener will recognize. The show’s emotional world is one of brittle wit, sexual candor, fear, yearning, and family improvisation. Whizzer’s song catches all of that in miniature. It has the shape of a standard confessional number, but the harmony keeps shifting beneath him, and his self-description keeps changing too: swagger, defence, hurt, appetite, real attachment.

I bet on the horses
I die by degree
I am sure his divorce is
A tribute to me
Ask me if I love him
It depends on the day
These are the games I play

10. “Quiet” (Matilda)
→ music and lyrics by Tim Minchin

One of the admirable things about Tim Minchin’s writing for Matilda is that he refuses to write down to children, either musically or intellectually. “Quiet” gives a child character a full-scale interior event. Minchin has described the song in terms of sensory overload, imagining what it would feel like to have a mind as busy and bright as Matilda’s. The song begins with an extraordinary passage about color, light, and subjective experience that is almost Seurat-like… Here, those questions are refracted through a child’s mind, and no less philosophically alive for it:

Have you ever wondered
Well, I have
About how when I say, say, red
For example, there’s no way of knowing
If red means the same thing in your head
As red means in my head when someone says red

And how if we are travelling at almost the speed of light
And we’re holding a light
That light would still travel away from us
At the full speed of light
Which seems right in a way

11. Piano Sonata No. 6 in A major, II. Allegretto
→ music by Sergei Prokofiev

Prokofiev’s Sixth Piano Sonata is the first of the so-called “War Sonatas”, and its second movement offers a Nondheim pleasure that is purely musical, but unmistakably theatrical in its gait. There’s a slightly mechanical insistence to this movement, offset by more lyrical or mysterious writing. That combination — propulsion, nervous wit, sudden shadows, chromatic veering — is part of why it recalls the musical language of Into the Woods. In both cases, we recognize something distinctively purposeful, quick-footed, and edged with irony.

12. “96,000” (In the Heights)
→ music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda

“96,000” is one of those numbers whose very architecture is exhilarating: not just one fantasy, but a whole neighborhood’s worth of desires, each one colored by class, ambition, romance, frustration, or political feeling. Miranda’s wizardry here recalls the layered ambition of something like “A Weekend in the Country” or “God, That’s Good!”: a big set-piece in which wit, character, and contrapuntal momentum conspire to raise the stakes in ever more thrilling ways. Pick any slice of this lyrical pie and I’ll show you a miracle marvelous rare:

USNAVI:
It’s silly when we get into these crazy hypotheticals
You really want some bread? Then go ahead, create a set of goals
And cross ‘em off the list as you pursue ‘em
And with those ninety-six, I know precisely what I’m doin’

VANESSA:
What you doin’?

USNAVI:
What am I doin’? What am I doin’?
It takes most of that cash just to save my ass from financial ruin
Sonny can keep the coffee brewin’
I’ll spend a few on you
‘Cause the only room with a view is a room with you in it

13. “I’ll Be Here” (Ordinary Days)
→ music and lyrics by Adam Gwon

Ordinary Days, Adam Gwon’s sung-through chamber musical about four young New Yorkers whose lives briefly and consequentially intersect, premiered off-Broadway at Roundabout Theatre Company in 2009. In “I’ll Be Here,” Claire tells her story in the plainest possible terms: the meeting on an icy corner of Bleecker and Mercer, the first date, the terrible play, the marriage, the dog they hadn’t yet got — and then, the morning everything stopped. The song moves through that loss and all the way out the other side. What Gwon does with harmony throughout is characteristic of the best musical theatre craftsmanship. His progressions have the outward shape of a familiar ballad, but he keeps making small, beautifully judged moves we don’t quite anticipate, tiny tugs in one direction or another.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to ruin your evening
By bringing up all of this stuff
You’re probably wondering why I even called you tonight
Well, today something happened that spooked me all right:
I saw this storm cloud of papers fall down from the sky
And I thought of that day, and I started to cry
When as sure as I breathe, I heard John clear as day
Saying, “Hey, you’re allowed to move on, it’s okay”

14. “Better” (A Class Act)
→ music and lyrics by Edward Kleban

A Class Act is built around the life and songs of Edward Kleban, with a book by Linda Kline and Lonny Price, and framed by friends gathering after Kleban’s memorial while Kleban himself shadows the action. Lonny Price’s presence alone makes the track irresistible as part of this playlist, but “Better” earns its place on its own terms. Kleban takes a simple premise and proves it again and again through variation. The lyrics are an utter delight, bursting with charm and logical play:

I’ve been good, I’ve been bad
Bad is better
Need’s okay
Having just had is better
I’ve been fire, I’ve been ice
I’ve been naughty, I’ve been nice
I’ve been naughty once or twice
Twice is better

15. “Yellow Field” (The Names We Gave Him)
→ music by Peter Foley, lyrics by Ellen McLaughlin

It feels right to end this first playlist here. Peter Foley was, in the fullest sense, a Sondheim mentee: he wrote to Sondheim as a teenager in Berkeley, received a detailed reply — hand-copied Xeroxes of unpublished scores arriving in large manila envelopes — and a friendship developed. Sondheim told him to go to Yale. He attended the opening of Sunday in the Park with George and had drinks with Sondheim afterwards. And as his widow Kate Chisholm described it in our interview last year, the connection went deeper than influence: Foley felt he had “an almost mystical connection to Sondheim’s music,” said he could turn a page of a Sondheim score and have already anticipated the next chord, “even if it was something quite unusual, which it often was.”

“Yellow Field” takes the form of a dying man’s act of remembrance — Henri, lying in a field with Virginie, willing himself to hold on to the moment of beauty before it passes. It is a fitting close for this collection, not only because of what it says about Foley’s gifts, but because of what it says about the art we cherish. A yellow field, a moment, a kiss, a song — held carefully, shared generously — “can always be like this.”

And I tell myself: remеmber this
I promise I’ll remember this
So I keep the memory of your kiss
And the sweetness of your taste
And the thrill of your caress
And your hair across your face
And the buttons of your dress
And the sound of the songbirds flowing
Like a river above us
And the smell of the warm earth growing
With the summer below us
And the shadow that I threw
On the beauty that was you

Listen to the full playlist on Spotify by clicking here.

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The person who keeps returning to the same damaging relationship, the soldier who relives the same moment of terror in his dreams, the child who replays a frightening game again and again — none of them are seeking to reproduce pain. They are seeking, through repetition, to achieve a mastery over it that the original experience denied them. The repetition mimics healing. It does not achieve it.

Has Sweeney Todd swum into your mind yet?

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We are presented in Sweeney Todd with several characters whose inner lives are organized around the compulsion to repeat in precisely Freud’s sense. They are not people who might change, who might work through their damage and emerge otherwise. They are people for whom repetition is the condition. As we explored in last Sunday’s essay, the ritual is the wound, wearing the costume of the cure.

Consider what it means that Todd, returning to London after years of penal exile, is reunited with a pair of razors. The objects he greets in “My Friends” — devotionally, tenderly, patiently — are what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott would have recognized as transitional objects: things that stand in for an absent relationship, that are handled repeatedly as a way of managing an absence that cannot otherwise be borne.

Winnicott developed this concept to describe a child’s blanket or stuffed toy — the object that represents the mother when the mother is not there — but the structure applies wherever a person invests an object with the weight of a lost relationship and returns to it, over and over, as a way of remaining in contact with what is gone.

Todd’s razors are transitional objects of a particularly dark kind.

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It’s so great to meet you. To begin with, I wonder if you could orient readers as to the various roles you’re covering in this phenomenal production of Into the Woods.

Sure! I’m a standby for three of the characters: Rapunzel, Lucinda, and Florinda. What that means is that I am in the building every night, at my dressing table, ready to go on should anything happen to any of those characters at any point during the evening, or during the day if we have a two-show day. I’ll often get called in to do the part before our call time, so I’ll hear maybe a few hours before we’re called to the theatre if I’m going to be on that night, and for which character.

At that point, I do a little review in my head, and I go in there and put the costumes on. I have my own costumes and wigs for everything. And I have a special thing, too: usually, each character will have a duplicate costume, but I actually have my own Lucinda-Florinda costume. So, whether I’m on for Lucinda or Florinda, I’m in the same stepsister outfit. Which is hilarious, because they specifically have the lines, “never wear mauve to a ball,” “or pink,” depending on who you are. And the costume very cleverly incorporates both.

So if someone sees you as one of the stepsisters, you are wearing both mauve and pink to the ball? I love that.

Exactly. It’s funny: when I auditioned for the project and I was seen for the stepsisters, they didn’t specify which, so the bit for the audition was “I was greedy, / I was vain, / I was haughty, / I was smug, / We were happy, / It was fun” — that whole bit, which is obviously incredibly fast. When I went in, I remember Jordan [Fein, director] saying, “Okay, let’s do this song,” and I said, “Which sister would you like?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I do think they’re quite different — one’s pretty domineering, and the other one is more of a follower.” He was like, “You pick, you choose your favorite, and you go ahead and do that.”

But then, when we did our cover run, I was playing all three of my characters at once. That was when I got to have my split personality moment, where I did both sisters at the same time, getting my heel and my toe cut off.

When I got the job, I did think about how challenging it would be to step in as both stepsisters. Their blocking’s very much the same, but just slightly different — and that might be trickier to remember and master, as opposed to two entirely different parts. I’m able to keep Rapunzel quite separate from the two of them, because they never really interact on stage. But it was such a fun challenge to surmount. With those alternating lines, you really have to keep track: okay, who am I tonight? And I can’t look down at my costume and know who I am, because it’s the same! But it’s really quite fun. They’re so silly, and I just have the best time.

When I get the call, I have a few different tricks. The first thing I did when we were in rehearsal was make what some people call a cheat sheet. I call it an entrances and exits sheet, where essentially I have all the scenes or songs that character is in, what comes right before, what cues you to perk up. Like, “Oh, I hear ‘Agony Reprise.’ I need to get over and get ready!” On that sheet, I also write where I enter from, what my first line is, what my last line is, what cues my exit, where I’m exiting, along with any props I’m wearing or bringing on, and any costume changes.

I did that for all three of my characters during tech, sitting in the back of the theatre in the gallery. For Lucinda and Florinda, I could essentially copy and paste, and then go in and change all the specific things — okay, this person stays on the right, this person enters from wherever — and then it was very clear what the differences were. So whenever I’m on, I’ll have a quick glance at the chart. And when I’m waiting in the wings, I’m just reviewing what goes first, who goes where, all the different positions.

Of your three roles, which was the first you went on for in a public performance, and how early into the run was it?

I was the last standby to go on. Press night was on December 12th, and I didn’t go on until the end of January, so it was a good amount of time. I went on as Florinda first, and it was the best day. The cast were all so supportive — finally Chloe gets to be on stage! And it really didn’t hit me until after that opening number, when the woods are revealed and the audience just cheers in exhalation after this huge prologue. I came off the stage after prancing around with the horse-and-carriage handbags, and that roar of applause… Of course I hear it every night from my dressing room along the hallway, but there was just something about it. Coming off the stage and hearing that, I got a bit teary-eyed. I was like, wow, that’s what that feels like.

I hadn’t been on stage and had it acknowledged by an audience for so long — almost an entire year, because the last time I was in a show on stage was The Great Comet of 1812, and that closed in February 2025. So it was just like, whoa! I forgot what that feels like! What a breath of fresh air!

Had doing a Sondheim show always been a specific goal of yours?

As an actor, so much is out of your control. For my mental health and wellbeing, I try not to give myself too much of a tick list, because so much of it is up to chance, no matter how hard you work or how good you are. But of course, in my dream of dreams, as a theatre kid and a Sondheim head, I always wanted to do a Sondheim show.

I remember that was one of the first things Jordan asked in my first-round audition. We sat down and talked about Comet — he had seen me in Comet and loved the show — but then we moved on to Into the Woods. We talked about the different themes and how it speaks to so many people on so many levels.

It’s always been a dream of mine to be part of a Sondheim musical, let alone one as iconic as Into the Woods, that holds such a special place in so many people’s hearts. I remember when it was first announced, at The Bridge, with that creative team, and the theatre world went wild. I remember thinking, oh man, I would love to do that.

And I remember I had just gotten a no from another show that I’d been through several recalls for. I was on the phone to my agent, kind of sobbing about that as he told me, and through my tears I was like, “Can you just make sure I get in the room for Into the Woods? The creative team, the music, the theatre… I will play tree number two if you can get me in that room. I will be forever grateful.” And he was already on it. I was so thrilled to get to audition for this, let alone get to do the actual job — and honestly, it’s everything I could have wished for and more.

Rapunzel feels like quite a good microcosm of the emotional range of the show, because she gets laughs for the hair and her “beautiful music,” but then what’s actually going on with her is really quite dark and sad. How did you find that expressive variety as you were preparing for Rapunzel?

I do love that about Rapunzel. You get to the end of the show, and everybody’s saying their lines about what they’ve learned, and then Rapunzel turns around and goes, “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.” That always gets a huge laugh. But I love that Jordan has really leaned into the sadness of Rapunzel’s story.

When I went on for Rapunzel, I got to be on stage with Kate Fleetwood. She is just the most incredible scene partner. I feel like she’s seeing into my soul. I’ve never seen somebody so in it, so connected, so giving, so listening. It makes me feel and be a better actor simply by being on stage with her and doing a scene with her. It’s really amazing to stand in the wings with Kate just to the side of the stage before we go on, and to see her doing the prep work, preparing to go into the scene with you.

There’s a moment when Rapunzel enters first, and then the Witch comes on after her. Kate was so lovely with me about it, and told me exactly what she wanted. She needed me to stand on one side of her so that I run in front of her before I’m visible to the audience through the trees and on stage first, because that was an important thing for her to see for her prep before we went into the scene. So even though I enter first, I come in from behind her.

I love the monologue that Rapunzel has after the big opening number of Act Two. She runs on stage, and it’s the first time the audience sees Rapunzel going completely crazy, with her balding hair, looking like she’s on the edge, laughing, clearly not all there. That’s one of those zero-to-a-hundred moments in playing her. And then Kate comes out of nowhere, and we see the juxtaposition — the two of them on stage once again, the complete and utter change between how they look physically, and also where they’re at mentally. I love that scene so much, because I think the audience has no idea what to do. Where is this coming from? What’s going on with Rapunzel?

And I’m really glad that James Lapine put that in there, because I think it’s such a critical and interesting point in Rapunzel’s story. We hear more about Cinderella and Jack and Little Red — quite a bit more. Rapunzel may have a smaller slice of the pie, but she still has a very great impact.

You mentioned being a real Sondheim head growing up. What was your Sondheim origin story?

Sondheim’s really been woven throughout my life. Everything I was just saying about process and performing on stage with Kate reminded me of a quote by Sondheim from that six-hour-long interview. I remember when I was in school, I listened to the whole thing over a weekend while I was cleaning my flat. Sondheim said something like, “When you prepare the table, the meal is easier to cook.” And I feel like that really applies to those moments with Rapunzel and the Witch, and seeing Kate’s process.

I would say the first time I was really introduced to Sondheim was when my voice teacher, at around age fifteen, gave me “On the Steps of the Palace” to learn. That was the first Sondheim song that was ever in my book. Ever since then, he’s just popped up in so many different parts of my life. When I went to uni, the first musical I did in my freshman year was Sweeney Todd, where I was Johanna. I think possibly one of my favourite Sondheim numbers is the Johanna quartet.

I feel like, in one way or another, Sondheim has always had some presence in everything I love about musical theatre. But it’s really something else to get to do this show professionally, as one of my first proper jobs, and to get to do it on this scale with these people. I couldn’t be more grateful.

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This idea, of private ceremony or ritual, is something specific. It is no great surprise when, at the theatre, we share space with a character as they confess, as they mourn, as they hunger, or as they dream. But in Sweeney Todd, these states are rehearsed. We are immersed in a world of repeated language, repeated gesture, repeated space. Inner life arrives already shaped; objects are treated ceremonially. It’s a show as soaked through with ritual as it is with blood.

Turpin’s “Johanna,” which we explored in depth recently, is one of the clearest and ugliest expressions of that pattern. Couched in the language of penitential ritual, the inherited form becomes a chamber for desire. Turpin kneels, prays, scourges himself, looks again, names Johanna again, tries to master himself again. Nothing is resolved. The ritual gives his desire a structure in which to intensify. Even his solution, “I’ll wed you on the morrow,” has the feel of ritualized enclosure: a formal arrangement designed to convert inward disorder into sanctioned possession.

Yet once you notice this structure in Turpin, it becomes harder not to see it elsewhere. Sweeney Todd is full of characters who steady themselves through ceremony. They handle certain objects in certain ways. They return to the same phrases. They occupy the same psychic rooms. They submit themselves, over and over, to forms that promise relief and instead deepen the thing they are trying to contain.

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The opening Ballad establishes the ceremonial grammar of the show. This is already a ritual: the summoning of a demon, the recitation of his legend, the collective assumption of the role of teller. The Ballad performs Sweeney Todd — show and character — into existence. We hear that our title character is “quick and quiet and clean,” “smooth,” “subtle,” planning “like a perfect machine.” He is, we are told plainly, a figure of obsessive form. We glean from the outset that this will be a drama of repeated action, of exacting procedure, of life hardened into pattern. And Sondheim builds that recursiveness into the form: the show ends with the same summoning, the same instruction. We are told to attend. We will attend again.

“My Friends” is, among other things, a reunion scene, though a reunion of a peculiarly concentrated kind. Todd’s razors are tools, but they are also emblems of a lost professional self. And he receives them devotionally. “These are my friends. / See how they glisten.” “Speak to me, friend. / Whisper, I’ll listen.” “Well, I’ve come home / To find you waiting.” What matters here is the ceremony of address. He greets the razors, listens to them, holds them, warms them in his hand. The scene unfolds with the patience of private devotion.

The language is tender, even reverent. “Come, let me hold you.” “Rest now, my friends.” The razors, not yet instruments of action, are instead objects of contemplation, of intimacy. Todd’s arm is “complete again,” he says, once he holds them. Completion lies in contact, before it lies in vengeance. Revenge will come, certainly, but first it must be handled, must be admired. First it must take ceremonial form.

And then the image turns. “Till now your shine / Was merely silver.” Soon, he promises, “You shall drip rubies.” Blood enters the song as fulfilment, not eruption. The private rite has prepared for it. The tenderness of “My Friends” is inseparable from its homicidal imagination, because Todd shows us revenge in its most inward state: cherished, caressed, made beautiful to its possessor. If Turpin’s “Johanna” stages lust as a repeated private act, “My Friends” does something comparable with vengeance. Before Sweeney kills, he communes. Before Turpin acts, he kneels. The violence to come is already latent in the ceremony.

Todd’s ceremony turns inward and backward, toward loss, the past, and the objects that predate his destruction. Turpin’s turns in a circle, ritualizing its own interruption so that desire can begin again. Johanna’s turns outward. “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” is a song addressed to living creatures, caged like her, who she watches with a question she cannot quite formulate about herself.

“How is it you sing?” she asks. “How can you jubilate / Sitting in cages, / Never taking wing?” The birds are her ritual objects, but she holds them at arm’s length, reads them, tries to extract from their captive song some answer to her own situation — some model, or some warning. Her ceremony is interpretive where the others’ are devotional. That is part of what makes her situation so moving in a show otherwise thick with predation and appetite. Johanna does not yet possess action in the way that others do. She cannot scourge herself, cannot sharpen silver, cannot remake the world by force. What she can do is return, again and again, to the imagined shape of another life. Her rituals are gentler than Turpin’s or Todd’s, but no less structured for that. They are built from recurrence too: from daily looking, daily waiting, daily address to creatures seemingly more free than she is.

Johanna’s window is the ceremonial space that makes all of this possible: the frame through which the outside world remains visible, the boundary her ritual approaches but cannot cross. It is also, not incidentally, precisely what Turpin fears. His “Johanna” is organized around the light at her window, the unbearable proximity of what he has locked away. The window that represents Johanna’s ritual of longing toward freedom is simultaneously the site of Turpin’s ritual of voyeuristic possession. Repetition can corrupt, but it can also sustain. And Johanna shows us what ritual looks like when it belongs to the captive rather than the captor.

Mrs. Lovett shows us ritual as adaptation. If Todd’s ceremonies are intimate and Turpin’s are penitential, Lovett’s are practical. She has made a life out of repeated management: of the shop, the pies, the talk, the habit of making do. She is a woman of routine, of accommodation, of comic resilience sharpened by necessity. What Lovett then does, more than anyone else in the show, is convert the intolerable into procedure. A body arrives. A problem presents itself. Very quickly, she has a plan of action. The horror is absorbed into sequence, labor, recipe, commerce. In Todd, private ceremony intensifies obsession; in Lovett, it domesticates catastrophe.

Lovett’s rituals are also prospective: rehearsals for a future she has designed in detail and intends to inhabit. “By the Sea” is the fullest expression of this, a fantasy so elaborately furnished — the pier, the bonnets, the deckchairs, the particular quality of the salt air — that it has evidently been visited many times before. It’s a ritual structure in which desire can live. Lovett, rather than communing with silver or kneeling before a keyhole, builds livable forms out of refuse, appetite, and hope.

This makes her, in some ways, the most unsettling ritualist in the show. Todd becomes grandly monomaniacal. Turpin remains trapped in the lurid cycle of lust and guilt. Lovett is more supple than either of them. She incorporates. She adjusts. She folds each new enormity into a rhythm that can continue. She is the character who best understands that survival in this city depends upon learning how to repeat oneself persuasively enough that repetition begins to feel like life.

Private ritual is one of the governing mechanisms through which character is legible in Sweeney Todd. Those on stage submit feeling to form. They handle it, name it, rehearse it, consecrate it, tidy it, sing it back to themselves. The forms differ; the compulsion to form does not.

Ritual is often associated with consolation, order, continuity, or meaning. Here, additionally, it becomes the form through which obsession is preserved, desire is legitimized, violence is beautified, and horror is made workable.

And there is one further implication the show presses on us. We in the audience are summoned by the Ballad, asked to attend, walked through the legend, and then — at the show’s end — we are summoned again. The recursiveness is perhaps the show’s final argument: that we, too, have submitted to a form. That we have our own version of the ceremony. That we will, if given the chance, return. Sweeney Todd does not judge the ritual. It attends to it — and it notices that we do too.

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We tend to discuss Joanne as Bobby’s dark mirror — the character who has consciously chosen the emotional coffin that he is inching towards. That reading is correct, but it undersells what Furth and Sondheim are doing in this scene. Joanne is much more than a cautionary exhibit. She is perhaps the show’s most actively dangerous character, and the nightclub scene is her attempt at recruitment. She offers Robert something that looks, from a certain angle, exactly like what he has always wanted: intimacy without consequence, connection managed at a safe remove. An affair with a married woman is the perfect architecture for a man who wants company without commitment. Joanne knows this. She has designed the offer accordingly.

What she has not designed for is his answer.

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It’s so good to meet you. Let’s start with Sweeney Todd. Is this a show you’ve wanted to get your hands on directorially for a long time?

I’ve been working at St. Augustine High School in San Diego since 2022. When I arrived, it was primarily a football school — theatre was just a hobby. But I’ve been able to help build it up to the point where we can actually do Sweeney Todd, which is thrilling and exciting.

I’ve had such a love and affection for that show since the film version came out when I was in sixth grade, and each time I go to it, I’m one of those people who goes with a monocle — “That 16th note is wrong,” you know? And because I love it, I wanted to make sure that I did it right. There have been a lot of productions in which they put a hat on top of a hat. They overthink it, and they try to put a concept on it. Yes, concepts bring new ideas, new thoughts, new perspectives — but directors spend so much time on their concepts that the work is put to the side, and the audience doesn’t even know what the story is.

My problem with those productions is they forget the subtitle. The subtitle is A Musical Thriller. None of those productions focused on that subtitle, so I made sure for my production to focus on it. What is a musical thriller? A lot of people confuse Sweeney Todd with a haunted house. But in a haunted house, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. “Boo, I got you.” A musical thriller is more like a roller coaster, in which you know you’re going to go up a steep ramp, you know you’re going to be going through loops, and you do it anyway. Everyone walking into the theater knows what Todd and Lovett are going to do. What makes it fun for the evening is doing all the loops and turns — seeing the murders on stage, seeing Pirelli strangled, Lovett tossed in an oven. That’s what makes it a fun roller coaster, and that’s been my main directorial stance.

Are the young people you’re working with encountering Sweeney Todd for the first time? Did they have any context for Sweeney Todd is as a piece?

My students were not familiar with it, but it was my job to make sure they darn well were. Their homework during Christmas break was to watch the South Bank Show from 1980. That’s the closest thing we have to dramaturgy for this musical. So they watched that, and then I told them they needed to watch a version of Sweeney, whether that was the Tim Burton film, the Hal Prince production, the New York City Philharmonic, the San Francisco Philharmonic — just so that they know what’s to come, what is expected, and the love for the piece.

I asked my friends Will Blum and DeAndre Simmons, both of whom you’ve interviewed, to come and do masterclasses. Will talked about what each character is thinking at each moment, and it helped my kids a lot. He made some brilliant observations. Here’s an example: a lot of Sweeneys at the top of the show come in angry. But here’s the thing — he’s expecting to come home to a loving wife and child. He’s not on the murder boat yet. His madness for murdering people doesn’t really kick in until maybe Pirelli’s death and “Epiphany.” Even when he says “the time for the Beadle has come,” he was basically going to go to a magistrate and say, “Look what they did!” He’s a little bit like Jack: I’m gonna kill the giant! No one can stop me! That was a great observation, and it helped my actor not just come in angry from the start like a lot of other Sweeneys have.

DeAndre, who is a renowned opera singer, helped out with the singing and the acting through singing. Again, just wonderful insights, especially since he did Sweeney so recently. His voice teacher was Barbara Cook, and he worked with Sondheim. He had all these great, helpful hints.

I know our readers find it rewarding to place Sondheim’s work in its broader context. You’re a Kurt Weill aficionado, and you’ve spoken before about The Threepenny Opera in relation to Sweeney Todd. Could you speak a little about what excites you most about that lineage, and how you came to see these connections?

Of course. For the record, Sondheim went on to say that he’s not a Kurt Weill fan — he never liked any of his German music, and he only liked one passage from Street Scene. But in regards to Sweeney — in 1976, Lincoln Center did a revival of The Threepenny Opera. And I just find it very interesting that The Threepenny Opera starts off with a ballad about an English killer, describing who Mack the Knife is. A ballad that starts off an entire show about a killer in England? I don’t see any similarities at all, do you?! And even critics in 1979 seemed to notice: there’s one great video where a critic was like, “Everyone in the show looks like they were from The Threepenny Opera.”

The similarities go further than just the ballads, too. The Act One finale of Threepenny bears a real resemblance to “Epiphany.” In the Ralph Manheim and John Willett translation from the 1976 production: “Let’s say your brother’s close to you / But there’s not food enough for two / He’ll kick you smartly in the face / And so will all the whole human race.” That is a very close cousin to “Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. / There’s the one staying put in his proper place / And the one with his foot in the other one’s face.”

And the Act Two finale of Threepenny shares the same ideology as “A Little Priest” and Sweeney in general. In the Marc Blitzstein translation: “What keeps mankind alive? / He lives on others / He likes to taste them first, then eat them whole if he can / Forget that they’re supposed to be his brothers / That he himself was ever called a man / Remember if you wish to stay alive / For once do something bad and you’ll survive.”

Now, I don’t think Threepenny was Sondheim’s catalyst for the show. Personally, I think it’s Porgy and Bess, because you know how much he loved Porgy and Bess, and how Gershwin sort of broke the mold of: is this an opera, or is this a musical? I think, more than anything, Sweeney is a love letter to Porgy and Bess and to Gershwin. But also, Threepenny and Sweeney are both about the class system, about fighting against it, about having all walks of life have an equal opportunity. That was what Brecht was writing about — a very Marxist idea. The point of Threepenny is that we’re all the characters. We’re all killers, we’re all taking advantage of the system, we’re all fighting against the establishment — just like in Sweeney Todd: “Sweeney waits in the parlor hall, Sweeney leans on the office wall.” We’re all Sweeney. We’re all victims of this horrible English class society. That’s what I think about in connection to Threepenny and Sweeney.

The closest thing we have to a very direct connection with Weill is Weill’s 1948 musical Love Life, which Hal and Steve both saw. Love Life is considered, along with Allegro, one of the first concept musicals. We all know that Steve worked on Allegro as assistant to Hammerstein, but there’s a lot more connection there. A lot of people say, oh, Allegro was his catalyst for Company, and Cameron Mackintosh has said that he spent his entire life trying to fix the second act of Allegro. For me, Allegro’s not a concept musical. It’s more of a Greek play. If you look at it, it’s a Greek chorus telling, throughout, the story of a man growing up. There’s nothing too concept-musical about it compared to Love Life.

Love Life is the story of Sam and Susan Cooper, starting in 1789 and ending in 1948. Sam and Susan and their kids never age. We watch their marriage across all of American history, and while we watch their story — their marriage and later their divorce — it is interrupted with vaudeville numbers. Because as soon as I say it’s interrupted with vaudeville numbers, people go, oh my god, that’s Chicago, that’s Cabaret. And at the end, Sam and Susan are faced with the head of a minstrel show, and they have to make a decision whether to live in this illusory minstrel show or face reality. That’s Pippin, you know?

With Love Life, let’s start with just the idea of a concept musical about marriage — that’s both Love Life and Company. Love Life was one of the first musicals to talk about marriage in a very serious way. In the second act of Love Life, there is a divorce ballet. The technical term for it is “Punch and Judy Get a Divorce.” And people always wonder why we don’t know about Love Life — it’s because we never got a cast recording.

Love Life is the story of America throughout a period of time in which time doesn’t really exist. Weill and Lerner were obviously inspired by Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Elia Kazan, who directed The Skin of Our Teeth, directed Love Life. With The Skin of Our Teeth, the Antrobuses go through time, but time is not a thing — they’re the same age when they go to Atlantic City as they were during World War I. Well, in Assassins, all the assassins are crossing times — Guiteau is having a conversation with Sara Jane Moore, Booth is having a conversation with Oswald. I think Love Life was definitely an inspiration for that idea of crossing time, of time not mattering.

Perhaps the biggest single reference to Love Life in all of Sondheim’s work is the Act Two finale, “The Illusion Minstrel Show.” Sam and Susan are pulled out of their narrative and into the framework of the show itself; several musical numbers are performed that comment on the themes of love, and it ends horrifically, with Sam and Susan fleeing to face the reality of their marriage. This, of course, would later be used in Follies, in which the four leading characters enter Loveland — several musical numbers are performed that comment on themes of love, and it ends horrifically, with Ben breaking down as he faces the reality of his situation in life. And Love Life, Company, and Follies all shared the same set designer: Boris Aronson.

That’s really fascinating. Tell me about Silverlake and Sweeney Todd, too.

So, we talked about how Sondheim was influenced by Weill. Well, there was a case at New York City Opera in 1980 where Sondheim influenced a production of Weill. The project that Hal Prince, Hugh Wheeler, Larry Fuller (the choreographer of Sweeney), and Ken Billington (the lighting designer of Sweeney) worked on right after Sweeney was an adaptation of Kurt Weill’s Der Silbersee.

Der Silbersee is a 1930s Kurt Weill piece that basically put him on Hitler’s list. It got Weill in so much trouble, because it was such an anti-Nazi opera, that he had to flee to France, and then eventually came to America and wrote his musicals. In 1980, they were going to do the American premiere of it at New York City Opera. But because it’s a play with music, and it’s four hours long, Wheeler and Prince decided to adapt the work rather than present it. And it became what is known as Silverlake. Unfortunately, it was met with such a disastrous response that the Kurt Weill Foundation has disowned it, Hal Prince has disowned it, and it’s only lived on through a cast recording. Not a lot of people know about it, but it starred Joel Grey. It was the first project that Grey and Prince had worked on together since Cabaret.

Now, in regards to how Sondheim affected the work: because Der Silbersee was a play with music, and the only time music was introduced was for Weill’s numbers, there were a lot of scenes without music. Prince took a page out of the Sweeney book, which was to fill the scenes with melodrama music, to make it feel more cinematic. He said he thought Weill’s music was too terse, and he wanted to fill the evening with music to help the momentum of the scenes. Well, that’s right out of Sweeney — just look at Pirelli’s death. You could do that scene with Pirelli in the trunk without music, but Steve specifically made music like a movie, because it was his love letter to Bernard Herrmann. There’s music all throughout Sweeney, and I think Hal definitely took a page out of that book.

There are also a lot of similarities between the Sweeney script and the Silverlake script, unintentionally. Wheeler even delivered one of the first drafts of Silverlake four days before Sweeney opened in New York. There are a lot of connections: the high class and the low class, the need for revenge, the people in power who take advantage of the poor. What’s interesting is that Wheeler — and I’m not sure even what his political stance was with Sweeney — decided to defang a lot of the political bite from Der Silbersee. A lot of that probably comes from the fact that he wasn’t a very political person. Sweeney’s not really that political. Some people put a political stamp on it, and to that I say, just go do Threepenny if you really need that.

When I interviewed Larry Fuller for my Silverlake article, he stated that in the beginning of Der Silbersee, there are two gravediggers who are digging to bury an effigy of Hunger. Well, they decided for Silverlake to change it to burning the effigy — a pyre. And the reason for that is that they had already done gravediggers in Sweeney Todd. There was originally a song in Der Silbersee in which they sing a funeral hymn to this effigy of Hunger. Again, they cut that because it was too similar to “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd.”

If you like Sweeney Todd, go listen to Silverlake. It’s basically Sweeney Lite. It’s Diet Sweeney!

You recently contributed to our 96th birthday feature, and in your tribute you reflected on a production of Sunday in the Park with George. What you hone in on as Sondheim’s gift in your life is the friendships born of that production. I’d love to hear a little more about that.

Of course. There were almost 2,000 actors who called for that show. And luckily, the director was able to detect not only who was good enough for the job, but who actually cared about the project. Sunday is a show you have to care about, because even though it won the Pulitzer, people still have a problem with that second act. And if you don’t have actors who believe in the second act, that show is not going to soar and fly.

We had a table full of books about Sondheim and Seurat. We all read them, we all talked about them, and every lunch we went out to, we talked about Sondheim, and the show, and how much we loved it. Will [Blum] and I really connected. During lunch, we would play Follies, we would play “Buddy’s Blues,” and I would tap dance. Here’s another gift Sondheim gave me: when I was in high school, I was obsessed with the 2011 production of Follies, and “Who’s That Woman?” I took tap classes because of “Who’s That Woman?” — and I know how to do the entire number.

On that production of Sunday in the Park with George, we felt like we were in the Cool Kids Club. Oh, to be in the Cool Kids Club, as someone who has never been in the Cool Kids Club — it was so much fun. And every night, it felt like we were doing a church service in which we were honoring God. That show, every night.

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This week, four astronauts travelled to the far side of the Moon, passing behind it and farther from the rest of us than any human being has ever been. There is, obviously, an engineering story to tell about Artemis II — a story with its own proofs, its own figures, with charts and diagrams worthy of much applause.

What lingers equally, though, is something harder to plot on a graph. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen were, in the simplest possible sense, away: beyond ordinary reach, beyond ordinary scale, at a distance that the rest of us can only imagine.

Sondheim, I think, understood that kind of distance. Distance as a human condition. Distance as exhilaration, as distortion, as loneliness, as a new vantage purchased at a cost. Today, I’d like to follow Whitman’s lead. Let us glide out of the lecture-room, drink in the night air, and incline our eyes skyward.

It’s 5:30 a.m. on Manhattan’s 110th Street. The year is 1957. On the rooftop of an old tenement building, a young man named Frank sits in his Army uniform, reading a script. Another young man, Charley, joins him, still waking up, binoculars around his neck. Soon their duet will become a trio; a pyjama-clad young woman named Mary will complete the group. On that rooftop, in the predawn air, they wait together, hoping to glimpse Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite.

Charley spots it first: “There! There it is!” Mary wonders how to pronounce the unfamiliar name: “Do you call it Sputnik — or Spootnik?” And Charley, without missing a beat, replies, “You call it a miracle.”

This is the final scene of Merrily We Roll Along. Frank, Charley, and Mary will soon be joined on that rooftop by the show’s full company, who drift up in bathrobes and hastily thrown-on coats — all drawn, as George Furth’s stage direction puts it, “to witness the birth of a new era in the sky.”

Merrily has prepared us for this moment. In “Opening Doors,” that whirlwind chronicle of creative beginnings in all their underpaid and overcommitted glory, our central trio speak the language of horizon and pursuit. “That faraway shore’s looking not too far,” they sing. “We’re following every star.” The future, for Frank, Charley, and Mary, is an approachable horizon; their aspiration shimmers with astronomy. Sondheim, reaching upward, places artistic ambition under an open sky.

The rooftop scene that ends Merrily resonates deeply because it captures several recognizably human responses at once: wonder, ambition, pride, uncertainty, a sense of history becoming visible. And, underneath it all, something else: the feeling that being alive in such a moment means standing at the edge of something larger still. “Something is stirring, shifting ground,” sings Frank, “It’s just begun…” The first satellite crosses the sky, and three young people feel not just that the world has changed, but that they themselves might change with it. “What a time to be starting out,” Frank says. “What a time to be alive.”

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Merrily’s Sputnik is an object. A remarkable object, an astonishing feat of engineering, but an object nonetheless. One wonders what the roughly 90-year-old Frank, Charley, and Mary would make of Artemis II. Four human beings fired into the sky, reaching a distance almost beyond comprehension. What a time to be alive, indeed. But it’s one thing to feel that exhilaration with our own feet firmly on the ground. To be the one out there is another matter entirely.

This is where Sunday in the Park with George begins to feel unexpectedly close. Not because astronauts are like Seurat’s figures in any literal sense. They are not. But Sondheim gives us, in “It’s Hot Up Here,” a startling language for what it is to be elevated into spectacle, set apart from ordinary motion, made visible on unusual terms:

It’s hot up here
And strange up here.
No change up here
Forever.

How still it is,
How odd it is,
And God, it is
So hot!

We also hear in this number that “there’s not a breath of air up here” and, indeed, that “these helmets weigh a lot on us.” Maybe there are proto-astronauts among Seurat’s ranks. But perhaps the most stimulating lyric in “It’s Hot Up Here,” when viewed through our present lens, is this one:

Perspectives don’t make sense up here.

One of the strangest and most compelling things about the human dimension of spaceflight is what it does to proportion. Near and far don’t behave in the usual way. The Earth becomes, all at once, unimaginably vast and impossibly small. A crew can be the focus of global attention while also being, in practical terms, inaccessible (as this crew was for 40 minutes as they passed behind the Moon). Astronauts cross into a realm where ordinary human proportion no longer holds. They are not static like Seurat’s subjects; if anything, they are their inversion. They are the ones moving, while the rest of us hold still and watch. But the asymmetry remains. They occupy a place of visibility that is also a place of separation.

Seurat’s figures are, in Sunday’s conceit, trapped in the condition of being arranged for other people’s looking. They have been put somewhere elevated — elevated as art — and cannot come down. The Artemis crew were also arranged for looking. They existed, for the duration of the mission, as a public visual arrangement: trackable, framed, streamed. They could, more literally than George, “watch the rest of the world from a window” — but they were as much art as artist.

Sondheim and his collaborators were so often interested in what vantage does to feeling. They were drawn to people who can see clearly because they are set apart, and to the pain built into that clarity. Sometimes the separation is artistic; sometimes social; sometimes moral. Sometimes it is the simple fact of being placed where others are not. What Artemis II has made newly legible, perhaps, is the grandeur and strangeness of that condition. The four astronauts that make up its crew are pioneers, symbols, public faces of a civilizational project. They are also just four people, enclosed together, farther than anyone has ever been from those they love.

As the Artemis II crew completed their lunar flyby, Jeremy Hansen radioed mission control with a request. The crew wanted, he said, to name two craters on the Moon. The first they would call Integrity, after the name they had given to the Orion spacecraft. The second they would call Carroll.

Carroll was Reid Wiseman’s wife. She died of cancer in 2020, at the age of 46. She was a neonatal intensive care nurse. And in honoring her, the farthest journey yet made by any of us is forever tethered to something precious and human in scale. It’s a gesture that speaks to an ancient impulse: to name what we love, and to find it still before us when we lift our eyes.

Distance can be public and private at once. It is, perhaps, the truest way of discovering what remains closest when almost everything else falls away. Carroll, forever on the lunar surface; the odd, airless separateness of elevation; a miracle glimpsed from a rooftop; Whitman, gliding out into the night air and looking skyward. The proofs and figures matter enormously. Of course they do. But, in our quieter moments, we should let those learn’d voices distance and die. Until there’s nothing but sky. And in that mystical moist night-air, we should, from time to time, look up in perfect silence at the stars.

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It is worth going inside.

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How Dejima Came to Be

This story does not begin with the Dutch. Dejima was built for the Portuguese.

In the early seventeenth century, Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate was growing anxious about the influence of Catholic missionaries. The Portuguese had been trading with Japan since the 1540s and had arrived, inseparably, with Jesuit priests. By 1636, the shogunate had decided that the missionaries posed a threat to political stability — Christianity, with its allegiance to a foreign spiritual authority, was incompatible with the absolute loyalty the shogunate demanded. The Portuguese were ordered to confine themselves to a new artificial island, constructed in Nagasaki harbor specifically to contain them: Dejima, which translates roughly as “protruding island.”

The Portuguese were expelled entirely in 1639, following a Christian-led rebellion at Shimabara that confirmed the shogunate’s worst fears. Dejima sat empty for two years.

The Dutch got it by default — and by calculation. The Dutch East India Company (or VOC, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) had been trading with Japan since 1609. Crucially, the VOC had made clear from the outset that it was not in the business of saving souls. Where the Portuguese arrived with merchants and priests, the Dutch arrived with merchants and accountants. When the shogunate offered the Dutch Dejima in 1641, along with a monopoly on Western trade, the VOC accepted without hesitation. The terms were extraordinary. But so was the prize.

Life on the Island

Dejima was small. Contemporary maps show a neat fan shape, roughly 120 metres long and 75 metres wide at its broadest point — about the area of a large city block, or a modest country estate. It contained warehouses, living quarters, a garden, a small hospital, and the residences of the VOC’s chief merchant (the Opperhoofd) and his staff. At any given time, the Dutch population of Dejima numbered between ten and twenty people.

The rules governing their existence were precise and comprehensive.

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It’s so good to meet you. You’ve lived with the Witch for months now. As you head into your final few weeks at The Bridge, are you conscious of ways in which she’s grown, and that you’ve grown through her?

Yes. Really deeply, actually. I’m finding her incredibly revealing. It’s like a cycle. You start with one focus, and then you go through other shifts and phases in how you want to interpret her, and what she reveals to you.

And more recently, with the events in the world as they are, I find myself very remote in “Last Midnight” in particular. That number has always had an element of nihilism to it. And I’ve always tried to recruit the audience: “You’re the world,” you know? “You’re all liars and thieves like his father.” Not in an explicitly accusatory way to the actual audience, but more in a thematic way. She’s saying to the outside world: if you continue only to blame each other, then there’s an apocalypse coming. And that seems really prescient at the moment.

I find that incredibly moving, that she is willing to give up everything just to make that point. In the early days, I thought it was rather a selfish act, but now I feel like it’s more of a protest.

I’ve always found the mothering side of it very rich and interesting. Because she hasn’t been parented herself, she’s rather shocked about how people are behaving. She really doesn’t have much of a compass on that. When her daughter says, you know, you did this and this and this, there’s obviously a moment of levity when she says, “I was only trying to be a good mother.” But she really doesn’t know how to mother. This really was her trying. She’s so removed from norms of behaviour that, through that, she can reveal the inadequacies of normal behaviour, as it were. And I find that tilt has become richer and richer over the last few weeks.

She’s also incredibly rich to play because it’s such a technical role. The singing requires such concentration. You have to be so connected to what you’re doing that you can’t ever drop the ball. It’s not only listening — and so much listening is involved — but everything is very active. You are constantly passing the baton to your fellow player, which requires massive muscularity and a turning on a sixpence constantly. In this show, nothing’s languid, nothing’s largo. It’s all very front foot, and the show is so propulsive. You have to be incredibly present, with your band and with your fellow players. You can’t switch off for a moment, because you are at the steering wheel.

And then, amidst all that propulsion, you do as the Witch get these tremendous moments of relative stillness.

Absolutely. That’s something else I’ve learned over the years. I haven’t done much musical theatre, but I always approach them in the same way as a classical text or a piece of new writing: you have to find what the pitch and tone is, and what the dramaturgy or the audience is needing from you at each moment And then you can slam something in which is a completely different tempo — not only in literal tempo, but in mood and tone.

Then it’s your responsibility as a performer to know what that shift is, to grab this tender moment because it’s just come off the back of something else, which might then lead into a more staccato moment afterwards. It’s about knowing when you can afford to do something more still and adagio, if you like. Musicals often do require you to turn on a sixpence that way as a performer. You can have great moments of levity and then immediately shift into something more tragic.

Because also — and I think this is really important for any performer — always remember that the audience is ahead of you. And that’s when Sondheim’s lyrics are so brilliant, because even though the audience may feel they’re ahead naturally and intuitively, Sondheim will write a great lyric that catches something really interesting that they maybe weren’t expecting. So it’s your responsibility as a performer to try and get there before them, so that then they’re surprised. You have to be quite brave about tonal shifts.

You mentioned classical texts, and your Shakespeare experience is vast. People often compare Sondheim to Shakespeare — almost as an offhand remark, as if it’s a given. Having lived inside this work, do you have a perspective on that comparison?

When you’re doing stage work, you have to deal with the technical side of repetition, and that requires leaps of imagination, so that you can keep focusing and keep things fresh. That is really important when you’ve done 300 performances of The Scottish Play. And for Into the Woods, we’re heading toward our 180th performance or something like that.

What is very similar is the colour, the depth of the colouring of the characters — the pigment, if you like. That might sound pretentious to someone who’s not involved in this kind of work, but it makes sense to performers, I think, to understand in a painterly way that your characters are either very strong colours, or transparent, or opaque, or whatever, and what they lend to the story.

Into the Woods is really dense and fountain-like. It springs forth a lot of new things all the time, in the same way that Shakespeare’s characters always do. And it all comes from the words.

As anyone who’s seen this production will know, the final sequence of your “Last Midnight” is excitingly distinctive. How early on were you talking to Jordan [Fein, director] and Tom [Scutt, set and costume designer] about those choices?

Making a show is like building a house. First, there’s the imaginative stage of what it’s going to be. Having been given this job through my audition process, I think I learned “Last Midnight” first. I wanted to get it really under my belt, and in my breath, and in my body as soon as I possibly could, so that it was just like air. I actually find it incredibly easy to sing, even though it’s a hard sing. It’s tiring — my intercostal muscles are really quite painful afterwards, after I’ve sung it. I’m always clutching my belly.

Jordan is so delicate and sensitive to the performance and to the vision of what he wanted. We staged “Agony” first, and then he said, “Shall we put a little staging together of ‘Last Midnight?’” He told me where to start, where to move, where to finish. And then I just did it, in one. I said, “Okay, I think I know what you want.” I think it was maybe two or three days after that that he said, “We’re thinking about putting Rapunzel back in and pulling you down from where she’s been sent.” I thought that was a great idea.

I’ve always been interested in finding other ways of telling a story that’s so well-known — ways that might pique something interesting, even if it’s just a thought experiment. I think there was a moment during previews where we thought about taking it out, just as a thought — but then we all changed our minds and said, “No, we must keep it in.” We were really wedded to it, and we wanted to be bold. And I find it fascinating to play. How I feel when Bella [Brown, playing Rapunzel] comes up is always different, always changing. It’s another rich beat. You can mine so much out of it. It’s an incredible number to perform. I never get bored of doing it. Ever.

I’d love to ask you about your costume design trajectory throughout the show. How collaborative was the process of finding your look(s)?

When playing a big iconic role like this, I allow myself the indulgence of immersing myself in other people’s performances for about two weeks. Looking through the crack in the door, as it were, or listening behind walls. And then at some point you have to just let that go.

Jordan asked me if I wanted to come to Tom’s workshop, his design studio — which in itself is a huge honour. They showed me a whole model box presentation, which was great. But before I went in, Jordan and I had a cup of tea for about an hour and a half; he asked me about my life and who I was. We’d known each other peripherally in the industry for a while, but not really very well. We talked about our families, and then we got kicked out of the café and went out to sit by the canal, and we talked about mothers.

And then I said, my biggest provocative question is: who was she? Who was she before she was cursed? And what role does she play in society after she’s transformed? The show goes through so many archetypes in the storytelling — you’ve got Jack, Little Red Riding Hood, princesses, princes — and I thought, well, what is the archetype of the woman who was a witch, who is now not a witch, who no longer has any powers? Who is she in the community? And often it’s done as a sort of pin-up, or a movie star, or that type. That was my main question, and I could see a little glint in Jordan’s eye, because he said, “Yes, exactly. That’s our big thing. Who is she?” And then I said — we both sort of said it at the same time — “Because she’s sort of a gardener, right?” And he’s like, “Yeah, exactly, she’s a gardener.” She tends the garden. It’s hers. She inherits it.

Before I was due to talk to you, I was in the garden. I have very witchy hands right now. I’ve got to wash my hands, but I didn’t have time. I think it’s quite a good homage to the Witch, my gardening hands. So if you ever see my hands and they’re covered in dirt, it’s not because I’m getting ready for the show early — it’s the fact I’ve just been digging in the garden.

Your garden thrives!

Exactly. Anyway, I then went up into the design workshop, and Tom showed me his ideas, and it all gelled. We looked at it as three witches. One is the hag, which is the first witch. We looked at the cultural dread of an ugly old woman, and what that does in society, and how we feature — or don’t feature — those women in our cultural narrative. How we dread and fear them, and how they are wrapped and warped. I was thinking of that Alexander McQueen Voss show, that woman in a box surrounded by moths. But I wanted her to be nimble as well. We wanted her to look like she was from the earth, but we also wanted her not to have a mask on, so we could still use my face.

And then, for the young version of her, before she was punished by her mother, we imagined a sort of Pina Bausch character who comes out of the water, as it were, fresh and taking her breath. That’s the girl in the white dress with the long hair. And that’s a really good example of a sixpence moment: you’ve got the kitsch joke of the transformation, followed immediately by, gosh, this feels amazing. It’s really real for her to feel that young and beautiful again.

And then we move into what I call the Vita Sackville-West meets Katharine Hepburn type. Katharine Hepburn lived next door to Sondheim, as you probably know. They had quite a tricky relationship, apparently, and she was always up her trees gardening. We wanted to plumb into that kind of woman, who is powerful and no-nonsense. We have a great heritage in our country of women like that, so it’s a mixture of those things.

So we were all roughly on the same page. But obviously I couldn’t have dreamed up all those incredible things that Tom and Jordan came up with, and so I was completely blessed by their level of vision. I just sort of fed into it, and I continue to interpret it.

We are all just caretakers of this work in this moment, until the next person takes hold of the material and hopefully cares for it and cherishes it and waters it, just like a garden. We’re the gardeners of this work. We watch it grow. And we’re all standing on the shoulders of the giants who made it.

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The Dutch Admiral arrives with chocolate.

The ideology here is, it’s fair to say, less clear. There’s seemingly no civilizing mission, no tentative arrangements pending proper diplomatic representation. There is a sales pitch, increasingly desperate, delivered by a man who in fact has more reason than any of the others to be in this room — and who has somehow, in the chaos of the opening, nearly been left out of it entirely. “Don’t forget the Dutch!” is the entrance of a country panicking.

That panic is our subject today. Because the Dutch Admiral, in his haste and his desperation and his shamelessness, accidentally says more about the structure of empire than any of his better-dressed colleagues.

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The Incumbent’s Entrance

Before we can hear what the Dutch Admiral says, we need to understand what he is.

Every other Admiral in “Please Hello” represents an arrival. America comes from nowhere, or rather from the confident presumption that nowhere is where Japan has been until now. Britain comes bearing institutional weight, the full administrative apparatus of a mature empire. Russia, France — all newcomers to Japanese waters, all presenting themselves as Japan’s introduction to the wider world.

The Dutch were already there.

Since 1641, the Dutch had been Japan’s only permitted Western trading partner, confined to Dejima — a fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, roughly the size of a city block, connected to the mainland by a single guarded bridge. No free movement. No Christian worship. Regular “tribute missions” to Edo, in which Dutch merchants bowed and presented gifts to a shogun who received them largely as curiosities. The Dutch accepted every humiliation because the trade was worth it.

This was the Dutch East India Company — the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) — which at its peak was the largest commercial enterprise the world had ever seen, with its own army, its own currency, its own capacity to wage war and sign treaties. By the time of “Please Hello,” the VOC had been dissolved for half a century, collapsed under debt and corruption. The Dutch state had inherited the Dejima concession, and with it the habit of profitable subordination — of accepting whatever restrictions Japan imposed in exchange for the right to keep trading.

For over two hundred years, the Dutch had operated within Japan’s rules. Their reward, in 1853, was to watch America arrive with warships and simply break those rules. Then to watch Britain, Russia, France, each in turn, extract concessions that rendered the old Dejima arrangement — the arrangement the Dutch had spent two centuries carefully maintaining — entirely obsolete. Hence:

Wait! Please hello!
Don’t forget the Dutch!
Like to keep in touch!
Thank you very much!

He speaks like a LinkedIn connection request sent into the void. We feel, from his very first words, the supplication of a man who knows the room has already moved on without him.

“Tell Them to Go”: The Aside and What It Reveals

The Dutch Admiral has been in the room for mere seconds when he drops the sales pitch entirely:

Tell them to go
Button up the lips
What do little Nips
Want with battleships?

This is unlike anything else in “Please Hello.” It is, first, an aside — the Dutch Admiral steps out of the number’s logic for a moment, perhaps addressing the audience, perhaps simply thinking aloud. Every other Admiral’s contempt is performed, encoded in their rhetoric: in the American Admiral’s broken English and his explosions-as-salutes, in the British Admiral’s polite insistence that you ignore the man-of-war anchored rather near the shore. The contempt is always mediated, always dressed up. The Dutch Admiral’s contempt is naked.

“Little Nips” is the only overtly racial slur in the entire number. That Sondheim gave it to the Dutch is a decision worth sitting with. The Dutch are the one power in the song with genuine long-term knowledge of Japan. They had spent two centuries on their little island, watching, trading, observing. Their contempt is born of familiarity, not ignorance.

There is something more damning in that than in any outsider’s slur. The Dutch knew Japan well enough to trade, well enough to accept extraordinary restrictions in order to maintain access, well enough that a Dutch physician based in Dejima in the 1820s — Philipp Franz von Siebold — produced some of the most detailed European scholarship on Japanese botany, geography, and culture of the entire century. And still: little Nips. Familiarity seems to have bred the particular contempt of a merchant who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The Catalogue: National Kitsch as Colonial Currency

Back to the pitch:

Wouldn’t you like to lease
A beautiful little piece
Of chocolate?

Listen, that’s not to mention
Wonderful — pay attention! —
Windmills
Und tulips
Und wouldn’t you like a wooden shoe?

Set this alongside the other offerings thus far. America spoke of infrastructure, the physical systems through which a nation’s resources are extracted and monetized. Britain offered the permanent machinery of oversight, and tea (which Japan already had). Even when Britain’s gifts were condescending, they were condescending in an organised, long-term way.

The Dutch bring chocolate, windmills, tulips, and clogs.

What’s striking, casting a skeptical eye over the list, is how little of it is actually Dutch. Chocolate is Mesoamerican, brought to Europe by Spain in the sixteenth century and refined for mass consumption largely by the Swiss and Belgians. Tulips are Central Asian and Ottoman in origin — the famous Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s was a speculative bubble built on an imported flower. The Dutch are offering the world’s goods rebranded as their own, which is, in miniature, a fairly exact description of what the VOC actually did for two centuries: an empire of redistribution, extracting from one place and selling in another, rarely producing anything itself.

The wooden shoe is an inadvertent self-portrait. The clog is the one item on the list that is genuinely, distinctively Dutch — and it is a souvenir, a national stereotype, a branded image. It’s as if the Dutch Admiral, in his desperation, has reached the bottom of the bag and found a gift-shop trinket. There is something almost poignant in that: the great mercantile empire of the seventeenth century, reduced to hawking kitsch.

“Two Ports”: The Transaction Laid Bare

Good! We will need
Two ports
One of them not too rocky—
How about Nagasaki?
Two ports
One of them for the cocoa—
What do you call it? Yoko-
Hama! Ja!
Und Nagasaki! Ja!

The other Admirals at least maintain a fiction of strategic purpose. America wants coaling stations and commercial access. Britain wants treaty ports and a permanent diplomatic presence. Their greed is, we can concede, dressed in the language of geopolitical necessity.

The Dutch Admiral wants a port for the cocoa. This is the reductio ad absurdum of the number’s argument: sovereignty, in the hands of imperial commerce, becomes a question of supply chain management.

And then: “What do you call it? Yokohama!” Two centuries in the region, and he seems to struggle to remember the city’s name. Either it is a power move (I need not learn your geography to reorganize it) or it is simple indifference (this place only matters as a node in a network). Both readings are damning.

Nagasaki, of course, he knows. It is the one Japanese city the Dutch had actually inhabited. Demanding it back, we see the flicker of an incumbent reasserting old rights, slipping the name into the list as if it were still theirs by custom, which in some sense it was, and now is not.

A Clog Dance

Each Admiral in “Please Hello” is given a musical idiom as precisely chosen as his rhetorical one, as we have seen in recent premium subscriber essays. The American Admiral marches; the British Admiral patters in the tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy operas. The Dutch Admiral dances.

Sondheim writes a kind of clog dance. Everything in “Please Hello” prior to the Dutch arrival has been in duple time: the American Admiral was set principally in 6/8, the British Admiral principally in 2/4. We are now in triple time — in this case, a 3/4 that feels like 9/8. And it’s easy to hear the shift in character: less commanding, more needling, more dancelike. The Dutch Admiral, rather than breaking down the door or overwhelming us with bureaucracy, takes us by the hand and spins us into a transaction.

What the Dutch Reveal: Empire Without Costume

The Dutch Admiral is the only “Please Hello” diplomat who doesn’t bother with an ideological wrapper. Strip away the ideology — the civilizing mission, the procedural correctness, the legal immunity, the rhetoric of mutual flourishing — and what remains is a kind of structure: want something, leverage something, get a signature, want something else. In his very shamelessness, the Dutch Admiral draws the skeleton that every other Admiral clothes in more presentable fabric.

His later reappearances confirm this. When Russia secures extraterritoriality, the Dutch response is: “We want the same / What the Russkies claim! / Why you let them came? / Dirty rotten shame!” The grammar has collapsed entirely — worse even than the American Admiral’s deliberate pidgin, because this is pure tantrum rather than any kind of rhetorical strategy.

And what of the historical aftermath? The Netherlands never recovered its monopoly position. The VOC had died in debt and corruption before the century began. The Meiji era’s opening to the West would benefit primarily Britain, America, and eventually Germany. The incumbent lost to the newcomers, and the price of two centuries of profitable humiliation on a little island in Nagasaki harbor turned out, in the end, to be the habit of humiliation — useful when Japan set the terms, fatal once the terms changed.

Next month, the Russian Admiral will robe empire in legalism. We move from “Wouldn’t you like a wooden shoe?” to talk of extraterritoriality. In the meantime, whatever you do, don’t touch the coat.

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“Move On” is, among other things, a miracle of dramatic construction. It takes place a century after Sunday’s first act, between a man paralyzed by creative exhaustion and a woman who has been dead for a hundred years. It is the conversation George and Dot never had, the one that couldn’t happen in their lifetimes, now made available across time through the strange alchemy of art and inheritance.

What Dot gives the younger George in “Move On” is not quite comfort, not quite absolution. It is that more practical, more radical thing: permission. Permission to stop worrying about whether the work is sufficient, whether the vision is new, whether the choices were mistaken. This is the show’s great act of generosity — the acknowledgment that the cost was real, the damage was real, but that none of it means the making, or the choosing, was wrong. Newness, it turns out, is the byproduct of sincerity. The problem George has been trying to solve dissolves the moment he stops trying to solve it.

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It’s great to meet you. Before we discuss your production of Company, do you remember how and when you first encountered the show?

As long as I can remember, Company has been my favourite Sondheim musical. I have this big playlist on Spotify of every Sondheim — a recording of every major Sondheim album. I’d seen people perform the most iconic numbers from the show at cabarets and concerts and on YouTube. But it was actually the Marianne Elliott production in 2018, which I saw just as it opened. I remember dragging some friends to go and see it, sitting right at the top of the gods in the Gielgud Theatre. I would have been about 14, 15, I think? And I was just absolutely blown away.

I remember leaving thinking: how can a show that is about something I relate to not one bit, as a 15-year-old girl, feel so relevant, funny, and real? My realisation of that at an early age — of how universal the show can feel, even though it’s about a very specific lived experience that a lot of its audience members won’t have had, or won’t have got to that stage in their life yet, or their life has been different for whatever reason — is really what brought me to wanting to direct Company. Because even though it was written in the 1970s, it feels like it was written for the generation that’s navigating relationships today.

The older you get, the more Company stops becoming a comedy and starts becoming a mirror. That’s a really exciting challenge as a director, and as a younger director, finding ways to incorporate the actors’ own lived experiences into this story, to make it as real as possible. As an actor and a director, the playground you’re given is far more substantial than anything I’ve ever done before.

Given that the Elliott production had made such an impression on you, how much were you able to prize yourself away from that and any other productions you might have swimming around your head? How did you go about unburdening yourself in that way?

That’s something I’ve been thinking about from very early on in the process. Pretty quickly, I had to say: the Marianne Elliott version is not what we’re doing. Dwelling and fixating on that production was never going to be helpful — as much as I’ve read lots of interviews she’s done, and I saw it several times, and listened to podcasts and all sorts. Ultimately, what we’re doing with the show is another very different version. And I think if I were to jump from one very different version — i.e. the gender-reversed production — to my very different version, you run a real risk of losing the text and losing what the root of the story actually is. It would feel like dramaturgical Chinese whispers. Because Marianne Elliott changed a lot, and it worked fantastically — but it all came back to the text and the story.

So my thinking is always: how can I best serve the story? We’re doing the show with the male Bobby. I said this to the cast quite early on, because they were like, oh, aren’t we gender-bending it? And it’s actually lovely, because in terms of commercial theatre, apart from the Elliott version, I wouldn’t say there’s actually a recent, hugely iconic, long-running production of Company that a mainstream audience has as a reference point. If you’re a Sondheim fan, you know about the Sam Mendes production, you know about Raúl Esparza’s production, you know about Neil Patrick Harris. But in terms of a big commercial audience, there isn’t a specifically clear and obvious frame of reference for this version of the show, which I think is a fantastic thing for us. We have no trope to fall into, no prior expectation to live up to. I’ve tried to frame that in rehearsals as a really great blank canvas. There’s no one that the cast are feeling like they have to replicate.

Talk me through the way you’re thinking about the audience experience. From your promotional material, it looks like there won’t be too great a barrier between the company and the audience. I’d love to know more about that.

Totally. Rather than describing it as an immersive production, I’d say that we want the audience to feel immersed in the story and in the space. We’re creating Bobby’s apartment within the theatre, fully — so you’ll step in and you’ll be in an apartment rather than a theatre space. The audience should feel like guests at a party rather than spectators watching from a distance, inside the room with Bobby as it unfolds. And ultimately, the question of how you can feel alone in a room full of people — something Bobby battles with for the whole show — is something that I’m hoping the audience will be able to connect to even more significantly.

Personally, I see theatre-going as quite a solitary experience. When those lights go down, it’s just you and your thoughts and your interpersonal connection with the show, and that’s very intimate. But being in a theatre party space where everyone can see you and you can see everybody is quite a vulnerable thing. My goal is to make the audience, regardless of their lived experience, feel like they can relate to an element of Bobby. Bringing the audience into this space, and having all the cast members rushing around them, makes that feel more personal. Inviting the audience into Bobby’s personal space means he’s never really alone — he’s constantly surrounded by people and thoughts, and it really exacerbates the loneliness that he feels.

We’re blessed with such a great book. George Furth wrote incredibly dynamic scenes. Even though they’re all situated in kitchens and living rooms and parks and on balconies, they’re all so dynamic with their pacing and the text. So it’s been a really exciting challenge. We want to create a place where the audience can move through the space before the show, hear fragments of conversations and relationships and songs, and be able to feel the excitement of the party — but also how alienating, actually, that can feel.

This is a Sedos production — a London-based theatre company with a rich Sondheim history of its own. I’d love to hear about how your relationship with them came about, and how the concept for this production took shape.

Absolutely. Sedos is a very unique company in what it provides. It’s got such a significant platform — it has a residency at the Bridewell Theatre, a connection with the Sondheim Society, and a really long-standing and reputable history. I’ve actually never worked with Sedos before. In February last year, Thomas [Marples], my musical director, and I sat in a pub and said to each other: if you just had to do another show right now, what’s a favourite show you’re dying to do? And we both said Company.

Sedos has quite a significant pitch process, so I was reading all the journals and the articles, re-watching, re-listening, and putting together this vision from probably as early as April or May of last year. What I like to do is collate as much listening material as I can. I’ll make a big super-Company playlist of all the different versions, any concept albums, any Sondheim-related material. Then I’ll add any podcasts about the show — there’s a great one, I’m sure you know it, called Putting It Together, which has a whole series on Company. I download all of those, plus any interviews with previous cast members of various versions, and even things about what it was like to live in New York in the 1970s, or what music was popular at that time. I’ll put it all in this jumbled playlist and I’ll just go on a walk. I’ll block off a Sunday and I’ll walk by the river for hours and hours on end, sometimes seven or eight hours. And any images that come to my head, I’ll just write them down, or I’ll try and find an image that matches it and save it. I’ll bring a little notebook, I’ll have my Notes app, and any questions that come to my head I’ll just write down and add them in. That’s my process for everything I do, because it’s such a great way to get started. I think best when I’m moving.

I was doing this big long walk around the Thames, and then I walked into Clapham. There’s a series of bars called the Little Doors — the Little Violet Door, and so on. They’re basically bars designed to make you feel like you’re in someone’s apartment when you’re having a drink. I’d been to some of them before, and I walked past the one in Clapham — the Little Orange Door — and I went, oh my goodness. At this point, you can imagine I’m walking along listening to “The Ladies Who Lunch,” and I see some Clapham socialites drinking martinis outside this place, and I go: actually, this is really, really cool. I went home and did some more digging into these places, went back to visit one of them, and that’s how the idea came about.

So then I went to our producer, Adam [Coppard], and said: I have this idea, it’s really ambitious, but I know that Sedos are real advocates and proprietors of doing things differently and taking those creative risks that in big commercial theatre, or even subsidised theatre, often aren’t taken — especially on younger creatives. I don’t have the money to put this musical on myself, but I knew Sedos had this really ambitious ethos and this collaboration with the Sondheim Society, in that they tend to do a Sondheim each year. And Company hasn’t been put on for ages, because so many people are holding tight for the gender-flipped rights to come out. But actually, why wait? The show wasn’t written like that — as much as that version is fantastic, and I’d love to do it that way round one day. It’s such an amazing show that isn’t being touched nearly as often as it should be. So we started working on the pitch together, and then we had to submit a whole load of information and do an in-person pitch, and we got it.

Sedos have been a dream to work with. They’re really, really supportive, and considering how many shows they put on in a year, the amount of love and attention and support we’ve been given is really fantastic. I’m really excited to connect with and meet the audiences who come in. I’m quite new to the Sedos community, but I’m really excited to see who this show is going to reach. I really hope it can reach as many Sondheim fans as possible. I’m hoping they’ll come away thinking: I’ve actually never thought of Company in that way before. And as many times as you’ve seen Company, this will feel different and energised and new and exciting. But also, I think it’s a great first Sondheim show if you’ve never seen one before. It’s funny, it’s about real people living their real lives, talking about issues and arguments and jokes that are still relevant and are still funny.

Talk me through your roadmap between now and opening night. The show has been cast, we’re beginning to see little windows into the rehearsal room on the Sedos social channels. And of course, your cast members have busy lives outside of the show — this isn’t their full-time day job. So how does the schedule work, and how intact is the show at this point versus where it’ll be in a few weeks?

You’ve asked me this at a great time, actually. I’m just about to run Act 1 tomorrow. As a director, I have to work chronologically, which feels paradoxical in this case, because Company is not a chronological show. But that’s just how I have to work. We’ve worked really, really hard over the past five and a half weeks to make sure we can do a good run tomorrow.

How it works is: we rehearse in evenings and on Saturdays, and then often I’ll pull people for one-to-ones on other days, too. I’m not a big fan of setting everything and then coming back to it in more detail. I think when working with something like a George Furth text and a Sondheim score, where the music, lyric and text are so interdependent, no one benefits from breezing through that. So I actually just prefer to do a really long session on each scene from the get-go. Do some text work, make sure we’ve done all our sessions on acting through song, make sure the detail comes through. That relies on a lot of commitment and time from the actors, but I set that expectation quite early on. So I’m hoping tomorrow will feel as much as possible like a full run of Act 1.

Act 2 is challenging, because “Side by Side by Side” is pretty much a third of the whole second act. But aside from that, it doesn’t involve a huge portion of the characters in the show — you have “Barcelona” and the April scene, and then you basically hop, skip and jump to “The Ladies Who Lunch” and then “Being Alive”. So the pace and structure of Act 2 is going to be a challenge — how to keep the energy high after “Side by Side by Side”.

Getting used to the logistics of the space will probably be the most challenging thing when we do a full run. And then the best day of every process: the sitzprobe. Thomas has booked an absolutely amazing band, truly. We kind of have the band in an apartment across the road, a bit like in Friends. We’re building our own separate second building for them to be in, which means the monitor situation is going to be challenging, figuring out how the cast can see the band.

But yes, it’s a timeline, really, of short, sharp bursts. I love working with companies like Sedos, because everyone is coming at you from a different place. Some people have come in having spent a day in court as a barrister, or in a hospital, or as a teacher, and you’ve got to meet everyone where they’re coming from. It’s really helped me with that skill of levelling out a room, of helping decipher what people need to do their best work. It’s no easy job, but it’s really, really rewarding.

Finally — you’ve also got West Side Story at NYMT (National Youth Music Theatre) coming up this summer, so it’s a Sondheim-filled few months for you. I’d love to know a little bit about your role there — and, for those who might be less familiar, about the experience of working with NYMT.

Totally. I’m the assistant director for NYMT’s 50th anniversary production of West Side Story, which is really, really, really exciting. It’s my fourth project with NYMT, and I’ll be working with the incredible Rupert Hands, alongside George Beet and Flynn Sturgeon. It’s going to be at the Birmingham Hippodrome from the 6th to the 8th of August. NYMT is the largest youth musical theatre organisation in the UK. They have a whole array of projects going on year-round, with West Side Story opening their season this year. I don’t know much yet about what it’s going to feel like and look like — but it’s definitely going to be a really monumental production.

And it’s young people telling a story about young people. West Side Story is very rarely done to quite such a high level with this age range, so I’m absolutely thrilled to be working on that. They do intensive rehearsals in Easter, and then come back and do another week in summer straight into their production week. I’m taking a week out of Company and handing over to Thomas to do all the music for that week. But yes, I would really, really highly recommend any Sondheim enthusiasts go and see the NYMT West Side Story at the Birmingham Hippodrome. It’s going to be very, very special.

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He is an artist — consumed, driven, brilliant in a way that is at once intoxicating and impossible. She is observed, on show, studied like the light. She submits herself, in her own way, to others’ eyes, others’ judgment, others’ scrutiny. But she, too, is watching. She watches the man she loves as he works. She watches him succeed and fall short, draw closer and drift away.

He makes something remarkable. Something that will outlast their relationship. She’s a part of that — present in it, preserved, even — and yet the making of it is precisely what she cannot survive. The work is where he lives. She, increasingly, is where he visits.

This, of course, is not a single story. It’s an old song, as Hadestown’s Hermes might say. It’s a song sung by Sondheim and Lapine in Sunday in the Park with George, by Jason Robert Brown in The Last Five Years, by each of us touched in some deep and hard-to-name way by one or both of these towering works.

This week, at the London Palladium, Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler have been the custodians of that song. Their Brown-directed production of The Last Five Years, now States-bound, is a 90-minute miracle. To say that Platt and Zegler are at the peak of their powers is tempting, but suggests that for them there even is such a peak. I prefer Cathy’s words: en route to the sky. And what a thrill it is to be dizzy from that height.

Today, let’s place Jamie and Cathy alongside George and Dot. Let’s listen for the song they share, the worlds they build, the love they can and cannot hold.

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As Sunday begins, Dot is standing in the sun, furious, in love, and already working something out. What she is working out is the particular experience of being with a man who looks at her constantly, intently, but who never quite seems to see her. Dot is modelling. She is, professionally and personally, an object of study.

In “Color and Light,” George and Dot’s inner worlds run simultaneously, in parallel, never quite touching — which is, of course, the point. Dot’s spoken observations about George here have the quality of someone trying to solve a puzzle that keeps changing shape. “He could look forever,” she says — and then, with the precision of someone who has been watching carefully for a long time: “as if he sees you and he doesn’t all at once.” George catalogues her completely, with a painter’s total attention: the pink lips, the red cheeks, the wide eyes, the round face, the tiny pout… He sees everything about Dot. He cannot, quite, see her.

This is the trap of loving someone like George: the same quality that makes him impossible — that total, consuming attention — is what makes him irresistible. “And you’re studied like the light,” Dot sings, “so you want him even more.” Being studied like the light is reductive and insufficient and, in its way, intoxicating. She knows all three things to be true.

Cathy, in The Last Five Years, has no painter studying her. Or does she? In Jamie’s very first song, he sings: “You, taking the light. / You, you are the story I should write — / I have to write!” What Cathy has, too, are auditions — and Brown shows us that auditioning and being insufficiently loved are structurally the same experience. In both cases, you submit yourself. In both cases, the people doing the assessing will often have other things, or people, on their minds (“Look at me. / Stop looking at that, look at me,” sings Cathy). In both cases, the verdict tells you almost nothing about who you truly are.

“Climbing Uphill” takes us inside Cathy’s head mid-audition, so we hear both the song she is presenting and the torrent running beneath it: the self-consciousness, the professional dread, the shoes she hates, the resume she half-invented. And then, in the middle of all this, she pivots to Jamie: his need for space, his work, his absence from this moment that she is living entirely alone. She is standing in front of strangers asking to be seen, and her mind goes directly to the man who is supposed to see her most clearly, and the gap where his attention should be.

The Follies fantasy that briefly opens up in “Color and Light” deserves a moment’s attention. Dot imagines a different kind of being-looked-at entirely: gentlemen in tall silk hats, young aristocrats with fancy flats, men who would wait for her, drink to her, want her with an uncomplicated directness that George’s painterly gaze never quite offers. Performance, in this fantasy, means desire rather than study; to be on a stage is to be wanted, not measured. She dismisses it, sensibly, as a world of married men and stupid boys and too much smoke and noise. But she dismisses it from the inside, which means she has stood inside it long enough to know its appeal.

Both women, then, know what it is to perform the self under observation, and both know how to calibrate that performance for a particular audience. Which brings us to “See I’m Smiling.” Jamie has come to Ohio to see Cathy, and she is working, visibly, to project happiness onto a visit that is not quite going as she’d hoped. “See, I’m smiling,” she tells him — “that means I’m happy that you’re here.” The annotation of the feeling, the stage direction spoken aloud, is the action of someone who has learned that her emotional reality requires translation to reach him.

This is Dot saying “don’t move the mouth” to herself, before George can say it to her. In Sunday, that instruction arrives in the opening scene and it is literal: George, mid-sketch, silences Dot mid-flow because he needs the line of her mouth to stay still. In “See I’m Smiling,” it’s as if Cathy has internalized the instruction so thoroughly that she delivers it to herself. She has learned to be both instructor and instructed — to manage her own presentation, to hold the pose.

In “Color and Light,” George and Dot’s parallel inner worlds briefly converge. Their voices meet, for the first and only time in the number, on a single shared line: “I could look at him / her forever.” Both of them mean what they say absolutely. And they do not mean the same thing at all.

George’s forever is the painter’s forever — the arrested instant, the pigment that will not fade, the afternoon held permanent on canvas. Dot’s is the lover’s forever — duration, presence, the hope of being known across time rather than captured in a single light. The word is identical, but the two forevers do not touch.

At Sunday’s formal midpoint, George’s forever is made flesh. His painting assembles itself, one Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte held still for good. Dot is in the painting, permanent and unreachable. Their relationship already over, George bestows upon her that “more public and more permanent expression of affection” she sang of at the top of the show. She becomes, in a way, immortal. The whole of Act One, it seems, has built towards its finale’s full-throated, full-ensemble “Forever…”

The Last Five Years also reaches for forever at its structural center. “The Next Ten Minutes” is, gut-wrenchingly, the only time in the show where Jamie and Cathy briefly occupy the same present tense. Their wedding is the single point of convergence in a formal design that holds them apart. Here, forever is a destination that the lovers try to reach by increment. Jamie proposes, famously, ten minutes at a time:

Will you share your life with me
For the next ten minutes?
For the next ten minutes:
We can handle that.

The song builds, though, and the language builds with it. When Jamie and Cathy sing together for the first time in the show, he asks her for “ten lifetimes” and “a million summers” while she sings—yes, that word again—“Forever. / Forever, Jamie…”

They continue:

‘Til the world explodes,
’Til there’s no one left
Who has ever known us apart!

The irony could scarcely be more devastating. We, watching on, have only known them apart. And we will only know them apart. Except, of course, for this one incalculably precious moment.

Cathy, notably, imagines a different kind of forever altogether. “I could protect and preserve, / I could say no and goodbye,” she sings — but for Cathy, preservation is absence. It’s the life never fully lived, the self kept intact by keeping what some might call a tender distance... George preserves Dot and makes her immortal. Cathy’s version of preservation would simply make her invisible. She refuses it. “But why, Jamie, why?” She steps instead into the version of love that can be lost — which is the only version, both shows understand, that is ever real.

The logic, remarkably, is one Jamie already understands. In “The Schmuel Song,” a story he writes for Cathy and reads aloud to her by Christmas tree light, an act of total creative devotion ends in a girl promising “forevermore” to the man who made the dress. The artist makes something; the making conjures the forever. Jamie knows this story. He tells it beautifully. The rest of his story is, perhaps, the distance between knowing it and living it.

George’s forever is a genuine artistic act, permanent and true and ruinously costly, and it carries Dot into a different kind of eternity — she is in the painting, she will always be in the painting, something of her will outlast all else. Jamie and Cathy’s forever is a vow, and we know from the very first line of the show—“Jamie is over and Jamie is gone”—that their vow will fail. Perhaps, here, The Last Five Years itself is the painting, and Jason Robert Brown our Seurat. He does what his characters can’t: he paints onto canvas a permanent record of their love. He holds that love still long enough to be seen whole.

Sunday gives Dot a second kind of forever: in Act Two, a century later, she returns to give the younger George what her George could never quite receive. The love changes form. It becomes available again, in a different way, in a different time. In this week’s paid-subscriber essay, we’ll explore that breathtaking sequence, as well as “Finishing the Hat” and “Moving Too Fast,” in more depth.

For now, let’s end where The Last Five Years ends — which, of course, if you’re Cathy, is where it begins. She stands on her front steps at the end of her first date with Jamie. He has just kissed her. She watches him turn the corner and go, and the world, for this one suspended moment, is nothing but potential: the next phone call, the next meeting, the rest of her life still unlost ahead of her.

Her world is, in that moment, a blank page or canvas. So many possibilities…

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The most striking pattern across all 96 tributes is a single word: permission.

Our 96 contributors each wrote independently, in different countries, across different generations and disciplines. And yet, in tribute after tribute, the same framing appeared. Kelvin Moon Loh: Sondheim “gives me permission to be obsessed.” Olivia Bloom: “permission to tell the truth.” Emily Phillips: “permission to embrace messiness.” Grace Yurchuk: he taught her not to “censor yourself.” Becca Jimenez found in Sunday in the Park with George the ability “to stop needing the validation or approval of others.” Joaquin Pedro Valdes described “Give us more to see” as offering “not a verdict — permission.”

This is worth us sitting with a moment. Sondheim is routinely described as demanding, rigorous, difficult. His work is intellectually complex in ways that can feel intimidating. And yet the dominant emotional experience reported by the people who work with it, who were shaped by it, is one of liberation. It turns out that precision and freedom aren’t opposites. Watching someone mean exactly what they say, and say it with complete conviction, tells you that you’re allowed to do the same.

Several contributors mentioned letters. Claybourne Elder has one framed on his wall: “I think you’ll be very proud of yourself. And if you’re not, you should be.” Christine Toy Johnson wrote to ask for sheet music she could have simply bought, and received the vocal selections in the company mail, “with completely non-judgmental generosity.” Nathan Loughstein, writing to request a dissertation interview, was told it would take Sondheim longer to write email answers than “to compose a new show” — so they should meet instead.

Kevin F. Story wrote a letter complaining about musical theatre’s sorry state, and received back “a lesson in hope.” Ethan Heard pitched a production concept for Sweeney Todd and got a detailed, several-paragraph rejection that is somehow one of the most generous things in this entire collection. Natalie Jasso, through the Instagram account @sondheimletters, has spent years collecting letters that other people received from him.

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