Today, we’ll look closely at the conversations we shared between January and March of this year — conversations with Ethan Heard, Robert Kaplow, Christine Toy Johnson, Bella Brown, Eric Price, Jacob Fowler, Claybourne Elder, Ian Axness, Nyla Watson, Daniel Okrent, and Kelvin Moon Loh.

These conversations varied widely, but different versions of the same thought kept recurring. That thought went something like this: I encountered Sondheim’s work, and it showed me something about myself that I hadn’t known was there.

Nyla Watson, preparing her concert A Sondheim Girl for performance on what would have been Sondheim’s birthday in March, described doing Into the Woods and Merrily We Roll Along in the same period during her undergraduate years. She noticed the same name on both. “I thought: why is this so hard? Why are these two shows so difficult?” And then: “There’s something about this man that calls something forth in me that I don’t yet know I need for this art form. Only these shows were ripping something out of me that I didn’t know was in there.”

Jacob Fowler, covering Jack, the Steward, and Rapunzel’s Prince in the Bridge Theatre’s acclaimed production of Into the Woods (soon transferring to the West End), had a parallel moment ten years earlier, performing the show at school at fifteen. “I knew about Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Disney musicals,” he said. “And then slowly, as we did Into the Woods, I realised, gosh, this is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It really opened my eyes.” Ian Axness, resident music director at Cincinnati’s CCM, where a major production of Sweeney Todd was being mounted in the spring, offered the most pedagogical account of this quality in Sondheim’s work: “If you do what’s on the page, you’re 90 percent there. He’s thought this all through for you, he’s designed the puzzle for you. And then there’s a little space, like a window — that’s where you, the actor, get to fill in.”

The work makes demands of you, and in making those demands, it tells you something. Bella Brown, whose year had included covering Eva in Jamie Lloyd’s Evita at the London Palladium and playing Rapunzel in that same Bridge Into the Woods production, understood this viscerally when she put on the bald cap for Rapunzel’s journey through Act 2. “I’ve never seen myself without hair, and it was quite scary,” she said. “I could feel that in rehearsals.”

If difficulty is the doorway, then what lies on the other side of it, in almost every conversation, is a person who held the door open.

Claybourne Elder’s account is perhaps the most remarkable of them all in this respect — the kind of story that, if you put it in a movie, people would call too neat. As a young man from a farming town in Utah, with no connection to the professional theater world, Elder was given $200 by a stranger on the street and told to go and see Sweeney Todd on Broadway. The stranger would not discover the magnitude of his gift until nearly twenty years later. That production, directed by John Doyle and starring Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone, changed the course of Elder’s life. The next time those same people worked together, Elder starred alongside them.

But that’s almost the lesser half of the story.

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Sagrada Família’s cornerstone was laid in 1882. The church-in-progress survived a civil war, the burning of its creator’s plans, decades of mockery, and the death — struck by a tram, dressed so shabbily that passersby assumed he was a vagrant and did not come to his aid — of the man who dreamed it. Antoni Gaudí died of his wounds on June 10th, 1926. Precisely 100 years later, tens of thousands of people lined the streets to see his magnum opus blessed by a pope.

A story of creation that begins in the 1880s. A 100-year leap forward in time. Are you thinking about Sunday in the Park with George yet?

In his June 10th homily, the Pope said something remarkable:

Much more than a monument, the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia remains a work in progress today. The fact that it is incomplete is not a flaw, for it bears witness to a desire; it does not signify a shortcoming, but rather expresses a promise that we wish to honor with consistency.

What a thrilling, even radical thing to say at such a ceremony.

We are accustomed to thinking of completion as the goal of any act of creation: look, I made a hat. A monument, it might follow, is to be celebrated as the pinnacle of creative accomplishment: look, my hat survives me, survives forever, beyond revision. Pope Leo inverts that. A monument, he suggests, is the lesser thing. What sanctifies Sagrada Família is ambition. Gaudí’s church is a promise carved in stone, renewed by each new generation, honored by the very fact of its reaching. Desire, here, is the sacred thing, not its satisfaction.

We don’t often think of buildings in this way. We tend to think of marble, granite, bronze. We think public, we think permanent, we think durable forever. But a building that still aspires, that still wants something, remains alive. Incompleteness is an active state, and all the more thrilling for it.

To Sunday in the Park with George, then. In Act 2, the first George’s masterpiece has, for the second George, become a monument. And like a vast church, it casts shadows. Every direction this 20th-century George might move in seems a dead end; he is a cornered king facing checkmate, paralyzed by his inheritance. “I’ve nothing to say,” he says. “Well, nothing that’s not been said.”

What rescues him, and what Sondheim and Lapine offer as their answer to that paralysis, is Dot’s notebook. Her writing. Her voice from the previous century, guiding him back not to the monument but behind it, or perhaps inside it, to the original impulse, to the desire that preceded the form. “Said by you, though, George,” Dot replies.

Consider her words in Act 1, too:

You are complete, George,
You are your own.
We do not belong together.
You are complete, George,
You all alone.
I am unfinished,
I am diminished
With or without you.

This, again, is Pope Leo’s language of completion and incompletion. The first George’s work, Dot recognizes, has made him self-sufficient, sealed, complete (though, crucially, not whole). He is the monument, she the work in progress — and that, their relationship cannot survive.

The story of Sagrada Família points us in another Sunday direction too. Late in Act 1, George’s elderly mother sits in that small suburban park, staring across the water. “All those beautiful trees,” she says, “cut down for a foolish tower.”

In the distance, she can see where they are planning to build something: a vast iron lattice, 300 meters tall, taller than anything ever built. The plan has been published; the outrage has begun. A petition is circulating among the city’s leading artists and writers (it will gather names including Guy de Maupassant and Charles Gounod) declaring the proposed structure an abomination, a blot on the Parisian skyline, a “truly tragic street lamp.”

George is unmoved by his mother’s words, and precise in his reply. “I do not think there were ever trees there,” he says. “I am quite certain that was an open field.” He is right about Paris. And, as it happens, he would have been right about Barcelona too. When the Association of Devotees of Saint Joseph purchased the plot on which the Sagrada Família would be built, they were buying a bare rectangle of undeveloped land: not yet built on, not yet anything. No trees were cut down for Sagrada Família. It, too, rose from an open field.

Still, George’s mother begins to sing:

Changing.
It keeps changing.
I see towers where there were trees.
Going,
All the stillness,
The solitude…

Her sense of loss is real, even if the trees were not.

And real, too, was the unease provoked as Gaudí’s towers began to alter the skyline. Sagrada Família attracted something of the hostility that had greeted the Eiffel Tower: mockery, aesthetic outrage, the suspicion that this particular vision had no business imposing itself on a city that had not asked for it. Many Noucentista and rationalist critics recoiled from Gaudí’s organic profusion, from façades that looked as though the building were erupting from the earth rather than being constructed upon it. George Orwell declared it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.” Like Eiffel’s iron tower, it was, to its detractors, an affront: too strange, too much, too insistently itself.

George, responding to his mother, does not dismiss or belittle her perspective. Instead, he adopts her language, meets her on her own terms. He speaks, as it were, in her voice:

All things are beautiful, Mother.
All trees, all towers beautiful.
That tower beautiful, Mother, see?
A perfect tree.

A perfect tree… Inside Sagrada Família, the columns branch. They spread upward and outward from their trunks as trees really do. Gaudí’s vaulted ceiling is a canopy; light filters in as if through leaves. This is deliberate: Gaudí spent years studying the way trees bear weight, the way branching geometry distributes force so efficiently that no column needs a capital, no arch needs a flying buttress.

George’s mother sees towers where there were trees. To step inside Sagrada Família is to see trees within a tower. It is to see a forest translated into stone and then, astonishingly, converted back.

On June 10th, Pope Leo XIV stepped out of the Basílica and blessed its tallest tower. In his words, an idea that Sondheim and Lapine had already understood: that great art lives most fully in the act of its creation. In the work, the desire, itself. In the limitless possibility of that blank page or canvas.

Sagrada Família is not finished. It will not be finished for another decade at least; the Glory façade still awaits, and Gaudí’s grandest ambitions for the entrance remain unrealized. The building being blessed is still becoming. And that, the Pope reminds us, is not a flaw. The desire is the sacred thing.

George’s great-grandson learns this on the island in 1984. You cannot inherit a monument. You can only find your way back to the impulse behind it, to that first exquisite reaching, and begin again from there. Dot shows him how. And the final image of Sunday in the Park with George is not the painting, fixed and framed and finished, but the desire inside it, alert, alive, reaching towards the verticals of trees forever.

Sondheim gives each Admiral in “Please Hello” a musical and rhetorical idiom as precisely chosen as his demands. Over the past few months, we’ve heard Sousa march plus pidgin-as-condescension, Gilbert and Sullivan-esque patter, a desperate clog dance, and lugubrious, rubato authority.

The French Admiral gets operetta. Specifically, he gets the musical idiom of Jacques Offenbach — the composer of Orphée aux Enfers, La Belle Hélène, La Vie Parisienne — whose frothy, irresistible, relentlessly cheerful music was, in the 1850s and 1860s, the soundtrack of the Second Empire, of Napoleon III’s Paris, of a regime that used spectacle and gaiety as instruments of political management.

Offenbach’s operettas were entertainment, to be sure. But they were also, as critics from Nietzsche to Karl Kraus observed, a narcotic — a way of making the uncomfortable comfortable, of dissolving anxiety. Sondheim’s pastiche of this style in “Please Hello,” then, is a precise one. But to understand just how precise, it helps to spend a moment with what Offenbach actually did, and why Napoleon III needed him.

Napoleon III and His Composer

Jacques Offenbach was born in Cologne in 1819, the son of a Jewish cantor, and arrived in Paris as a teenager with a cello and enormous ambition. He spent decades on the margins of the official musical establishment before finding his form in the early 1850s: short, satirical, wildly energetic operettas performed in tiny theatres on the Boulevard du Temple. When Napoleon III’s Second Empire was declared in 1852, Offenbach was ready for it, and it was ready for him.

The Second Empire was, among other things, a regime of surface. Napoleon III understood, better than almost any ruler before the age of mass media, that political legitimacy could be manufactured through spectacle. Baron Haussmann was tearing apart medieval Paris and replacing it with wide boulevards and grand vistas, not only for sanitary and military reasons but because a city of magnificent surfaces was a city that looked like it was being well governed. The 1855 and 1867 World’s Fairs brought millions to Paris and told them: this is the center of the world, and the center of the world is having a wonderful time.

Offenbach provided the music for that wonderful time. His operettas — La Belle Hélène (1864), La Vie Parisienne (1866), La Périchole (1868) — were officially satirical, full of jokes at the expense of the gods, the aristocracy, and pompous authority. But the jokes were so good, and the music was so irresistible, that the satire dissolved in the pleasure of the thing.

The music itself was the mechanism. Let’s break it down:

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I’d love to start in late November 2021. Just a few days after Sondheim’s death, you took part in that remarkable Times Square performance of “Sunday.” As you stood among so many artists gathered to honor him, what was going through your mind?

That’s a great question. As I recall, it was a sad time, and a sad day, but I tried to find the positive. I was there for Steve, and to join with the community that he was so richly a part of, to honor him. So I was trying to concentrate on those good aspects: the healthy pride and love for him and his work.

I actually don’t remember how I heard about it. But it was great to see people, of course. That’s the one good thing about any sort of memorial service, or whatever you want to call it: it’s a reunion with a lot of dear friends. So it was a beautiful day, but sad.

How vividly do you recall your first time in the same room as Sondheim?

I believe the first time was at my callback for Merrily. I’m sure I didn’t meet him before that. That was a huge day, in early December of 1980. It was huge for him to be there, sitting at the table with Hal Prince and George Furth, Paul Gemignani, Joanna Merlin, and so on. It was just thrilling for me.

My main thought that day was, I’m not going to be cast in this. That’s ridiculous. It really was, to me. I was 25 years old. I thought, there’s just no way. But I also thought, I have bragging rights now. I can walk out and say, “Guess who I met today? Sondheim! Hal Prince! George Furth!” And then to learn in the room that we were all cast, after that long day — as I’m sure you know — was amazing. But I had already gotten what I wanted.

And I thought of it as an investment. Even back then, I did. You build a career, you build a reputation, you go in, you do your best, and so the next show that Joanna Merlin is casting, she’ll say, “Oh, Jim Walton did a good job. He didn’t get cast in Merrily, but he did a good job. Let’s call him in.” I knew that then. To build a career was really what I was trying to do that day.

You’d made your Broadway debut the year before, but how secure did you feel in your career at that point? If you hadn’t booked Merrily, do you think your path might have looked totally different?

That’s really a fascinating idea. I’ve asked myself that many times: if I hadn’t done Merrily, what would my career have become? I honestly have no idea. Shortly after Merrily, maybe six months after it closed, maybe longer, I booked the national tour of 42nd Street — Billy Lawler, which is Lee Roy Reams’ part. It’s a featured role. And I’ve often wondered, well, did I in part get that because of the visibility that Merrily brought? Maybe I would have gotten it anyway.

But then, if I hadn’t done 42nd Street… Well, who knows? It’s hard to pick apart one’s destiny. It would have changed my career if I had not done Merrily We Roll Along. But also, maybe for the better! Who knows? I might have become a movie star, or a TV star. It’s so hard to know. But Merrily sent me down this road, and it’s been a good road. I have no complaints.

You’ve been asked about Merrily’s short run so much over the years, and I’d much rather ask you about the work itself: about what it’s like to hold new Sondheim in your hands, to bring this work into the world. Do you have any especially clear memories of your first encounter with a particular song?

I honestly love every song in the show. They’re so resonant and good, and funny, and clever, and tuneful, and harmonically rich. As you know, I started in the ensemble and played his lawyer, Jerome. I remember looking at the line “Best thing that ever could haaaaaaaaave happened” — that was one of Jerome’s lines, and then they gave it to Lonny, who sang it as Charley. But I remember looking at that going, wow, that’s a long note. It’s just like “We loooooooooove you” in Company. I found that fascinating, that of all the words in that line, he held out the word “have.” Maybe he wanted an obbligato feel. And it’s good counterpoint — I will not argue with that!

It was Act 2 that fit more for me as a 26-year-old man, so “Opening Doors” and “Our Time” and “It’s a Hit!” — those songs felt easier for me to find my way through as myself, rather than “Old Friends” and “Not a Day Goes By,” which I sang in the original, and which were challenging to make work as an actor. But it was all just thrilling.

Stepping into the role of Frank from the ensemble as quickly as you did must have been such a challenge. I’m thinking of a number like “Opening Doors…”

Oh, yes, it’s very tricky. You know, “I called a producer, da-da-da-da-da-da, I’m meeting an agent,” and so on. I don’t remember all those words now. And it’s not always Frank-Mary-Charley, Frank-Mary-Charley. It’s Frank, Mary, Frank, Charley, Mary, Frank, and so on. So that was a tricky song. But what Sondheim did so well is he wrote scenes. He wrote many scenes in that song. “Opening Doors” is just a masterclass in musical theatre composition.

Also, because I wasn’t even the understudy for Frank, I wasn’t learning the part just in case I had to go on — like, what if James gets sick? I wasn’t learning it at all. But then I learned it really quickly.

Are you able to break down how, just practically, you went about learning the role so quickly?

Well, I wish I could remember. I do have this flash of memory that I took a taxi home — I lived on the Upper West Side during rehearsals — and I remember being in that taxi memorizing lines. So every spare minute, for about four or five days, I was memorizing. Also, I did summer stock work all through college. Between ages 18 and 22, I worked at the same non-equity theater, Wagon Wheel Playhouse in Warsaw, Indiana, and I did maybe five shows a season over those three months. You do Bye Bye Birdie while you’re memorizing Minnie’s Boys. Then you’re doing Minnie’s Boys while you’re memorizing Brigadoon. So I was used to learning shows very quickly. We just had to. That’s how it was done.

Now, of course, if you’re playing a lead in a show in two-week stock, you can be memorizing it six weeks before. In Merrily I didn’t have that luxury. But I was a young hot dog, so of course it was like, “Yeah, I can do this.” And Hal Prince asked me… I’m gonna say no? But I knew, walking out of that meeting, that I needed to get to work immediately. So I probably did run lines with Lonny and Annie during that period, and I did have a put-in rehearsal. But I was also on during that time — I was in the show as Jerome — so I couldn’t stand in the back of the house and mutter the lines along with Frank. Honestly, I was probably muttering the lines along with Frank while I was on stage. I do remember watching his movements: oh, he goes to stage left 7, stops on 7, and so on.

When we think of Merrily today, we think of the various revisions, the different opening numbers, and so on. I wondered what it was like for you to see the show for the first time without, say, “The Hills of Tomorrow.” How protective did you feel of “your” Merrily?

It was hard for me. I can’t remember the first time I saw the show again, but it was long before the recent revival. I saw productions at this college or that, and the Encores! production many years ago. And I do like “The Hills of Tomorrow” as a framing device. It’s the same intervals as “It started out like a song” in “Good Thing Going,” so it’s the same Franklin Shepard. Frank really wrote one song, which I think is a fun idea.

But I also couldn’t be objective, because of my associations with it — so I couldn’t sit there and go, oh, “That Frank” is not good, it should be “Rich and Happy.” It was hard for me to know. I saw what they did, and I thought, oh, okay, it’s the two-faced LA crowd, which makes sense — because later in the show, earlier in his life, it’s the blob, whom he meets at Gussie and Joe’s party in Act 2, and the “Good Thing Going” song is part of that. So it made sense, but it was hard for me to let go of what I remembered — just naturally. But not to the extent where I felt like, oh, no, that doesn’t work, why did they do that? They’re so smart. So smart.

And yeah, it changed. But hey, the show is working now, and they’re making a film of it — so for anyone to sit here and say, oh, this didn’t work, that didn’t work… Well, really?

Which brings us nicely to this recent revival. Did you spend much time with Jonathan Groff? Did it feel like a passing of the baton?

I did feel the passing of the baton to Jonathan, who is one of the loveliest guys I have ever met. He was so kind to me. We went as a group — a few of us from the earlier cast, a dozen of us — and saw it off-Broadway first. And then we saw it on Broadway, and both times we stayed after and met the cast, including Jonathan, whom I had met years ago because we sang together at a gala, when he was very young. Before Spring Awakening, even. Way back. He was very kind, and super talented, of course.

But also, what am I gonna tell him? You know, “In the third scene, what you’ve gotta do is this…” No! No, I would never do that. But he was very gracious with me, and was thrilled to have me there, and was so warm and grateful to all of us in the original cast. And he mentioned Lonny, Annie, and me in his Tony acceptance speech. I mean, come on. This is a very open-hearted, generous guy. So, we love Jonathan.

I had the chance to speak to Annie last year, and she described the success of this recent revival as healing, as cathartic, for her personally. I wondered whether you shared that feeling.

That’s a very good call. Yes, I have felt the weight of Merrily’s failure upon me through my career, in a way. Meaning, I’m going out there in, let’s say, Come From Away. I did Come From Away for a long time. And there could well be people out there who are ready to judge my performance negatively and go, “Oh, I see. I understand why Merrily closed.” You know what I mean? So I would have to process that a little bit. Not every day, but once in a while, I would have to say: hey, you did your best in Merrily. You were very fortunate to do it, and you loved it, and you worked your tail off.

The most healing day of the Merrily experience for me was September 30th, 2002. That’s when we did a one-night reunion concert at LaGuardia High School. Sold-out crowd. Hal and Steve were there. Joanna Merlin was there, Paul Gemignani conducted the onstage orchestra, and we sang those songs. The response was the opposite of what we’d had before. We were like rock stars. And then Hal and Steve came on stage. Hal spoke, they embraced, and the audience went nuts. So that was very healing for me — and that’s almost 24 years ago.

So to see the recent revival, for me, and not in a cynical way, I thought, you see? This has always been a hit! That’s what I thought. And no, our production was not a hit. But the show is so rich and so original — so theatrical, and poignant, and funny, and specific. It’s so good. And I just kind of thought, you see? I’m glad you all get it now. That’s the way it was. It sounds a little chip-on-the-shoulder, and maybe it was, but it was really in defense of Steve, George, and Hal — that they got it right, and finally, finally, the world caught up.

That’s a beautiful way of framing it. I was also thinking about you and Liz Callaway singing to Sondheim on Inside the Actors Studio. That must be an experience you don’t forget…

No, that’s hard to forget. It was November 7th, 1994. I have a weird thing about certain dates that are big red-letter days for me. Liz and I were handpicked by Steve to do it, and both Liz and I sang many more songs than made it into the final cut, because they cut it down to an hour. I think we were there closer to two hours, and we sang a lot of songs. But singing “Move On” with her, for starters, was thrilling — that voice! But to sing it to Steve, who sat there and teared up — my gosh. What a thing, to be able to sing his own words back to him and to ask him for more. It’s profound.

I wish I could get inside his head, just to figure out how the hell he did what he did, and what he felt that night. But he truly was a very generous, empathic man. He loved the theatre and music so much, and I think he loved Liz and me. I was nervous that day, and had to remind myself, this is not really a performance, this is just me standing at a mic. It was like a reading: just sing the best you can, and act as well as you can, in front of your music stand. I had to remind myself to do that, because the feeling was, oh, Steve is 15 feet away. No way! No, just calm down. So I had to talk to myself a little bit through it.

But that was a thrilling evening, and I’m so grateful it was videoed. It’s on YouTube. I’ve watched it and skipped through me singing, just because I want to watch Steve again talking about his work. I’ve watched all of his interviews, and I wanted another hour of that one. A thrilling, thrilling night. I’m glad you got to see it too.

You’ve been part of so many non-Sondheim shows too — you mentioned Come From Away, which is so inventive in its storytelling and has such a great score. How do you feel about the overall health of Broadway today?

Well, I’m a Sondheim fan to the bone. And I miss the adult musical. Yes, we still have Jason Robert Brown and Adam Guettel and Jeanine Tesori and Pasek and Paul — and others, forgive me for not mentioning them — who write smart songs. Flaherty and Ahrens, of course. And Ragtime did well the other night. But I worry that the audience has changed, and the ticket price has changed. And if people are going to pay $200, $300, they want to see what they want to see, which is sometimes a revival, something they know, or a big star. People doing flips. And I get it. But I miss the music and lyrics that challenge me, the listener, more, and take me to a deeper human place. That’s what I really like. That’s why I like Two Strangers, because it’s, to me, a deeper story.

It’s not that writers are not intelligent anymore. I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s partly what the audience wants for the grotesque amount of money they’re paying. I still haven’t seen Death of a Salesman, which I really want to, but I went online the other day and the cheapest ticket was, like, $340. And I went, gosh, I remember when it was $40. I’m that old. Never mind the $1,000 tickets to this or that, which I have a problem with on principle. I think it affects the artistic contribution. But yeah, I like an adult musical. That said, I’d probably have a blast at The Rocky Horror Show.

I wanted to end with Frank’s own words. Just before the end of the show, you say: “My final thought is a simple but mighty thought. It is the obligation we have been given. It is to not turn out the same. It is to grow, to accomplish, to change the world.” Do you feel that Merrily itself has, in its own way, lived up to those words?

Wow. You’ve given me chills. I remember almost all of that speech. Yeah. I think in many ways that show was autobiographical, especially for Steve. I imagine George Furth wrote those lines, but it’s as true in Steve’s lyrics for “Our Time”: “Up to us, pal, to show ‘em.” Right before the song begins, Frank says to Charley, essentially, “We’re gonna change the world.” And Steve and George did.

Stephen Sondheim over and over again changed my world, and is still changing it, because of the depth of his work. That line… “The obligation we have been given … to not turn out the same.” It’s so easy to do, to conform. I’m a songwriter as well — and often, even just today with a song I’m writing, I’m telling myself, no, there’s something better. You’re not getting to the heart of it. Who is this character? Who are they? It’s easy just to go, oh, well, this rhymes, this works, sure. It’s too easy to settle.

Sondheim was so bright. He knew how to really get underneath the skin of it. And that’s how you hopefully don’t turn out the same. But boy, he sure became something unique and mighty. I’m just so lucky to be a part of it.

We’ve looked on as four other Admirals have arrived, threatened, bribed, and coerced their way to signatures. We’ve watched “Please Hello” descend, in the wake of Russia’s extraterritoriality clause, into a chaotic scrum of competing demands. Amidst this chaos, the French Admiral arrives with a word — a single, luminous word — that proposes to make all of it disappear.

That word is détente.

Before we get there, though, we’ve learned throughout this series to pay attention to entrances. The French Admiral tells us he brings word from “Napoleon ze Third.” That word, at first, would seem to be ‘allo. He enters, dancing, with no fewer than six such greetings.

Here is a man, it would seem, who is conscious of his lateness and intends to make up that deficit:

That lateness chimes historically. France was the last of the major Western powers to force treaty concessions from Japan in this period, signing its first treaty of amity and commerce in 1858 — three years after Russia’s Shimoda treaty, four years after the American Convention of Kanagawa. By the time France arrived at the negotiating table, the door had been broken down by everyone else; France was simply walking through it.

And yet France arrives with perhaps the most ambitious demand of all — not a port, not a legal clause, not an ambassador, but an ideological reframing of what has just happened.

What Is Détente?

Détente means a loosening or relaxation, the easing of tension between hostile parties. In the diplomatic vocabulary of the nineteenth century, it described the careful management of great-power rivalry: not resolution necessarily, nor alliance, but the maintenance of a working relationship between nations that might otherwise come to blows. In twentieth-century vocabulary, it would come to mean specifically the managed coexistence of the superpowers during the Cold War. It’s worth noting that Sondheim was writing Pacific Overtures during Nixon and Kissinger’s détente era with the Soviet Union (a policy critics derided as a polite framing for acquiescing to power, for calling that acquiescence peace). But the word means, in both contexts, roughly the same thing: we have decided not to call this what it is.

As the French Admiral puts it:

Just détente! Oooh, détente!
No agreement could be more fair!
Signing pacts,
Passing acts,
Zere’s no time for making warfare
When you’re always busy
Making wiz ze
Mutual détente!

The word “mutual” here recalls the American Admiral’s “first result of mutual trade,” again applying symmetrical language to an asymmetric situation. The détente is mutual in the sense that both parties are participating; it is not mutual in the sense that both parties are equal. Japan is being offered détente as a name for what has been happening to it for the past several years, retroactively, by the last in a series of uninvited guests who has decided to reframe the party as a dinner to which everyone was always welcome.

This is a new kind of ideological move. Previous Admirals brought ideologies that justified their specific actions: we bring technology (USA), we bring civilization (Britain), we bring trade (the Dutch), we note what our laws say (Russia). The French Admiral brings an ideology that justifies all of it, all at once. Détente says: we are all cooperating. We are all, together, relaxing tension. The coercions of the previous four years were not coercions. They were the gradual construction of a framework of mutual goodwill. You may thank us now.

The Gifts

A reminder of the “gifts” Abe has so far received:

From the USA, infrastructure — the physical systems of extraction and monetization. From Britain, tea — which Japan already had. From the Dutch, chocolate, tulips, and a wooden shoe. Naturally. From Russia, strictly speaking, nothing — which was at least honest.

The French Admiral brings champagne:

Leave ze grain,
Leave ze train,
Put Champagne among your imports!

These lines fly by, but they’re impressively audacious. “Leave ze grain, leave ze train” dismisses the entire economic justification the US offered for its presence. The French Admiral, uninterested in infrastructure or development or any moral argument about technological progress, foregrounds luxury and pleasure.

We might think of champagne as the reductio ad absurdum of the whole gift-giving tradition in “Please Hello.” America offered kerosene and cement and said: we are civilizing you. France offers champagne and says: we are partying with you. The distinction is meaningless in practice — both are one-sided exchanges dressed as generosity — but the champagne is, in its way, more honest. It at least makes no claim to your improvement.

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The champagne, like the wooden shoe, is a kind of branded national souvenir. The difference is that Sondheim’s Dutch Admiral offered his stereotypes desperately, at the bottom of the bag, having run out of actual arguments. The French Admiral offers his first, before making any argument at all. The champagne is the détente — the sensory embodiment of the claim that this is all, really, just a very nice party.

The Mask Slips

For roughly the first two-thirds of his section, the French Admiral maintains the performance perfectly. Détente, he insists, is the only thing France wants. No agreement could be more fair. Everyone is cooperating. And then Abe speaks:

It is late,
And I fear—
Well,
You see,
There’s a famine.
Could you wait
For a year?
We’ll agree
To examine it

Abe, who has been steamrolled, manipulated, coerced, and ignored since America fired its first cannon, finds in this moment a voice. But it’s an exhausted voice, not a defiant one. All of this — all the signing, all the explosions, all the mutual détente — has been happening to a nation that is actually suffering. As Abe lists the disasters one by one — “But we’ve had a quake and a flood and a famine” — it is clear no one is listening. But he keeps speaking anyway, because what else is there to do?

What the French Admiral does in this moment is pretty dark. Rather than dismissing Abe’s famine, rather than arguing against it, he incorporates it:

Why discuss,
Make ze fuss,
Since ze West belongs to us?
And ze East
We ‘ave leased
For ze French administration.

Japan has been leased — a term that preserves the fiction of Japanese ownership while describing total French administrative control. The famine, rather than something to be considered or addressed, exists inside a piece of territory France has already decided belongs to its sphere of management. The champagne is still on the table. There is, apparently, no reason to stop celebrating.

This is the endpoint of the ideological progression. Progress, civilization, commerce, law… France has something that subsumes all four: a vision of the world already arranged, already leased, already administered, in which the question of Japan’s consent is not refused but simply never asked.

The Collapse

After the French Admiral’s mask slips, “Please Hello” reaches its extraordinary finale. All five Admirals sing simultaneously, their individual national idioms dissolving into a single, cacophonous whole:

Please hello!
We must go,
But our intercourse will grow
Through détente,
As détente
Brings complete cooperation.
By the way,
May we say
We adore your little nation,
And with heavy cannon
Wish you an un-
Ending please hello!!!

“We adore your little nation.” The diminutive has been implied since the very beginning of this number, the American Admiral speaking as if to a child. Here it is finally spoken plainly, the condescension stripped of any particular national wrapping.

“Please hello” began as America’s phrase, the broken-English courtesy of an empire that assumed the world should accommodate its arrival. By the end of the number, it belongs to everyone, repeated endlessly, a sound that has lost its meaning in its own repetition and become simply the permanent condition. The Admirals must go, they tell us. Their intercourse will grow. They will be back. The door is open. The coat is untouchable. The champagne is poured. The train runs on time. And through it all, please hello, please hello, please hello — the sound of the Western world deciding to stay for good.

Five Admirals, One Argument

This essay series began with a question: what does each imperial power’s mode of arrival reveal about how it understands its own presence? Over five months, we have traced five answers.

America’s answer was progress — the circular logic of technological supremacy that creates dependency in order to prove the right to impose itself. Its gift was infrastructure; its threat was disguised as festivity; its most lasting move was the fine print, the most-favored-nation clause that wrote America into every subsequent negotiation without appearing at the table.

Britain’s answer was civilization — the permanent installation of process as power, bureaucracy as occupation. Its gift was formality; its threat was apologized for; its most lasting move was the word “tentative,” which promised that whatever had just happened was only a beginning.

The Netherlands offered little to no ideology, only empire as supply-chain management, sovereignty as a question of port logistics, two centuries of profitable humiliation concluding in a tantrum when the incumbent’s position was superseded by more aggressive newcomers.

Russia offered law — or rather, law’s negation: a clause that removed its citizens from the jurisdiction of the country they were visiting, a coat that could not be touched, a frank dismissal of the question of whether Japan wished to vote.

And France offered détente — the proposal that required no argument because it had already incorporated all the others. It’s an assertion that the arrangement already exists, that Japan’s disasters are administrative matters within a leased territory, and that the only question remaining is whether to have champagne now or later.

Taken together, these five ideologies form a complete grammar of imperial justification. Progress. Civilization. Commerce. Law. And finally, the master term that renders all the others unnecessary: the claim that everyone has always been cooperating, that the coercions were collaborations, that the endless please hello was, and remains, mutual.

And so concludes our five-part essay series on “Please Hello.” For now, please goodbye! On Friday, exclusively for our paid subscribers, we’ll be looking at the French Admiral’s music — tracing it back to Offenbach, and forward to Alan Menken’s “Be Our Guest…”

The group stage is over. The votes have been counted. The casualties have been mourned. The knockout rounds have begun. After thousands of Instagram votes across eight days of group-stage action, 32 competitors will now go head to head.

As I wrote last week, the whole enterprise is ludicrous. Of course it is. There is no sensible world in which “The Miller’s Son” and “Finishing the Hat” should be forced into direct comparison — even if, after that hat is finished, you pin it “on a nice piece of property.” But the ludicrousness remains part of the pleasure. And now that the group stage is complete, a few more patterns are emerging…

Last week, after the first half of the groups had been decided, the clearest lesson seemed to be this: emotional directness was doing very well. “Sunday” took 68% of its group. “Giants in the Sky” also took 68%. “Move On” took 59%. “No One Is Alone” took 52%. “Losing My Mind” took 49%.

The second half of the group stage has largely confirmed that pattern — but also complicated it.

“Pretty Women” took 64%. “Another Hundred People” took 62%. “The Miller’s Son” took 60%. “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” took 57%. In groups of four competitors, these are not narrow victories. Each of these songs seemed to become, very quickly, the obvious center of its group.

With 62% of the vote, “Another Hundred People” dominated a group that also included “Another National Anthem,” “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” and “So Many People,” which received just 8%.

I say “just” 8% not because the result is wrong — again, this is Instagram polling, not divine judgment — but because “So Many People” is one of those songs whose modesty may make it vulnerable in this format. It does not seize the room. It glows more so than it announces. And glowing, in a World Cup, is not always enough.

But, now that the group stage is complete, the most revealing question is not which songs topped which groups. It is what kind of map the qualifiers create, and what that tells us about our collective preferences.

And the map is striking:

Read more

It’s really good to speak to you. Could I ask you to start by introducing readers to what you do, and how your scholarship intersects with Sondheim’s work?

Thanks so much for wanting to talk to me! I’m a Professor of Theater and American Studies at Princeton. I’ve written a few books about musicals and most recently published a small handbook, Feminist Approaches in Musical Theatre, which I co-wrote with my former student and now collaborator, Paige Allen.

I’m probably in the second generation of musical theater scholars — that is, people take musicals seriously as a form of art and culture and use tools of musicology, theatre and performance studies, and dance studies, as well as history and sociology, to analyze them. We might say that Joseph P. Swain’s The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (1992) and Geoffrey Block’s Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (1997) were among the first books in the field of what we now call “musical theatre studies.” I came to musical theatre by way of feminist and queer performance studies and popular culture studies. My first book, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, was published in 2002, shortly followed by work that then hugely influenced mine: Andrea Most’s Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004), Scott McMillin’s The Musical as Drama (2006), and two books by my dear friend and colleague Raymond Knapp, which were published in 2005 and 2006. And since then, the field — of which Sondheim studies is a subfield — has exploded!

I first wrote about a Sondheim musical in an article about the women in Company for Robert Gordon’s The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies. From there, I learned about Sondheim’s musicals by teaching a seminar on his work.

Musicals are middlebrow. Sondheim is the highbrow of the middlebrow, and his work is considered serious. In fact, when I first started teaching a Sondheim seminar at Princeton, it was under the course for “master authors” (or something like that), an English department course number that was for single-author courses. It was Faulkner, Toni Morrison — and Sondheim! Now my Sondheim seminar is housed in American Studies with an emphasis on the musicals in conversation with U.S. history and culture.

Since then, I’ve written about West Side Story in my book, Changed for Good; about gender and college productions of Sondheim’s shows in Tony Sheppard’s edited collection; about high school productions of Into the Woods in my book, Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America; and about the gender-swapped Company in an article that Gail Leondar-Wright and I co-wrote, in a forthcoming collection edited by Elizabeth Wells.

I’m lucky because I get to teach what I love, and I get to be with brilliant, enthusiastic students and learn from them every day. Over the years I’ve been teaching, taking musical theater seriously as an academic subject has become increasingly acceptable. I have many colleagues now who teach musical theater history from a critical perspective across the country and around the world.

I’m also lucky because John Doyle was my colleague at Princeton for 10 years. He visited my classes and transformed students’ lives. John generously introduced me to many artists who visited Princeton (we’re fortunate to be a short-ish train ride from NYC). Also, my colleagues, lighting designer Jane Cox, and more recently, Tess James, designed some of John’s shows. This is only to say that a love for Sondheim’s musicals is in the water in Princeton! (Save the date! We are holding a symposium on “Sondheim’s Afterlives” at Princeton on the afternoon of Friday, November 6, 2026, which will feature an impressive collection of artists and scholars talking about Sondheim’s musicals.)

You’ve described meaning in musical theater as something made between text, context, performance, and spectator. As you came to know Sondheim’s work, did his musicals seem like especially fertile ground for that kind of analysis?

No and yes. On the one hand, ALL musicals (and really, all theatre and performance) can be analyzed by way of text, context, performance, and spectator — those elements are essential to interpretation. That said, there is always more to be gleaned from examining Sondheim and his collaborators’ texts (meaning lyrics, music, and book); from considering various historical, geographical, and theatrical contexts of their shows; from experiencing different performances and productions; and from imagining the perspectives of different spectators with their own interpretive practices.

I love teaching Sondheim’s musicals because they are truly the gifts that keep on giving. Every semester, I see or hear things I never noticed before. In terms of performance, more and more directors and designers and actors are thinking about these shows afresh and letting go of the canonical version. I think that John Doyle was the person who really broke that open with his reimagined actor-musican Sweeney Todd, and he left that door open for someone like Lear deBessonet, whose revival of Into the Woods was phenomenal. I heard so many lines in ways I never had before — even though I’d seen Into the Woods a hundred thousand times (maybe a slight exaggeration!). Same with Jordan Fein’s production at The Bridge. And earlier, Fiasco’s incredibly inventive production. There are so many nuances and subtleties in these shows that brave and creative directors, music directors, choreographers, designers, and performers can bring out.

In terms of context, Sondheim has been done all around the world now — professional, non-professional, Broadway revivals, off-Broadway, high schools, community theaters, even primary grades with Into the Woods JR. There are many more contexts to think about. How does this show resonate in this different context? What does it mean to these people (this audience) in this place at this time? And in terms of spectatorship, because of the circulation of his musicals over time, many spectators come to a performance with much more knowledge and experience. They’ve often seen many productions in their lifetimes, which makes for a richer viewing experience.

So, yes — there are qualities of these shows that make them, in these different categories of analysis, especially interesting. Sondheim’s shows give us a lot to chew on.

One theoretical idea I introduce early in the semester is Marvin Carlson’s notion of “the haunted stage” — the idea that every theater space, every character, every play is haunted by past productions. When Patti LuPone performs Joanne, she’s bringing with her all the other roles that she’s played in Sondheim shows, and her performance as Evita, and even Fantine in Les Mis. All of those ghosts come with her when you see her in Company. She’s a diva, she’s Patti, and she’s all of those characters. Also, when she (or anyone) plays Joanne, that role will always be haunted by Elaine Stritch.

This idea that theater is layered, that we never see a performance in a vacuum, and that as more and more Sondheim musicals are revived, there’s a larger collection of ghosts — many, many ghosts in the room — is important. And not only in Follies, which is itself, of course, a ghost-filled show.

Another concept we rely on in my classes was first articulated by the theater historian Freddie Rokem: triple historicity. Triple historicity is the idea that theater exists in (at least) three time periods at once: the time the play is set, the time it was first produced, and the now. To think about Company in 1970 is completely different than thinking about it in 2006 with Doyle’s production, and completely different than thinking about it today, whether that production is gender-swapped or not. And sometimes the very day you’re discussing a show inflects the conversation — which is why theater is awesome, because it’s live.

How do you balance those different layers — the original works and their original contexts on the one hand, and our contemporary frameworks and expectations on the other? Do you see a tension between what these musicals achieved in their own moment and the ways they can be read critically today?

Absolutely. And that’s why, as an instructor, I hope — without ever telling my students what to think — to keep that tension always alive. So, to say: John Weidman and Sondheim were these white Jewish guys who wrote Pacific Overtures because Weidman was extremely knowledgeable about Japan, interested in history, and he had this imaginative, smart, and brave idea for a musical. They wrote a show that, at the time, offered an extraordinary performance opportunity to Asian American performers on Broadway, that brought Kabuki to the Broadway stage, and brought a critical story of the West’s imperialist project to the Broadway stage. From that perspective, it was not only theatrically groundbreaking, but politically groundbreaking.

From a contemporary perspective, students see it as racist, ethnocentric, and demeaning. Because they’re students in this decade of the 21st century, they bring a more progressive critical sensibility. What I hope is that we can talk about and hold both perspectives at once.

Usually John Weidman will visit my class, either by Zoom or in person, and as soon as John starts talking, the students are disarmed. Not only because he’s completely lovely and smart and generous, but because he says to the students: “This is where this show came from.” And he will also readily admit: today, would I write this exact show? Probably not. Probably not today. But at the time, this is what we did. And we did it with our very best intentions. John welcomes the students’ criticisms and underlines the importance of the historical moment, of context.

Every single one of Sondheim’s and his collaborators’ musicals was groundbreaking in its moment — often so much that many audiences didn’t know how to interpret them. They were doing completely new things in terms of characterization, music, story, topic, structure. They were not doing what other shows were doing. But from a critical distance, they read differently. I try to keep that tension alive all the time. Let’s not in any way compromise our own politics and our own critical and political views of these shows. And also, let’s have generosity towards the moment, and towards what happened at the time.

You’ve written about mega-musicals and their treatment of women — often as objects — and compared Sondheim’s work favorably to some of those examples. Sondheim is often unhelpfully pitted against the more commercial composers and shows, but it seems like you’ve identified something genuinely grounded in the texts themselves. Are there some examples you could point to that illustrate that comparison?

First of all, because I write about a middlebrow art form, I’m not that keen on reproducing hierarchies of taste in my classes (even as it’s hard to resist). And I’ve found it falls flat with my students — although now some of them know that they “should” love Sondheim and hate, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber. But most of my students come to all musicals with love and affection. That said, I do think that with the mega-musicals — Les Mis, Phantom, Miss Saigon — the women are only functional, in service of the men’s stories. (Evita, which I love, and Sunset Boulevard are different, so I might be reluctant to make a generalization about ALL mega-musicals.)

In my class, we often talk about “page versus stage.” On the page, the women in these musicals are useless. They’re victims, they’re objects, they have no purpose other than to reveal the complexity and dilemmas and character arcs of the men. But they also get to sing some of the best songs — so how should we think about that?

Something that’s important to me as a writer and a teacher is feeling comfortable with ambivalence and contradiction, and saying: you can absolutely hate this show and love this show at the same time. Having a critical perspective doesn’t prevent you from loving it. That’s how I feel about most mega-musicals (and Hamilton). All the women in Les Mis exist solely to pine after men, to be useful to men, and to be discarded by them. The men do all the things. But the women do get to sing some great songs.

That’s not how it works in Sondheim at all. These women are complicated, and a lot of them are thoroughly… I don’t really like to use the word unlikable, but I think in an art form that seeks to please, to have characters who aren’t villains, but who are complicated and difficult and layered, it’s worth noting. The women’s journeys in these shows are their own journeys. Even a character like Sally in Follies who we might think of as more or less a sad sack — she’s in love, she’s been rejected, she doesn’t get what she wants, the love remains unrequited — her journey in that musical is incredibly interesting. Even just in “Losing My Mind”, in that one song, her journey is compelling.

The women in Sondheim’s musicals are not there for the purpose of male characters to find their way. For the most part they’re very smart — or if they’re not smart, they’re self-conscious.

I was really struck by your idea that a musical can have an emotional or even erotic center of gravity that may not be exactly where the surface of the show seems to place it. Regarding Gypsy, you’ve written about Rose and Louise in that way. How do you think about that now?

Isn’t Gypsy such an amazing show? It’s so good! I just love it. When I wrote that chapter, which was a fairly long time ago, I was struck by the fact that in a musical written in 1959 — a Golden Age musical, if you want to use that term — not only is there no celebration of heterosexual romance at the end, but the whole last section of the show is about the relationship between a mother and a daughter. The powerful reconciliation is between two women. The last moment is two women embracing and going off stage together.

At the time (when I was writing A Problem Like Maria and then Changed for Good), I was thinking about how that ending upends the convention of heterosexual romance as the dominating force, and the dominating narrative, and the dominating political work of most musical theater. I was thinking about Gypsy alongside the end of Guys and Dolls — “Marry the Man Today” — which also, despite the wedding that follows, ends with women bonding. And also alongside “A Boy Like That / I Have a Love” near the end of West Side Story. The musical is a Romeo and Juliet story plus gangs, and then near the very end, there’s this powerful duet between two women that changes the entire gender dynamic of the show.

Thinking about Gypsy now, especially after seeing Audra McDonald’s performance several times, I think I would not say, in the end, that it’s about Rose and Louise equally. I think that it’s a show about Rose, and the other characters are spokes on the wheel around her — including the audience. We are part of the drama. “Rose’s Turn” is a number about the character, the actor, and the audience. We participate in what happens in that song.

What’s fascinating about Gypsy — especially because it was written in 1959 — is that it is about a woman who refuses to be the housewife she’s expected to be. She will not do it. She will not be that kind of wife or that kind of mother. At the end of the show, Rose and Louise have something in common: they are in love with show business, in love with performance. Louise has found herself and expressed her rage. Rose has expressed her rage, partly witnessed by Louise, and fully witnessed by the audience. And that’s how they can go off together — not that it’s going to be happily ever after, not at all. But they can leave for a party together.

If I were writing that chapter again, I don’t think I would make the same argument about the ending. That’s what’s good and bad about scholarship: it’s out there, and there it is. In this case, for me, performance revises criticism.

This seems like a perfect moment to ask about how your thinking about Sondheim might have changed or deepened over the years. You’ve just given a great example from your own scholarship, but I’m interested in how conversations with colleagues and students continue to shape your understanding of Sondheim in 2026.

In terms of colleagues, there’s so much great work out there about Sondheim, so I feel like I’m learning more all the time! I’m fascinated by all the books that are about process, even those that aren’t new, and by criticism that offers new perspectives. There are excellent podcasts, including, for example, Kyle Marshall’s. And your work is really important. Thank you for the work you do!

As far as my students are concerned, the thing about young people is that you do not know what’s going to happen when you come into the room with them. I don’t teach a lecture class; it’s a seminar. We do a lot of on-your-feet activities, all kinds of performance analysis. We do scenes. We play around a lot. But I don’t know what they’re going to think, or how they’re going to react, or what they’re going to say. This is why I learn so much from my students every year.

There was a semester when everyone’s view of Passion completely changed. I had taught Passion for a number of years, and I would raise questions like: what is this musical saying about love? About appearance? About gender? About power? For years, my students did not like the musical, and they were repelled by Fosca. And then one year, they all came in saying that Fosca is a character with a disability, that she has a chronic illness, that her view of love is spot-on, and that she is absolutely a heroine worth identifying with and relating to. And they all loved the show and found it perceptive and powerful. I thought: okay, I guess we’re in a new world here with this musical. So I really never know how it’s going to go, which I enjoy and appreciate.

More and more, my students see Company as being — and this started because I teach the work of Ashley Pribyl, who’s written a lot about Company — about friendship and other kinds of relationships. Marriage doesn’t feel the same to them; many don’t feel the same pressures around marriage. So for them, it’s not exactly a play about marriage. It’s about connection, intimacy, friendship, community. And that’s endlessly interesting to me: that they come at this work from different angles than I do, and they respond to every show in surprising ways.

Lifetime achievement has a deadly sound to it. A ring of finality. A faint whiff of “you’ve outlived your usefulness.”

Those words were written by Stephen Sondheim for the 2008 Tony Awards, where he received a Special Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He wasn’t there to deliver them himself — Mandy Patinkin stood at the podium in his place — but they say much about the strange experience of being celebrated.

With the 79th Tony Awards taking place today at Radio City Music Hall, it’s a good moment to look back at Sondheim’s own relationship with Broadway’s highest honors — beyond the record of wins and nominations, looking at what he actually said when he stood at that podium. Taken together, his acceptance speeches form something like a miniature portrait of the man: generous to his collaborators, subversive in an understated kind of way, and always more interested in the work than the prize.

The Crusade

If you listen to Sondheim’s Tony Award acceptance speeches, one thing above all shines through. At the 1971 ceremony, accepting for Company, he says: “It’s odd how there’s never been a Tony Award for an orchestrator, and there’s no score on Broadway that exists without orchestration. In my opinion, the most brilliant orchestrations ever made in musical theatre are those of Jonathan Tunick for Company, and I want to share this with you.”

He returns to the same theme in 1972, accepting for Follies: “I’d like to thank two people who weren’t nominated because there were no categories for their nominations: the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and the musical director Harold Hastings. I pray that next year the Tony Awards will reinstate those two categories.”

And in 1979, for Sweeney Todd, he says: “I must of course share this with Jonathan Tunick, who orchestrated two hours of music in 23 days, and did it better than anybody who’s ever done it.”

Three wins. Three variations on the same theme. Sondheim used his platform, again and again, to make a structural argument about how the Tony Awards failed to recognize the people who made his music possible.

The Tony Award for Best Orchestrations was finally introduced in 1997. The named beneficiary of Sondheim’s advocacy, Jonathan Tunick, was its inaugural winner.

The Collaborators

Sondheim’s orchestration crusade is expressive of an almost systematic insistence that his awards belonged to other people.

At every ceremony, Sondheim names names. Conductors Harold Hastings and Paul Gemignani. Tunick, relentlessly. Rehearsal pianist Paul Ford, described in the 1988 speech as “the world’s most tireless rehearsal pianist and a walking memory bank of every song that has ever been written for any musical on any continent.” Ingmar Bergman, whose Smiles of a Summer Night made A Little Night Music possible. Hal Prince, of course. And James Lapine, his chief collaborator on Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods and Passion, thanked warmly and consistently.

Sondheim’s 1972 speech for Follies goes furthest in articulating why this matters. After his thank yous, he says the following:

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I just thought, as I was sitting there tonight, of something that a young playwright named David Trainer said about the theatre. He said, “It’s the only medium that acknowledges the presence of the audience, and that’s why it will never die. If you laugh at a movie screen or boo at a movie screen or anything, the actors go right on. They do exactly what they want to do. Same thing with the television. But not the theatre.” And that’s why I’m proud to be in it.

It’s abundantly clear that Sondheim’s gratitude at the podium was not cursory, nor performative. He was thinking out loud about the collaborative form he’d devoted his life to, and the people without whom his own work would exist in a vacuum.

1988 and the Ghost of Anyone Can Whistle

There’s a fun added ingredient in Sondheim’s 1988 speech (where he was accepting for Into the Woods) that sets it apart from the others.

The presenter that evening was Lee Remick, who began her remarks by recalling her first Broadway musical. She did not name it at first, only describing the exhaustion of rehearsal, the endless changes, the songs going in and out, and the eventual reward: “the run of that show was six of the happiest days of my life,” she said.

That show was, of course, Anyone Can Whistle.

Sondheim, accepting the award, pounced on the reference at once. “This is a double pleasure,” he said, “because, as most of you know, the show that Lee was referring to, her baptism in musical theatre, was Anyone Can Whistle — and I’m responsible partly for that running only six performances.”

It is a very Sondheim joke: dry and self-puncturing. Here he was, winning Best Score for Into the Woods, and he begins by bringing the room back to one of the most bruising failures of his early career. The path to the esteem in which he was held in the late ‘80s, we are reminded, did not run in a straight line.

Sondheim’s reflection feels especially apt in an acceptance speech for Into the Woods. It is, after all, a musical about the folly of simple progress toward your goal, about the more complex, more honest, more human paths that splinter away from the straighter, smoother road. Sondheim’s self-effacing joke about Anyone Can Whistle seems somehow to carry that same knowledge.

The rest of Sondheim’s speech returns to the pattern of his earlier acceptances, now even warmer and more crowded. He thanks the producers “for the courage to put on Into the Woods,” then the ensemble cast, then James Lapine — “not only for this show, but for Sunday in the Park with George.” And then, as ever, he turns to the people who make the score sound: Paul Gemignani, Jonathan Tunick, and Paul Ford, “the world’s most tireless rehearsal pianist and a walking memory bank of every song that has ever been written for any musical on any continent.”

It’s a touchingly extravagant tribute. Sondheim, surrounded by glitz and glamor, is thinking about rehearsal rooms, pit musicians, collaborators, the nightly shared labor of performance.

The Final Word

We end where we began, in 2008, with the speech that Mandy Patinkin delivered on Sondheim’s behalf.

He begins, characteristically, by giving the award away. Not first to composers, not to lyricists, not even to directors or performers, but to playwrights: Julius Epstein, Arthur Laurents, Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, George Furth, James Goldman, John Weidman, Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine. These, Sondheim wrote, were “the men who created the characters that sang the songs, the situations that gave rise to the songs and the criticism that improved the songs.”

There is then a joke, of course. “I would also share this award with Hal Prince,” Patinkin read, “but he has one already.”

And then it turns:

Lifetime achievement has a deadly sound to it. A ring of finality. A faint whiff of “you’ve outlived your usefulness.” And as you get older, you start to believe that. At least some writers do, including me.

This is such a direct admission — that the honor itself, from Sondheim’s perspective, carried something almost like a threat. To be celebrated for a lifetime’s work is also to be placed, however lovingly, at a kind of endpoint.

His answer to it is wonderfully Sondheimian: “Nevertheless, buoyed by your encouragement, with more lifetime, I — or rather we — promise you more achievement.”

“I — or rather we.” It’s the smallest of revisions, but an immensely revealing one. Across nearly four decades of Tony speeches, Sondheim kept turning the solitary award into a collective object. He shared it with orchestrators, conductors, musicians, actors, directors, producers, pianists, librettists, playwrights. He used the podium not to polish the myth of individual genius, but to complicate it.

This Sunday, as the Tony Awards unfold again at Radio City Music Hall, it is worth remembering Sondheim not simply as the composer with a mighty haul of trophies, but as the winner who refused, again and again, to stand alone.

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Yes, it is ludicrous. Let us begin there.

It is ludicrous to rank songs. It is ludicrous to pit “Losing My Mind” and “On the Steps of the Palace” against one another. It is ludicrous to ask whether “Sunday” has defeated “God, That’s Good!” as though the two songs have met on a pitch somewhere, boots studded and knees muddied. Art does not become greater by defeating rivals, by surviving a poll.

And yet. And yet…

Few things are more enjoyable than to take something obviously silly very seriously. That, really, is the spirit behind the World Cup of Sondheim we are currently running over on Instagram. The tournament is taking place there for two reasons: 1) it’s extremely easy to run large polls there, complete with live, trackable data; 2) it’s our largest single-platform voter base. 64 Sondheim numbers are “competing” in 16 groups of four. In each group, the two numbers receiving the most votes qualify for the knockout rounds. After that, the tournament becomes head-to-head: song against song, survivor against survivor, until a single champion emerges.

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This is not, needless to say, a scientific survey (though our sample size is large). It is not a definitive ranking. It is not an attempt to settle, once and for all, the matter of Sondheim’s “best” song, as if such a thing could be settled by percentage points.

But it is something. It is a way of listening in public. A way of seeing which songs our readers carry closest to them. A way of putting the famous beside the less famous, the canonical beside the comparatively niche. And if, along the way, this tournament prompts even a handful of people to listen to some of these songs for the 1st or 101st time, then the entire enterprise will have been worth it.

The first half of the group stage is now complete. Eight groups have voted. Thousands of votes have been cast in each group. Some favorites have cruised through; some heavy hitters have struggled. Some results have felt inevitable; others have been unexpectedly close, unexpectedly revealing.

So, now that our World Cup of Sondheim is underway, let’s break down the data so far. Here is what the first stage of the tournament seems to be telling us:

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It’s a real privilege to talk to you, especially in Pacific Overtures’ 50th anniversary year. Tell me a little about your path toward the show.

I have to thank Patricia Birch, our choreographer, for my being in this show. I had just assisted her on a Broadway show that she was going to be directing and choreographing, called Truckload. We had several previews, and that was it. The show closed. But she knew my work, and I had been working alongside her, and she called me on the phone one day and told me that they were casting for Pacific Overtures. She said, “You are part Asian, aren’t you?” And I said, “Oh, yes, of course.” And then I said, “Can you hang on just a minute? Somebody’s at the door.”

I had the book Shogun on the nightstand next to my bed, because I had purchased it to give her as an opening night present for Pacific Overtures. I had no idea that she was going to ask me to contact Joanna Merlin, the casting director, and put my hat in the ring. So I looked through Shogun, kept going through the pages, and kept seeing the name Omi, Omi, Omi. So I said, “Well, Pat, my grandmother was part Filipino, and her name was Omi.” She said, “Well, when we send you in, can we bill you as James Omi Dybas?” I said, “Sure, absolutely.”

So Joanna Merlin brought me in, and I decided I would sing “Feeling Good” from The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd, because the images to me were like a Japanese woodcut. “Birds flying high, you know how I feel.” I wore a sport jacket and turned the lapels up and inwards so that it looked like I had a mandarin collar. I sang the song, and they told me on the spot that I had the job. They had been casting for a little more than a year, and had gone all over the world looking for Asian actors to play all of the roles. I was the last person to be cast — they needed one more part. I chose the right song, and there I was.

I know you’ve been following our “Please Hello” essay series, and I’d love to know what your first memories of that number in particular are.

I remember getting the music for “Please Hello.” I wanted to play the Russian Admiral, because I thought it seemed the most fun — “Don’t touch the coat!” — and Pat said, “No, no, no, no, no. I know your work. You’ll be perfect as the French Admiral. I know you can move, and you move well, and the French Admiral never stops moving.”

And I have to tell you that Florence Klotz’s wonderful costume was terrific. However, it was heavy, with the sash and the medals and everything, so I had to jump around with all of this heaviness on me.

But we worked it out, and Pat knew what she was doing; she knew what I could do and what I would bring to it. And the other guys playing the Admirals were all so great: Alvin Ing, Ernest Harada, Patrick Kinser-Lau and Mark Hsu Syers. They were all just so wonderful in their roles — and perfectly cast, I might add.

We put the number together piecemeal. I think that each of us learned our parts, and would rehearse those parts separately, and then we just put it all together to see how it fit.

When you were cast, were you assigned all three of your named roles [French Admiral, Old Man, Councillor] at that time?

No. My contract just read as “cast.” I had no idea what I was going to be doing — and boy, do I have a story about that. There I was, playing the Second Councillor, and then we started to talk about “Please Hello.” I got that role, and I started learning it bit by bit by bit.

But as far as “Someone in a Tree” is concerned, here’s how it unfolded. We were out of town, and the song was originally performed by one of the co-stars, Soon-tek Oh. However, Soon-Tek was an actor more than he was a singer — and he also had a very fast change from the scene before, to get into the Old Man’s costume with the beard and the bald head and everything, and it just wasn’t happening.

So Hal Prince came up to me one day and said, “James, we’d like you to take a look at ‘Someone in a Tree,’ because we’re thinking of having someone else do it, and we’d like to hear what you would do with the song.”

I got the music, and the next thing I knew, I was up at Steve Sondheim’s hotel, which was very near the theatre. I walked into the room, and Steve was on the telephone. He said, “Just have a seat, Jim.” The top of the piano had all these coffee cups and cigarettes smashed out in ashtrays. It was like one of those old Hollywood movies, where you see so clearly: we’re putting on a show, you know?

I sat there with the music, and in comes Hal, in comes Hugh Wheeler, in comes Pat Birch, Ruth Mitchell… The whole team came in. I took the music, they sat on the sofa. I was a couple of feet away from them, and I started to sing the song. I got through it. Hal said, “Thank you very much, Jim. That’s what we wanted to hear. Thanks for coming.” They didn’t tell me if I was doing it or not.

And then it was a Saturday matinée — I’ll never forget this — and another cast member was walking up the street and said to me, “I hear you’re going to be singing ‘Someone in a Tree.’” I said, “What? How do you know? I don’t know that yet!” So I got to the theater, and Hal said, “We’d like you to do it. When do you think you can have it in?” I said, “Well, let me see. Today is Saturday… It’s 137 bars... How about Wednesday matinée?” He said, “Perfect. That’s exactly what we were thinking.”

So I had our pianist in the orchestra record the song for me, and I had it with me all the time on my tape recorder, going over and over it, so that by Wednesday matinée I would be sure to have the song down.

When Hal told me they wanted me to do it, I asked if they would please let Soon-tek know this. I went to Soon-tek’s dressing room and told him, “You’re such a wonderful actor. I hope that I can bring all of the wonderful acting beats that you brought to this song.” And I left it at that. I didn’t want there to be any hard feelings at all, and there weren’t. So the rest is history, and I was someone in a tree.

Sondheim would often cite “Someone in a Tree” as the number he was most proud of. As you look back on that time now, what does it mean to have helped create that number?

I just have to say, in retrospect, it was such a gift. I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been able to create that song.

I remember the recording session, and I remember Steve standing in the back as we were listening to the playback. We did it in one take. I said, “Are you sure? Can we do it again?” “No, we’ve got what we want.” I’m grateful for Jonathan Tunick’s beautiful orchestrations, and for what Thomas Z. Shepard did to produce the recording.

And who knew at the time that Steve would, at some point in his life, say that it was his favourite song that he’d ever written, and that it made him cry when he heard it? I’m just, again, so grateful — really grateful, grateful, grateful — for the gift of that song. I was just doing my job at the time; I had no idea it would turn into what it has become.

There’s a fantastic video of “Someone in a Tree” that many of our readers will have seen — Sondheim at the piano, with the four of you around it, singing. What are your memories of that experience?

Well, there we were in Steve’s townhouse on East 49th Street, with the critic from the New York Times. It was amazing, just amazing, to be there with him accompanying us. We had become such a close unit by that time, after rehearsing the song and then performing it. That show was called Camera Three. We recorded it not long after we opened. It was such a treat. And I love the fact that at the end, Steve has the sheet music on the piano with him, and when the song is over and we all sing our last notes, the camera pans to him and he looks up and gives a smile. Again, such a gift.

Sondheim always made himself available. He was always available, and he was open to whatever kind of questions we had about what he wanted from the lyrics and music. And he was a kind man — at least, that’s my experience with him. He was kind, and he was open and generous with his time, and with his answers to questions I might have.

Pacific Overtures has become so studied, and so celebrated. But at the time, it must have felt quite risky — so different from everything else on Broadway. Were you conscious at the time of just how daring it was?

Absolutely, and that’s what made it special. Being in rehearsal and listening to everybody else sing the other wonderful songs in this show, I didn’t ever think that it was not going to be a success. I just thought, this music is so extraordinary. And Sondheim knew that most Westerners had never seen Japanese theatre, anywhere. So I think they all knew that, and they were ready for anything.

I remember the day after we opened, Clive Barnes in the New York Times did not give it a good review. However, the Wall Street Journal did. And Hal called us all on stage at our half hour call and said, “I just want you all to know that the next best thing to out-and-out raves are mixed reviews, because people are curious. They want to see for themselves what it is.” So we had terrific audiences. There were a lot of people who loved it, and a lot of people who didn’t get it.

You’ve had the opportunity to see the show in various productions over the years. Are you ever able to watch it purely as an audience member, or do you always find yourself tracing your own route through the piece?

Both. I’m able to do both. I happened to be in Philadelphia when the Arden Theatre Company was doing a production of it. I went up to the box office and said, “Are there any tickets left? I was in the original cast of this on Broadway.” They gave me a comp, and sat me on the aisle.

When the fellow playing the Old Man in “Someone in a Tree” started the song, he walked up the aisle — though I’m sure he didn’t know that’s where I was sitting — and stood right next to my seat. The spotlight, as he started to sing, spilled over onto me sitting in my seat. It was just the most extraordinary thing.

My dear Gedde Watanabe — my boy in the tree — did a production in Los Angeles, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to get out to see, but in that production he played the Old Man. We had such a wonderful relationship, Gedde and I. He’s a terrific fellow. We’re still in touch.

I look at photographs of the production and, well, I’m the last man standing from the “Please Hello” group. There aren’t so many of us left. But the show speaks for itself. The brilliance of the piece speaks for itself.

At our closing performance at the Winter Garden Theatre, after I sang “Someone in a Tree” — my last physical action in the song is to put my arms up into the air and say, “Only cups of tea / And history / And someone in a tree.” And at that performance, I felt that history happening. I have goosebumps as I say it now. The applause started, I walked off stage, walked up to my dressing room on the third floor, and I could still hear the applause. It’s emblazoned in my mind — that extraordinary closing performance, a Sunday matinée.

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From the transformation of “Unworthy of Your Love” into an even more twisted romantic duet to the clever repurposing of “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” as a tool of seduction and jealousy, this analysis explores how context can be as powerful as content in shaping our understanding of a song’s emotional truth.

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Putting It Together: Rewritten Lyrics

“Invocation and Instructions to the Audience” — The Frogs

Original meaning: Please don’t be one of those audience members

PIT meaning: Please don’t be one of those audience members (but also, in case you haven’t noticed, this is a Sondheim show)

Putting It Together begins its litany of Sondheim canon with the opening number of The Frogs, “Invocation and Instructions to the Audience”. While the two shows have completely different plots, both utilize the song to break the fourth wall, explaining how to be a decent audience member. “Instructions” was no stranger to alternate lyrics; Sondheim had already written two different versions for contrasting presentations of The Frogs (water versus dry land, it’s a long story…). Like the original “Instructions”, a dig at disrespectful audience members (“Don’t go ‘Oh’/Each time you see an actor that you know”), the newer version alludes to the concept of PIT being a revue with changed songs while continuing to poke fun at audiences: “Don’t go ‘Oh’/Whenever there’s a song you know/And when you hear the verse, don’t whisper low/’They cut that out of town, I saw the show’/’I don’t recall the tempo being quite that slow’.”

Sondheim even swaps out a line mocking Aristophanes’ lewdness for one that seemingly elevates his own notoriety: “The author’s reputation isn’t based/On taste”, which pokes fun at the Greek playwright, is replaced with “The author has a reputation based/On taste”, an almost over-the-head reminder of the method to the musical’s madness.

“Putting It Together” — Sunday in the Park with George

Original meaning: The art industry is difficult to navigate, but never forget your vision

PIT meaning: The world of theater is ever-changing; any detail can be altered at a moment’s notice

This is the second of three revisions that Sondheim penned for his mammoth ode to art from Sunday in the Park With George. The original lyrics focus on “having to plead for the opportunity to do what you want to do…” in terms of the art business. An update for Barbra Streisand changed the theme to describe the difficulties of recording an album, and a later adaptation for the Academy Awards focused on making movies. Most importantly, for PIT, the show’s namesake was changed to detail the world of acting and performance. The first two verses of the song remain the same (“Bit by bit…ounce by ounce…”), not changing until the third verse (“Link by link/Making the connections” becomes “Note by note/working on projection”).

Each verse is sung by a different actor when they enter, with instrumental breaks in the score allowing for audience applause, especially highlighting the leading ladies of the three mainstage productions (Diana Rigg, Julie Andrews, and Carol Burnett). Whereas Sunday’s “Putting It Together” is mainly George’s rationale for his glibness as an artist, the purpose of PIT’s “Putting It Together” is to fill the audience in on all of the behind-the-scenes stuff that they never see: “Dealing with producers’ interference/Waiting for the author’s disappearance/Filling up the holes with animation/Covering up the flaws in the construction…” When the actors ultimately proclaim that “that is the state of the art,” it bookends the show’s fourth wall-breaking setup, and the musical’s plot, albeit a loose one, begins.

“Rich and Happy” — cut from Merrily We Roll Along

Original meaning: Oh, so money CAN buy you happiness

PIT meaning: There are only two groups of people in the world: the haves and the have-nots

A James Lapine-directed performance of Merrily led to Sondheim revisiting and revising this infamous flop; from 1985 onward, “Rich and Happy” was replaced with “That Frank” for the opening scene of Franklin Shepard’s Hollywood party. Two mainstage performances of the revised Merrily had been staged before the creation of PIT, so it’s worth noting that the song remains in its original, discarded form. The song’s original context, a kid’s idea of a Hollywood party, fits PIT’s very loose dramatic framework with their shared cocktail party setting; the rough plot is structured around the relationships of five characters during a dinner party as they go through bouts of self-reflection. The subtext of the song, while still about living life as a member of high society, no longer discusses movie producing (“When you see a movie that bad,/What on earth can you say?”), but twists words for characters to describe each other: “When you see a facelift that bad,/What on earth can you say?” Comments about the quality of Frank’s movie (“Terrible/Wasn’t it just terrible?”) become jabs at characters: “Terrible/Doesn’t she look terrible?” The Husband and The Wife, being the rich and happy ones, sing about how wonderful their life is (“Who says, ‘Lonely at the top’?/I say, ‘Let it never stop’”); The Younger Man and The Younger Woman can only gaze longingly at what their lives could be (“This must be what happy means”). Only the mysterious Observer sees the scene for what it truly is, addressing the audience directly: “These are the movers/These are the shapers/These are the people/Who fill the papers”.

“Unworthy of Your Love” — Assassins

Original meaning: When does a crush become an obsession?

PIT meaning: When does a relationship become an obsession?

The unorthodox ‘romantic ballad’ of “Unworthy of Your Love” is unassumingly dark and twisted, originally focusing on the obsessive and murderous natures of would-be presidential assassins John Hinckley, Jr. and Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme. Despite the anachronistic staging of the two as a “loving couple,” they are actually ‘singing’ to their hearts’ desires, Jodie Foster and Charles Manson, respectively. Hinckley and Fromme both claim to be “unworthy’ of their infatuations’ love, yet their firm beliefs that they are owed that love become the motivation for their assassination attempts:

HINCKLEY: I did it to prove to her my everlasting love … I did it so she’d pay attention… Because she wouldn’t take my phone calls…

FROMME: I did it to make them listen to Charlie… I did it so there’d be a trial, and Charlie would get to be a witness, and he’d be on TV, and he’d save the world!...

Sondheim turns this parody on its head by changing only one word; the names “Jodie” and “Charlie” are changed to “darling”, suddenly shifting the song into an actual romantic, yet still horrifying, duet. Framed as a moment of afterglow between The Younger Man and The Younger Woman, “Unworthy of Your Love” becomes a confession rite – admittance of past guilt paired with penance and forgiveness. This relationship is incredibly unhealthy; the couple no longer see themselves as equals working together for the sake of the relationship. Hardened by their life experiences, The Younger Man and the Younger Woman can only see themselves as worthless, yet they revere their partner as a God. In changing one word, Sondheim completely transforms the meaning of his twisted duet. In Assassins, it’s a disturbing anthem of devotion by unbalanced, obsessed individuals. Out of context, it can become a powerful declaration of affection & ardor between two lovers.

Changed Context

“Hello, Little Girl” — Into the Woods

One of the most sexually charged songs in Sondheim’s canon, “Hello Little Girl” is originally sung by The Wolf as he tries to distract Little Red Riding Hood from visiting her grandmother so he can eat them both. The already tense nature of the ‘predator-prey’ song becomes heightened within the context of PIT as the song morphs into one of seduction and carnality. In this context, The Husband attempts to get with The Younger Woman/The Maid merely as a way to satisfy his sexual appetite, aiming to add “something fresh on the palate” to his list of conquests, which presumably already includes his wife that very same day. The manipulation of the song remains the same, as The Husband eventually wears The Younger Woman down, bending to his will and insinuating that the two of them run off to a different room. The connotation of ‘little girl’ and ‘wolf’ in this context completely deviates from their fairy tale inspirations, instead changing into dark, sexual tones as the audience, like The Wife in her next number, are helpless to do anything other than watch.

“Everybody Ought To Have a Maid” — A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Sondheim didn’t think too highly of this witty ditty, considering it not much more than a list song, but still heavily rooted in plot. Funnily enough, when used in PIT, the song functions within the plot similarly to its use in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Unlike most songs in PIT, “Everybody Ought To Have a Maid” is special in that its context and usage change depending on the version of the revue. For the West End and Off-Broadway versions, the context of the song remains the same as its original, with the main male characters ogling over a maid they can’t seem to stop fantasizing over. In the Broadway version of PIT, the song is given to The Wife as she tries to seduce The Observer as a way of getting back at The Husband for “Hello Little Girl”. The words remain the same, but Sondheim has The Observer (working as a servant for the couple) sing with The Wife, turning it into a comedic, yet consensual tryst, which serves its purpose in making The Husband jealous. Technically, the Broadway version is slightly rewritten, changing the subject from “working girl” to “working boy”, but this rewrite doesn’t change the intention of the song at all. Given the frilly little apron The Observer is forced to wear, one could argue that the word change isn’t necessary to get the point across.

“Pretty Women” — Sweeney Todd

Within the context of Sweeney Todd, “Pretty Women” presents itself as one of Sondheim’s most chilling songs, masking the dramatic tension and situational irony as Sweeney distracts Judge Turpin as he attempts to murder him. Considering that there is no murder plot in PIT, the use of “Pretty Women” allows for its lyrics to be interpreted at complete face value. Some irony does still exist, however, as The Husband has just (unsuccessfully) attempted to seduce The Younger Woman, with The Younger Man completely unaware of this betrayal. Fear not, The Husband will indeed get his comeuppance heavily doled out on him later by his wife. Answering the question of “What do you want to get married for?” (posited from the previous “Have I Got a Girl For You”), The Younger Man and The Husband sing through their reasons of why they indeed would want to get, or have been, married. “Pretty Women” in this context then functions as a truer list song, with the virtues and characteristics of women extoled, sounding more like A Little Night Music’s “In Praise of Women” rather than a murder plot. Gone is a scene fraught with irony and suspense - the song becomes a tender duet between two characters who shared very little in common before a moment of bonding.

“Getting Married Today” — Company

Originally sung by bride-to-be Amy as she gets cold feet, Sondheim cleverly crafts a new perspective on this song in PIT by having The Wife (also known as Amy in some productions) sing the entire thing by herself, taking over the parts usually sung by Paul and a Choir Member. This solo performance becomes a retrospective look at getting married (for the first time; both versions of PIT call The Husband Charlie, meaning he is her second marriage), with The Wife frantically reliving her nervous breakdown. The fear and anxiety associated with the song remains, but the context shift lies in the change from present moment to flashback. Regardless of any version, having “Getting Married Today” as the last song of the ‘party games’ and ‘self-reflection’ sections allows for The Wife to become bigger and more frantic than the other solo songs, as the fear isn’t resolved like it is in Company - there is no actual wedding occurring; instead, the song becomes a reliving of past trauma. While Company resolves the issue with Amy willingly accepting her upcoming marriage, PIT can’t directly resolve the issue with the song stuck in the past. The Wife’s culmination of emotion triggers the fight-or-flight reflex she felt on her first wedding day, resulting in the panic attack we witness onstage. Once the pain has been rehashed, the memory settles down and dies away, allowing The Wife to feel confident and secure that her marriage to Charlie was the right choice for her all along.

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Pacific Overtures is, famously, a musical about an opening.

Opening can mean contact, can mean curiosity, can mean exchange. It can also mean coercion. And in Sondheim and Weidman’s show, the word is never innocent. A port is opened; a country is opened; a culture is opened to commerce, diplomacy, gunpowder, etiquette, and threat. The musical keeps worrying away at the same question: who gets to describe this process, and in whose language?

That question did not end at the Winter Garden Theatre.

The original Broadway production of Pacific Overtures opened on 11 January 1976 and closed on 27 June, after 13 previews and 193 performances. Before the end of that run, the production was videotaped at the Winter Garden. That recording later had its own afterlife: an American Broadway musical about Japan’s forced opening to the West crossed the Pacific and was broadcast on Japanese television with subtitles.

How should we categorize this? We’re not talking of a revival, nor of a new staging. What we’re considering here is, perhaps, something more intriguing: a kind of second opening. Let’s take a closer look.

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It’s so good to meet you. Before we dive into Merrily We Roll Along itself, I’d love to know about the project you’re in the midst of right now.

I’m working on a new play called The Zionists: A Family Storm. It’s by a playwright named S. Asher Gelman, and it’s about a family who’s torn apart after October 7th. We did it at an awesome theater in Miami Beach that fosters new work, called Miami New Drama, and we’re about to do another run of it at Barrington Stage in the Berkshires. It’s intense material, and an intense time, obviously. But as a Jewish-American actor, it feels like an appropriate project to be a part of.

This is my first time originating a part, and my first time being a part of a new play like this. It is so cool to feel like you’re part of something that’s living and breathing. It’s also a good reminder that theatre, at the end of the day, is meant to challenge us. When you’re doing a piece that evokes a strong audience reaction, it can be intense. We had a lot of heckling happening. We had a lot of people who were clearly very activated by the material and the things we were talking about.

Not to go too much into the specifics of the play, but it presents many viewpoints in a respectful way, and I would say everybody gets a chance to have their perspective heard — but some people just could not handle hearing the perspective that wasn’t theirs. And I think it’s a really good reminder that it’s so important for us to be able to sit in discomfort, for the benefit of being able to understand each other better.

If you see something on a screen, you have the option not to engage with it. If you’re scrolling through reels, you’re getting things that keep you calm and comfortable, and then if you get something that you don’t want to see, you just scroll past, you know?

But in a live performance, sometimes you’re going to see something that’s, like, the best production of Legally Blonde, and you’re like, “Holy shit, that was amazing.” And you’re so happy to have escaped your everyday. There’s a place for that. Actually, my partner is the producer of Schmigadoon! on Broadway. It’s just opened, and one of the things that has been really amazing about it is that it offers that escapism. It gives people the opportunity to escape their problems for a couple of hours, and that is a beautiful thing.

But if you go to see a play like Giant, which is dealing with difficult issues, you can’t just swipe it away — you’re there. You paid the money, you’re in the seat. So you can either start yelling at the actors about things you don’t agree with, or you can sit there and listen to the words and have your reaction, and then you’re forced to process it, whether you want to or not. I think that’s something that can only happen live. But there’s definitely room for both.

Merrily We Roll Along, though less politically charged, is certainly a show that forces us to confront ourselves in various ways. Before the Broadway production came your way, what kind of relationship did you have with the show?

My road to this production was kind of wild. I auditioned when it was going to New York Theatre Workshop, made the final callbacks, got really, really excited — and then didn’t get it. I was devastated. I actually went to opening night as a guest of someone else, so I saw the show on opening night on Broadway, and was so moved by it — but I thought, that’s amazing, and I’ll never be in it. I mean, who would ever leave?

And then, just by some fluke, almost two years to the day from auditioning the first time for the New York Theatre Workshop production, I got an email: hey, are you available to come in for Merrily? Brian Sears, who I love, wasn’t going to do the extension.

I went in for the audition. It went okay, but it was pretty brief, and I was kind of in my head. I was waiting for the elevator, and the casting director runs out and says, “Hey — you got it.” I was like, “What?” I left the studio and walked outside into Times Square, thinking, it’s our time… I really felt like I was in the right place in my life to appreciate it.

And at that audition, you knew that part of your job would be to cover Charley, right?

Exactly, yeah. Typically, when you build a cast, you have to build in coverage. The members of the ensemble, or smaller principal roles, might cover other principal roles — and you have to think about who’s going to be able to cover what. So part of the original audition for the New York Theatre Workshop was mostly Charley material: “Franklin Shepard, Inc.”, “Good Thing Going,” a couple of scenes. When Brian left, because he was in the ensemble and understudied Daniel, they had to hire a replacement specifically for that job.

My rehearsal process, because I came in as a replacement, was unique. They gave me three months to rehearse, which is kind of unheard of. Usually when you replace someone you rehearse for two, three weeks. But they really wanted me to be performance-ready with Charley.

I actually learned Charley first, then had a rehearsal with the rest of the cast as Charley, and then I started learning my ensemble track. Part of the reason for that was because Daniel and Jonathan had planned absences. They never called out — they never missed a show, which is unbelievable. But there were those planned absences. So when I was coming in, I needed to be ready to go on, because I was going to be going on.

Is there something uniquely intimidating, or thrilling maybe, about stepping into that role when you’ve already seen the show in all its glory as an audience member? And for an actor who is so well-known, too?

Well, first of all, Daniel is the most famous person I’ve ever been around, by far — in the sense that he could go anywhere in the world and people would know who he was. That’s a different level of fame. There was so much pressure. But I was pretty confident I was never going to go on without notice, because Daniel understood his responsibility. Daniel is the best — hardworking, humble, professional. He’s an actor who loves to act, he understood the responsibility of what that was, and so he showed up every day. So I was never really worried about unplanned dates, to be honest with you.

But I will say that having planned dates to go on almost stressed me out more — because I was so excited about it. It’s this thing of, holy shit, I’m going on on Broadway, starring in this hit production. There’s the excitement of that, and also the pressure of that. Then it’s like, oh my god, I’m understudying Harry Potter?

The first time I went on, 150 people I knew had flown out from California. And I was lying there the night before thinking, why did I pick this career? Why did I create such a stressful situation for myself — where I have to go sing “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” in front of 150 of my closest friends and family, and a Broadway audience who’s there to see the hit of the season?

It was a lot. But it was so great. Lindsay was so helpful for me, so grounding. And Jonathan… I could talk all day about Jonathan. An absolute role model, the greatest of all time. Getting to share that with them was a dream.

Thinking about Charley’s particular journey through the show, “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” comes quite early, relatively speaking. Does that help at all?

Two things. Personally, as someone who was nervous about going on, I appreciated it. I was like, let me just come in hot, get this out of the way, and then the only other thing I really have to worry about is “Opening Doors,” but that’s a while from now. So I actually appreciated that it came right away.

And I also think that, as an understudy, having that happen right at the beginning was a way of saying to the audience: “See? You guys are good. We’re all good. Trust me.” An audience can feel nervous about an understudy. So I think once you’ve done that, it allows people to settle in, and I certainly had a lot more fun throughout the rest of the show because of it.

Was there anything about Charley in particular that, beyond “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” surprised you or challenged you more than you’d expected?

“Opening Doors” is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my career. That’s harder than “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” because you’re just pulling these phrases out of thin air, and it’s so fast. I would sit there in front of the typewriter before the song started and take a huge breath, you know? Because you’re about to get on a freight train.

But I think the thing that surprised me the most about Charley was that, because we’re so used to hearing “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” we can think of him as this angry, jaded character. But he is so full of love. He loves Frank, and from the very beginning is such a cheerleader for him. Which is why it’s so heartbreaking that their relationship ends the way it does.

And even in “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” yes, I’m really mad — I’m pissed off, I’ve had enough. But it’s so much more than that. Charley’s reckoning with all of these complicated feelings about the person that he pretty much loves the most in the world, who he would lay down his life for — Frank says that, actually, about Charley, but I think it’s true for both of them — and who has betrayed him in that sort of way. It’s so challenging.

In my normal ensemble track, I was all the way stage left for “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” leaning against the proscenium, watching Dan sing it in the spotlight. We were all watching him. And then I had this weird moment when I was on as Charley, where I was like, oh my god, I’m in the spotlight. I was having an out-of-body experience where I was thinking, normally I’m sitting there watching this thing — but right now, I’m the thing. That was weird. That perspective shift was strange.

As an actor, you want to be part of bigger and smaller projects, a whole variety of things — and of course you can’t exactly determine what your career looks like. But I’m curious: now some time has passed since Merrily, do you find yourself craving that specific feeling of being inside a big, buzzy hit, with the Tonys and the proshot and all the things that come along with a production like that?

Yeah, definitely. It’s such an unstable, unpredictable thing, any life in the arts — and so to suddenly be in a moment where all of the things you always wanted to experience are happening at once — I’m in a show that’s a hit, we’re performing on the Tonys, they’re making a movie — it’s an amazing feeling, yeah, for sure.

The other thing that comes with that is a little bit of stability. You’re like: okay, my show’s not going to close next week, so I can financially plan. I know I’m going to have a job. So it’s the feeling of, oh my god, I’m in a hit, this is a dream come true — but also, oh my god, I’m going to have a paycheck.

Merrily was such a beautiful, beautiful gift to me — and to everyone involved, on stage and off. It was just a wonderful group of people who were so happy to be there. And the fact that I’m in a Sondheim proshot? Elementary school me, who used to sit in front of the computer and wait half an hour for the Lion King Tony Awards performance to load, just to be able to watch “Circle of Life” — that kid thinking, one day I’ll be a part of that. And now to have people watching me in Merrily on planes? That’s crazy.

I’m just so excited to be part of Sondheim’s legacy in any way, however small, and to have had that experience. I wish I’d been able to meet him while he was alive, but I felt like I did in some small way — by doing that show and saying those words. Because it feels like such a personal show to him. About the struggle of what a life in the arts is, about what growing up is, and maintaining friendships, and deciding what road you’re going to take. You just bend with it, and go with it, and keep perspective, and keep the people you love close. I love Merrily so much.

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Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Sondheim’s second produced Broadway score as both composer and lyricist, closed on Broadway after 12 previews and nine performances. By any conventional measure it was a disaster: savaged by the New York Times, deemed unable to reconcile its warring impulses (absurdist social satire on one side, genuine romantic musical on the other). But the show — and, crucially, the score — survived, and more than survived.

The title song in particular has become a cabaret standard, a concert perennial, a touchstone. Sung by the emotionally armored nurse Fay Apple, it is the least showy number in a musical full of theatrical pyrotechnics. It has outlived every scathing review.

Whistle Down the Wind (1996), meanwhile, emerged in the wake of overwhelming success. Lloyd Webber was by this time musical theatre’s supreme commercial force. But this new show, with lyrics by Jim Steinman (the man behind Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell and Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”), received mostly negative notices at its D.C. premiere, and had its scheduled Broadway opening canceled.

Reworked and redirected by Gale Edwards, Whistle Down the Wind opened in the West End at the Aldwych Theatre on 1 July 1998, ran for 1,044 performances, and became something of a cult classic. The title song was recorded for the concept album with Boyzone and others; its companion piece, “No Matter What,” became the UK’s biggest-selling single of 1998.

Two shows, then, that struggled to find their footing, but whose title songs slipped free of their circumstances and entered the wider musical theatre bloodstream.

What Whistling Means

Before the music, the metaphor.

In “Anyone Can Whistle,” whistling means ease — the easiest thing in the world, the thing any person can do without thought or effort. Fay is a woman who has organized herself entirely around competence. Dancing a tango, reading Greek, even dragon-slaying — easy, she says. And yet she cannot whistle. Why? Because of any physical incapacity? No. Whistling requires something she has never allowed herself: the freedom to be unguarded, to stop performing, to relinquish control and simply breathe. In short, to let go. Whistling, in Sondheim’s imagination, is a kind of emotional surrender — and surrender is precisely what Fay cannot do.

In “Whistle Down the Wind,” the metaphor is nearly the reverse. Here, whistling is not ease but signal — a call sent out into darkness, a cry for help, a promise of presence. The show is set in 1950s Louisiana, where the young girl Swallow discovers a fugitive man in her barn and, with her siblings, comes to believe he may be Jesus. The title song is essentially: I will not abandon you. To whistle down the wind is to throw your voice into danger, into the unknown, into the night — and to trust that someone is listening.

If Sondheim’s whistle is what Fay cannot produce, Lloyd Webber and Steinman’s whistle is what Swallow sends out and trusts will be received. One song is about the ache of being unable to let go; the other is about the comfort of being answered when you call.

Musical Simplicity

Both songs are strikingly simple.

Sondheim’s harmonic world is frequently — and thrillingly — a dense, chromatic, endlessly surprising place. We can’t always be certain where and when the next chord will land; suspensions are held past the point of comfort; modulations arrive sideways. But “Anyone Can Whistle” is harmonically smooth — tranquil, even. The melody moves in easy, symmetrical phrases. The accompaniment is spare. It is, on its face, a diatonic song — i.e., it uses only the notes of the key it’s in.

Almost. Because there is a moment when Sondheim musically contradicts his lyric, and it is exquisite. On the word “simple” — “it’s all so sim-ple” — the note ventures outside the key (which itself is that “simplest” of keys: C major). An accidental (F♯), modest but unmistakable, falls precisely on that first syllable of “simple.” The song presents itself as easy — but Sondheim proves, in that single inflection, that ease is never quite what it claims to be. The coloring is fleeting and subtle, merely a way of pressing into the G♮ that follows. But we feel it, the way we feel the catch in someone’s voice when they insist that everything is fine.

Later in the song, at the equivalent moment, Sondheim reaches slightly higher melodically. The major 7th of “it’s all (so simple)” becomes a full octave leap for “what’s hard (is simple)” — but that chromatic inflection on “sim-ple” remains (now as a G♯ pressing into the A that follows). Aside from a quick F♯ on “why can’t I,” these are the only two non-key notes in the whole song.

Lloyd Webber’s title song is purely diatonic — there is not a non-key note in it. The melody is open, memorable, built for large voices in large spaces. Where Sondheim’s song is an intimate, almost confessional piece, Fay alone with her inability, Lloyd Webber’s is musically declarative, anthemic, a kind of lullaby made large.

Lloyd Webber’s melody is entirely contained with in the span of an octave — meaning that the octave leap from “make it” to “clear” (in the line “make it clear and strong”) is articulating the song’s full melodic span, the edges of the known musical universe. And if you compare Sondheim’s “what’s hard is simple” to Lloyd Webber’s “make it clear and strong,” their contrasting approaches to simplicity shine through in miniature. An octave leap upward begins both phrases — but where Sondheim chromatically inflects, Lloyd Webber remains scrupulously, solidly undecorated. Sondheim underscores the irony of “what’s hard is simple”; Lloyd Webber is the musical embodiment of “clear and strong.”

In “Whistle Down the Wind,” such harmonic stability and untroubled diatonicism perhaps reinforce the song’s point: this is how faith sounds, or how it wants to sound — clear, singable, unwavering, without shadows. To introduce harmonic ambiguity would be to introduce doubt, and Lloyd Webber will not do that.

The musical contrast here, then, is not necessarily between sophistication and simplicity, but between two different uses of simplicity. Sondheim’s simplicity is undermined from within, its ease elusive. Lloyd Webber’s simplicity is sustained as a kind of shelter: stability offered precisely because everything outside the song is unstable.

Lyrical Simplicity

Sondheim’s lyric is masterfully concise. The vocabulary is meticulously plain — “easy,” “relax,” “let go,” “free” — but the emotional situation is anything but. That paradox lands in two lines we’ve already considered musically:

What’s hard is simple,
What’s natural comes hard.

Fay handles the things that ought to require effort without breaking stride, because they are tests of competence, and competence is her armor. The things that ought to require nothing defeat her completely. And at the end of the song, she makes a request:

Maybe you could show me
How to let go
Lower my guard
Learn to be free
Maybe if you whistle
Whistle for me

She cannot do it herself, so she asks someone else to model the thing she cannot access. The whole song turns inward, and inward again, even in that final plea. And Sondheim achieves all this with words not exceeding two syllables.

Steinman goes in precisely the opposite direction. He escalates. “Whistle down the wind” becomes “howl at the stars” becomes “send a flare up in the sky” becomes “burn a torch” becomes “build a bonfire.” Each image seems louder and brighter than the last; we move from private call to public beacon. There is nothing oblique about it: this is a lyric of transmission, not interiority. Its refusal to remain quiet is itself a kind of protection — and, of course, exactly the right mode for children in crisis who need to believe and trust that their voices will be heard.

Set these two songs side by side and the coincidence of their shared image starts to feel less incidental, and more revealing. Both composers reached for whistling as a symbol of something elemental — something beneath performance, beneath even language.

For Sondheim, it’s what remains when all of Fay’s armor has been stripped away: the one simple, human, undefended gesture she cannot make. For Lloyd Webber and Steinman, it is the first and purest act of faith — a sound thrown into darkness on the trust that darkness is not the end of the story.

One song asks: can you whistle for me? The other answers: I have always been right there. That the two songs don’t quite speak to each other is unsurprising. But it’s rather wonderful that, for a moment, they almost seem to.

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A few weeks ago, we looked at Company’s Joanne as she attempts to recruit Robert into her own carefully managed emotional life. A question remains hanging in the air: If Joanne is so committed to the performance of not-feeling, what do we make of the man she’s married to? Larry has watched Joanne’s performance for years, knows every move, still loves her deeply… And in most discussions of Company, he barely registers.

Larry is fond, gently comic, reliably present. He pays the bill. He goes to the john. He takes his wife home. But his brief monologue, delivered to Robert at the end of the nightclub scene, is certainly worthy of our attention.

In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he argued that all social interaction is essentially theatrical. We are all, Goffman suggested, performers managing the impressions we make on our audience. But he drew a crucial distinction between two kinds of performer. The sincere performer has genuinely become the character — they believe in the role they are playing. The cynical performer knows exactly what he or she is doing, and does it anyway, as a means to an end.

Joanne is Goffman’s cynical performer made flesh — perhaps the most self-aware character in the Sondheim canon. She catalogues her own evasions with precision, raises a glass to each one, and keeps going. The zingers. The theatrical drinking. The elaborate nihilism. She knows these are performances. And as Larry’s monologue reveals, she has been running the same scenes for years: packing her bags twice a year so he’ll beg her to stay. Goffman would recognize the routine immediately. It is protest behaviour, carefully staged for a permanent audience of one.

What Goffman’s framework doesn’t quite account for is what happens when the audience, refusing to be manipulated by the performance, stays nonetheless.

Larry’s monologue deserves a close reading.

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It’s so good to be speaking with Johanna so fresh in your mind. What was your relationship like with Sweeney Todd before the La Mirada production was on the horizon for you?

Sweeney Todd has actually been my dream show since I was in 6th or 7th grade. I’m a die-hard Sondheim fan. I’m a very math-science-brained person, and I love puzzles, so I always really gravitated towards his work. I think all of his shows are spectacular, but Sweeney was a huge favorite of mine. And Johanna, in particular, was always at the very top of my bucket list of roles. It’s a part that I’d practised in my room a million times. And then this production came along, and I couldn’t have dreamed of a cooler thing to be a part of, truly.

The theater announced that Sweeney was going to be part of their seasons in August of every year, and immediately I was like, I’ll be there with bells on, with everyone and their mother, at this audition. It was also announced that Jason Alexander would be directing it, and he is a staple of my childhood and adolescence. Seinfeld was such a huge show in my house, and Brandy’s Cinderella with Whitney Houston — he was peppered throughout my entire adolescence. So the chance to work with him was a dream.

It was interesting, though, because I had done two and a half years with Jagged Little Pill on the road, which is very much not Johanna — very belty, pop-alto world. My heart has always been with soprano, classical work, and the earliest parts of my career were very much based in that, but I had taken a huge detour into the more pop-contemporary world. So I was nervous about the audition, because the casting team knew me more as a belter. I didn’t know if they would even consider me for it.

We had five rounds of auditions and callbacks. I filmed my first tape at the beginning of August, the show was cast in November, and rehearsals started in January. It was wild.

What was your overall impression of Johanna going in? Particularly, as you say, having been in such a different vocal space beforehand, what was your sense of her as a character?

To me, Johanna is a huge symbol for women of that time period. There’s a major commentary on a woman’s role in society during this era, and what value is placed on women. Because you never really get the whole story from Johanna’s point of view — you get it from Sweeney’s. He has this entire backstory of Johanna being taken from him as a baby, but then there’s a huge chunk of time you don’t see. We don’t see her with the Judge as a child, we don’t know for sure how she was raised, and then we see her in this state of captivity.

So, in my mind, the interesting layers to play with are these: the Judge didn’t necessarily set out, when he saw her as a baby, to hold her captive. He wasn’t lusting after the baby. When he gets this child in his care, in my eyes, he’s parading her around the streets as this beautiful little specimen that completes the image he wants for his life: this upstanding family man with this smart, beautiful little daughter.

And I imagine her as having had all the best tutors. Other than the Judge, she’s probably the most educated person in their entire town, because she’s had access to knowledge. She might not be street smart or understand the ways of the world, but what she has are books. So there’s a level of intelligence to her, and you can hear it in “Green Finch” — in the differentiation between each bird. I did a four-page analysis on the different birds she mentions throughout “Green Finch,” what their lifestyles are like, where they live, how they flock, when they call out, when they sing and when they don’t, and why that ties into who she is. For her to be drawing from all of those different references, it comes from a place of a deep understanding of the world.

So, I imagined that growing up, Johanna had been treated as this little princess, this wonderful gift being paraded around, and she’s seen the world — and then, as men started to view her differently, the Judge’s walls went up to protect her, so that no one else could have what he has. In that isolation, it gives her an added layer of, what have I done wrong? What is now wrong with me, with my body, with who I am, that I don’t deserve to be out there anymore? I think she’s so deeply trying to do right by the Judge and say the right thing and follow his orders, because it comes from a place of: well, maybe if I’m being the right kind of daughter, maybe then I can walk the streets again and find some semblance of freedom.

And how about her and Anthony?

Yes… The age-old question of does she actually love him, or is it the idea of him? The Judge talks about how many men come to the door and stare at Johanna. There are lines about him having to shoo people off. But Anthony is the first person — and Jason made this moment so beautiful, he really highlighted it — who really sees her at the end of “Green Finch.” He sees her interaction with the birds, and he decides to buy her a bird. He’s so gentle with her.

That’s why the whole beginning of “Johanna” is marked piano, because he’s so gentle with this bird, and he’s not coming at her from a place of greed. He does talk about her beauty, but it’s not in such an intense way — it’s, I see you. I feel you. I’m bringing you something that you clearly want more than anything. There’s a level of gentleness she has not experienced from any man in her life, because her whole life has been in service of the image of the men around her. And this is the first man who walks up and says, this matters to you.

In our production, for the Act Two “Johanna” sequence, I was in a straitjacket on stage. The passage of time was shown through Johanna’s character and how the asylum changes her, because she’s in the asylum for nine months. When you’re watching the show, it’s sometimes hard to understand that passage of time, especially because normally Johanna is seen in a window again, or it’s done as a shadow play like in the original. But I was in a full-on straitjacket, twenty feet in the air, losing my mind.

I was reading in your Johanna article where someone said Johanna feels most at home in the asylum — which is such a fascinating take. I do think that, in a way, she finds power in the asylum. My take is a slightly darker one: I think it’s because, at this point, she literally has nothing left to lose. What else could people do to her? Fogg even says that he had to torture her the most, because she never stopped singing. Singing is an act of protest. It’s her way of fighting her circumstance. The whole point of what he’s trying to do is to beat the fight out of her — and she only starts to take her power back when she kills Fogg.

But then we segue into the scene in the barbershop, and this was one of my favorite things we did with the Anthony-Johanna journey in our production. She has just escaped nine months in an asylum, just killed someone, and is out on the streets she has been wanting to reach for so long. But she is not well. She is fundamentally broken. The Judge could be anywhere, and everyone works for the Judge, so there is no safety. She gets into this barbershop, which also isn’t safe, and then there’s this man who, yes, she knows vaguely, who says, “Great, you’re going to stay here.” And once again, she’s being caged. Once again, there is a man dictating how she is supposed to live her life. And she’s thinking, no, no…

I gave Johanna a nervous tick: her fingertips became her birds. She would have conversations with her birds. So the birds came back in that scene in the barbershop when he was singing.

Something Jason did that was really cool was, instead of having the policemen come in at the very end to see Toby and the destruction, it was Anthony and Johanna who ran down the stairs and through the door and found everyone. So in that final moment, I got to stand over the Judge’s body and see him dead for the first time. And that was the first moment in the entire show where I felt, I actually am free. There is finally no one who can hurt me.

So when everyone was feeling all the emotions of that ending, and Anthony is distraught for obvious reasons, and Toby is losing his mind at the meat grinder, I was in probably my greatest moment of joy in the entire show. Tears were streaming down my face, but it was the biggest spark of hope Johanna had had the whole show.

For readers who might not be familiar with Jason Alexander’s concept for this production, could you talk a little about what made it distinctive and how it informed your performance?

The whole show took place in Fogg’s Asylum. This was actually pitched in the original breakdown, and it’s why I was so excited about this production — I knew it would be a darker, more introspective, film noir-esque approach, which played into everything I love about the show. I thought, this could be a place where my Johanna can live.

Basically, the inmates of the asylum were putting on the story of Sweeney Todd. Everyone was an inmate. In the ten minutes before the show started, we were all on stage as our inmate personas, just improvising, doing some immersive work. Then Mrs. Lovett, played brilliantly by Lesli Margherita, was the nurse, and Beadle Bamford was the security guard of the asylum. When the steam whistle blew, we all scattered to our starting positions, and the nurse brought out this older gentleman who walked out and sat up high. You never saw his face — he was basically our master of ceremonies, and we all had very different reactions to him.

During “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” they changed up the solo lines, so Mrs. Lovett as the nurse actually started our show. She walked around with different costume pieces attached to different characters, casting the show as it went. We were doing the show for the man — the Overseer, his name was — in the chair above. The inmates transformed, and once we became our characters, as principals we stayed as our characters. And the ensemble would go back and forth between Londoners and inmates depending on what was happening.

Our inmate personas were just as deeply and fully realized as our Sweeney Todd tracks. Everyone had something that would cause them to get chosen for their role. For anyone who knew the show, it was always a very fun thing for them to sit and figure out, oh, because of that, I think that inmate is going to play that character.

All of our props and set pieces had to be things you would actually find in an asylum. So our meat pies weren’t actually meat pies — we had little burlap sacks tied up. Everything was appropriate to that world. The Sweeney killing chair was a very old-fashioned wheelchair. There was a platform, and for all the deaths they would roll out this giant coal bin, like they were going to be taken to the incinerator. It was a three-level set, and there were all these cubbies that would close with sheer curtains, so no one ever left the stage. We were all just living in our different cubes and cubbies. And as soon as you stepped out into the playing space, you would transform into your character.

You don’t find out who the Overseer is until the very end, after everything has happened. Spoiler alert: when Sweeney normally does his “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” we had a little movie magic moment where Will Swenson, who was our Sweeney, was in the chair as the Overseer, with a stitched-up slit neck. And Mrs. Lovett, as the nurse, was there beside him. At the very end, they both put their arms out, crossed them, fell backwards, and died. So: the Overseer in Jason’s vision was Sweeney. Sweeney hadn’t actually fully died — they had committed him to Fogg’s Asylum. And in the years since, he’s been trying to figure out where he went wrong. He uses the inmates to retell the story so that he can figure that out.

Other people believed — and this also makes a lot of sense — that Sweeney did die and was sent to hell, and that his version of purgatory was being committed to Fogg’s Asylum, forced to watch everything that happened again and again and again. That wasn’t the original concept, but it’s such an interesting reading.

Jason is one of the greatest directors I’ve ever worked with. He was so thoughtful, he had such a clear vision, but he also really trusted everyone in that space to show up and do the work. It was such a collaborative process.

Jason and Sondheim worked together multiple times and were very close friends, so Jason said, “This is my love letter to Steve.” He wanted every single thing Sondheim had written for this show to be there. So we added back in Johanna’s time in the trunk, when the Beggar Woman comes in and sings her lullaby. And the thing that’s so important about that is, if you track the music of Sweeney Todd, all of the songs from the present are reflections of songs we hear from the past. Everything Mrs. Lovett sings is a callback to something else, which is great commentary on her as a character: she’s trying to be someone she isn’t.

So to hear that lullaby at the end, and to hear that it’s the melody of “Poor Thing” as well as different bits of the Beggar Woman’s music — to hear that Mrs. Lovett chose to tell the story of Lucy’s rape and breakdown to the lullaby that Lucy used to sing to her daughter — it adds such a fascinating layer to Lovett and her choices throughout the whole journey. That has to be a melody she knew would appeal to Sweeney, because it’s something the woman he loved sang to his child. Adding it back in was so meaningful. Jason just really wanted to honor the material completely. He wanted it to be something Sondheim would have been proud of. I hope it was.

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Tharon Musser had designed the lighting for more than 150 Broadway productions across five decades. She had won three Tony Awards. She had helped to change the technical infrastructure of the American theatre. And yet lighting designers live with that particular kind of invisibility shared by so many great craftspeople: when their work is at its best, we can fail to notice it at all.

That invisibility is partly why Musser’s story is worth telling, and why all of us who admire Sondheim’s work have reason to know it. During the years when Sondheim and Hal Prince were remaking what a Broadway musical could be, Musser was one of their closest, most trusted visual partners. Today, we turn the spotlight toward her.

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Musser was born Kathleen Welland in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1925, before being adopted and renamed in 1929. There is a detail from Musser’s childhood that seems almost too neat for a woman who would spend her career manipulating light: her family couldn’t afford electricity. She grew up with candles and gaslights. We needn’t over-mythologize this — but perhaps it does suggest something about the quality of attention she would later bring to light.

At Yale Drama School, her path narrowed in an unexpected direction. As she recalled it: “Then I went on to Yale as a tech major, and I started thinking, Why am I getting a master of fine arts to pull ropes the rest of my life? Little by little I got into lighting there.” After receiving her MFA, she toured with the José Limón Dance Company, serving as lighting designer and stage manager. She also worked, briefly, as a television floor manager at CBS, before discovering she was being paid less than her male counterparts — “so adios TV,” as she later quipped. Musser moved to New York in 1950 and helped start Studio 7, an experimental theater, while also designing dance programmes at the 92nd Street Y and working for thirteen seasons with the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut.

Her Broadway debut arrived in 1956 in formidable company. She was a lighting designer with the original production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, directed by José Quintero, which opened on November 7, 1956, at the Helen Hayes Theatre. She recalled waiting anxiously to discover whether Brooks Atkinson’s review of the production was favorable: “Thank God, it was.”

A Broadway career of unusual breadth followed. By the late 1960s, Musser was among the most in-demand designers working. She was, in effect, the house designer for a particular kind of serious, ambitious Broadway — the Broadway that believed production design was dramaturgy, not decoration.

Which brings us to April 1971, and the production that defined the first chapter of Musser’s legacy.

Follies premiered on Broadway on April 4, 1971, at the Winter Garden Theatre. It was directed by Hal Prince and Michael Bennett, with choreography by Bennett, scenic design by Boris Aronson, costumes by Florence Klotz, and lighting by Tharon Musser. It’s a show that presents a lighting designer with an almost philosophical challenge: to make not only the stage but time visible, to hold past and present together in the same space, to let the boundaries between memory and reality dissolve and re-form at will.

Musser met that challenge, and won her first Tony Award for doing so. She had been consistently working on Broadway for almost twenty years by the time she designed Follies, and the production united her with two collaborators — Aronson and Klotz — whose work she prized. She later praised Aronson’s sets as “always great to light.” If the best theatrical design happens in conversation between disciplines, perhaps the best lighting finds what the set already knows.

The Aronson-Klotz-Musser team became the visual backbone of much of the Sondheim-Prince enterprise in the 1970s. Two years after Follies, all three returned for A Little Night Music (1973). Where Follies had demanded that light carry the weight of temporal dislocation and theatrical decay, Night Music required something subtler and more continuous: the quality of a Swedish midsummer evening, stretched and warm, in which all the characters’ misrecognitions and erotic misadventures feel simultaneously inevitable and absurd. The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill, reviewing the production, described the show as “bathed in a continuous mild erotic glow,” and went on to explicitly commend Musser’s lighting alongside Klotz’s costumes. Musser received a Tony nomination for the work.

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Then, in 1976, came Pacific Overtures, Sondheim and Weidman’s radical account of the Western opening of Japan, told through a stylized Kabuki-inflected lens. This was a production that called for ceremony, for historical spectacle, for visual austerity lit to suggest both distance and precision. The Winter Garden production ran for 193 performances; Musser received another Tony nomination. The original cast recording’s liner notes speak of Aronson, Klotz and Musser working their “customary magic” — a phrase that itself captures something true about this creative unit. It had become a team with a shared grammar.

It is worth pausing on what that grammar meant for Sondheim’s work specifically. These were not shows that wore their meaning lightly on the surface. They required an audience to look and feel simultaneously — to notice, for instance, that the showgirls in Follies appear as both their present and past selves, that the stage holds them at two ages at once, and that this formal device carries the show’s entire emotional argument. None of that works without a lighting designer who understands it and executes it. Musser understood it.

A 1973 note from Sondheim to Musser, which we can see thanks to @sondheimletters on Instagram, makes his respect for her work abundantly clear:

In 1975, a new Michael Bennett musical transferred from the Public Theater to Broadway. Musser’s work on A Chorus Line proved groundbreaking: she became the first lighting designer on Broadway to use a computer-controlled lighting console, replacing the manual “piano boards” that had previously required teams of electricians to operate by hand. The complexity and speed of the show’s cues made the older system inadequate.

Musser’s solution was the LS-8, the prototype computerized memory lighting board. The union electricians had legitimate concerns — computerized boards threatened jobs — and there was real resistance. Musser’s response was characteristically pragmatic: she ran a live demonstration proving that the cues she had designed simply could not be executed fast enough by hand. The argument was unanswerable, and the electricians, who respected her, came round.

In a 1975 interview she explained her thinking simply: “A show like this, with a lot of movement, needs more light faster. This is a dance setup rather than a Broadway musical or drama. You concentrate on movement and dynamics, not eyeballs.” Within a year, computerized lighting became the norm on Broadway.

Musser tended to be spare and elegant in her designs. She was caustic about excess: “I call it supermarket lighting. You see mush. You don’t see a point of view on that stage, just mush.” The lighting designer Marilyn Rennagel — who was Musser’s life partner, and had served as her assistant on Pacific Overtures — put the same principle another way: “She knew what every single lamp did and what it could do and when to use it. She taught me that there needs to be a thread. You really need to think of a concept. Then you work everything around that concept.”

That concept-first discipline is what aligned Musser so naturally with the Sondheim-Prince aesthetic. These were musicals built on ideas, on the formal challenge of how to tell a particular kind of story, and they required collaborators who operated at the same level of abstraction. Musser did. She read a show, and then she found the light it needed.

She told The New York Times, “Lighting design is learning how to see. I learn to hear the lights in music in my mind.” It is one of those statements that opens up, the more you think about it. Light as something heard. Music translated into illumination. The synesthesia of a fully unified production design. “Taught me how to see…” “Understand the light…”

Musser died on April 19, 2009, aged 84, in the company of Rennagel. Two nights later, Broadway theaters dimmed their lights to honor her. The lights went down, briefly, because she had spent her life making them — with precision, economy, and a rigorous sense of purpose — go up.

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Sweeney Todd ends without an epilogue for Johanna. Barber, baker, beggar, Beadle, and Judge are dead. Toby’s fate is little better. And somewhere offstage, Johanna and Anthony are running. What happens next is entirely ours to construct.

We asked the 10 performers who spoke to us for last Sunday’s Johanna feature what they imagined for her future. Their answers were as divergent, and as revealing, as you might expect...

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It’s so great to meet you. How much of a relationship had you had with Sweeney Todd before you were cast in the Chichester/West End revival?

Well, hilariously, I’d actually played Mrs. Lovett in an amateur production the year before. On my first day of rehearsals as Johanna — and this is something I’m deeply embarrassed about — I said to Imelda, “Hello, nice to meet you! I actually played Mrs. Lovett last year!”

I loved the show. I knew it inside out, as you do when you’ve done a show as a kid. The production company I did it with went so in-depth with everything, and all of us were just die-hard Sondheim fans. I absolutely loved the show, inside and out.

I was doing a play at the National Theatre when I was auditioning for Sweeney Todd, and I was desperate to do another musical — I hadn’t done one for a couple of years. I’d done Spring Awakening and then nothing. Throughout the audition process, I had a lot of support, because I was a bit of a Broadway belter and needed to work on some of the more soprano-focused stuff. When I finally got the job offer, I just couldn’t believe it. To be in a Sondheim, with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton, at 19. Like, what?

Johanna can so easily be dismissed or seen as a type. How did you go about unlocking her as a three-dimensional character?

It was interesting, actually. I saw that surface sweetness of Johanna, and in rehearsals I tried to play that — and sometimes they would stop me. “Stop it, you don’t need to do that. You can give the grit of her.” Because ultimately, she shows that in the end.

Honestly, I was so green when I did it. I think I had all of that natural innocence, and I look back and think: I barely had a clue what I was doing. And I think, actually, that was possibly why they wanted me for the job. I too saw her as quite sweet and innocent — and she is all of those things — but I don’t think I saw the full depth of her at the time. Maybe that was the point.

In such a starry production, and being so young at the time, what was the rehearsal room dynamic like from your perspective?

Michael and Imelda were incredible leaders. Absolutely. I’m actually doing a massive clear-out at the minute and I found their gifts the other day: they got everyone pie bowls, signed and everything. It’s such a good reminder that they were so kind and gentle, because they’re obviously both hugely experienced — and that’s something I’ve been super aware of recently as I’ve done more teaching. The best way to get the best out of people is to build them up.

There’s this very old-school idea that you must be broken into a million pieces in order to truly find yourself — it’s all a load of shit, actually. The best way for people to improve, in my experience — and I have about twenty years of that now — is to build them up. That is exactly what Michael and Imelda did. They were so supportive, so careful. I found it really hard at times; it was really out of my comfort zone. But they were nothing but supportive, and the rehearsal room was just magical.

We come to know the Beggar Woman, of course, as Lucy. And her surname is Barker… How long did it take before someone in the cast talked to you about the fact that you share her name?

It’s crazy! I already knew, of course, because of my teenage Mrs. Lovett era. And obviously everyone was like, “God, that’s so strange!” I remember when the cast was announced — it was the early days of social media, and shows were actually quite strict about what you were and weren’t allowed to post — people online were like: “What?!” It really is such a weird, brilliant coincidence.

I’d love to zoom in on the vocal side of things. Were there any particular challenges in singing Johanna that might not be immediately obvious audience members?

The main thing was: when you’re singing that high up, it’s so hard to make it sound genuine. I know that sounds very general, but the whole point of singing — and I teach singing now, so this is my most-used phrase with students — is that it’s an extension of your communication and your emotion. I say to all of them: stop singing. Stop doing singing, and just let it flow out of you — which sounds a bit hippie, but it actually does work.

The challenge with anything that pushes your voice to an extreme — especially when it doesn’t naturally sit there, which mine doesn’t — is that it’s so hard to really connect it to the emotion, because you’re thinking so technically all the time. There’s that moment just before the escape, when Johanna is with Anthony, and it’s just unbelievable. Every night I was saying a small prayer. I’d had the training, I’d practised and practised until I was blue in the face.

One of my proudest moments was when Sondheim came to see the show a second time, after some time had elapsed since his first visit, and he said: “I can really hear the difference in your voice. I can hear you’ve been working on this. And now you’ve built the muscle up, you can be a bit freer with it.” It is just practice, ultimately. Flexing those muscles will help you make it more real. It’s just hard to get the extremes of the voice to sound genuinely authentic.

Were you told in advance when Sondheim would be at the show, or did his visits come as a surprise?

We were told when he’d be coming to see the show — but there was one time we’d all been given the date, and then at warm-up that night they told us that he was not actually coming. He’d had an operation on his toe.

On the first night he came, I remember being in Michael’s dressing room afterwards, everyone chatting, pictures and all of that — and it was just such a great reminder of what it means to have been performing his music in an era when he was still alive. It’s like with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cats — we’re in a time when some of these greats are still alive, and it’s really special. To have had the opportunity not only to meet Sondheim but to actually sing one of his songs in front of him was quite unbelievable. I do think I understood the weight of that at the time — but in true Johanna form, maybe I didn’t fully realize what a gift that was.

Now that you’ve played such a wide range of roles, do you see any through-line in how you approach characters in seemingly very different contexts? Is being inside a Lloyd Webber, a Sondheim, or a Mamma Mia! actually as different as we might think?

The questions are always the same: how do I make this character real? How do I make this character effective as a cog in the machine of the story? What did the writer care about, and how do I honour that? And — is there anything that only I can bring that everybody else has missed? I’ve only really put that last one into practice in the last couple of years, but it’s about trusting your own instincts and being brave in how you act on them.

And actually, I would argue it’s even more important to get something like Mamma Mia! right. This could be the decider of whether someone ever walks back into a theatre. They might be there for the first time, potentially been dragged there against their will. If I had to choose one that was more important, I’d say Mamma Mia!. And with Cats — loads of people have a preconceived idea about it, an opinion, even if they’ve never seen it. If you’re one of those people, I think it’s actually for you, because the show is literally about looking beyond your preconceived ideas and seeing what else you find. I just love it all, more than ever. Theatre is just unbelievable.

I know there’s a limit to how much a performer can control their future — but if you imagine a career over the next few years that would really nourish you, what does the mix of musicals and straight plays look like? And might there be more Sondheim ahead for you?

I used to not think about this actively at all. It was always just, oh God, hopefully someone will give me a job again at some point. But now I know I actually have to go after the things I want. I have to decide, as much as I actually can — which isn’t a lot, but still.

It would be fab to come full circle and play Mrs. Lovett. Those sorts of roles are just the best. I love making people laugh. I kept trying to make Sophie in Mamma Mia! more of a comedy role — and I do think I succeeded many a night. But to make people laugh at the absurdity of life is the best feeling. The Wagatha Christie play I did was just unbelievable for that — people were in bits every night, laughing at the reality of something like that actually happening.

And the big, big musicals? I don’t think I’m afraid of those anymore. After doing Cats, I was like, oh no, I can do this. All those big roles, I’m ready. So: Mrs. Lovett, 2047!

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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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