I Talk To Friends...
Reflecting on our January-March 2026 conversations
It is a continuing and considerable pleasure to talk to such a wide range of people for our weekly “A Conversation With…” interviews. The midpoint of this calendar year seems a good moment to reflect on our 2026 conversations so far: to tease out any threads that run between them, to ponder the perspectives that deserve more than a week’s lifespan.
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.”
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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.