Nondheim: A Mixtape (Vol. 1)
Music for Sondheim-trained ears
Last year, we asked Sondheim Hub readers to suggest music not written by Stephen Sondheim that nevertheless, for one reason or another, seems Sondheimian. Your responses were fascinating: not a list of imitators, but a collage of songs and pieces of music that share something with Sondheim’s work — whether that’s wit, rigor, ambition, psychological sharpness, formal daring, or simply a familiar sonic thrill.
What follows is the first volume of Nondheim: an occasional series of playlists for those of us with Sondheim-trained and (crucially) curious ears. Below, we offer a guide to this first curated offering. (You can listen to the full playlist on Spotify here — or click each title below to find the relevant track on YouTube.) Please feel free to add your own suggestions for future Nondheim playlists in the comments below!
1. “The Whole World Changed” (The Connector)
→ music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Jason Robert Brown is one of the first names many reach for when asked to suggest a contemporary writer with Sondheimian craft instincts — and with good reason. Today’s playlist begins with his 2024 musical The Connector. As an opening number, “The Whole World Changed” does the kind of heavy lifting Sondheim and his collaborators excelled at: it establishes a publication, a lineage, a mythology, and a moral fault-line, all while moving at a propulsive lick. The territory the show inhabits — idealism surrendering to ambition, the gap between truth and performance — feels palpably Sondheimian too.
What looks at first to be remarkable, bizarre
Will soon reveal itself to be part of a pattern.
And we who stand outside identify the history
In the seemingly unprecedented thing.
2. “Hosing the Furniture” (The Jonathan Larson Project)
→ music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson
Jonathan Larson is often discussed in relation to Sondheim because of lineage, and sometimes too loosely. Here we can hear a more specific affinity. “Hosing the Furniture,” now more widely known thanks to The Jonathan Larson Project, comes from Larson’s 1989 revue Sitting on the Edge of the Future, a piece prompted by the 1939 World’s Fair and its visions of domestic modernity. You can hear Larson using an unmistakably Sondheimian device here: a comic surface that keeps cracking under pressure. The song starts as chirpy household bustle and gradually reveals panic, resentment, delusion, and violence, all through a woman’s spiralling interior monologue. Larson is brilliant at the fake-out: “I’m singing in the living room” (as opposed to the rain); “Raindrops are falling on my couch” (rather than my head). The lyric swerves, again and again, and that unstable moment-to-moment surprise is part of what makes the number feel so rich:
Tom likes cocktail
Onions
Tom nodded off again
Last night
Was it me?
Was it-
I get treated like dirt
Oh dirt, dirt
Here’s a squirt
What a glow
3. “You’re Nothing Without Me” (City of Angels)
→ music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel
The central conceit of City of Angels is gloriously Sondheimian: a 1940s noir murder mystery and the story of the Hollywood screenwriter adapting it unfold simultaneously on a split-stage, the fictional characters bleeding into the writer’s real world. “You’re Nothing Without Me” is a duet of mutual contempt between a writer and his fictional detective. It is a song about authorship, ego, dependence, and the humiliating fact that creator and creation need one another. Stone (the fictional hard-boiled detective) and Stine (the writer who invented him) debate mutual indispensability, and the lyric is as ingeniously funny as anything in the canon:
You are some gumshoe.
You just don’t think. Well
Get this, dumb gumshoe,
You come from my inkwell.
Is your mouth lonely
With one foot in there?
Stone, your brain only
Holds thoughts I put in there.
4. “Birch Trees” (Three Houses)
→ music and lyrics by Dave Malloy
Dave Malloy may be the major contemporary musical theatre writer who most consistently treats form itself as an adventure. Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, Ghost Quartet, Octet, Preludes: each show invents a different architecture for feeling and thought. Three Houses, which premiered at Signature Theatre in May 2024, is a pandemic parable about three people isolating in three different locations, each forced to face personal demons while sheltering from the world. “Birch Trees” traces the interior journey of Susan, who has retreated to her late grandmother’s home in Latvia, an inherited place full of emotional residue. Malloy builds his portrait with a beautiful observational specificity:
and the birds;
the air is latticed with birds of brilliant colors
cerulean crests
vermilion breasts
and butterflies flutter by
in bursts of ochre and amber
5. “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” (Only Murders in the Building, Season 3)
→ music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
Is this the best patter song of the century so far? I sincerely think it has a claim. In season 3 of Only Murders in the Building, the fictional murder mystery musical “Death Rattle Dazzle” is at the center of the intrigue. This song, from the in-show musical’s score, sees Steve Martin attempting to identify which of a set of infant triplets is guilty of matricide. It’s ludicrously fun, intricate, and inventive. Here are some lyrical highlights:
In this picaresque puzzle of the Pickwick pack
Will a lighthouse shed some light
On which kid gave ol’ mom a whack?
There’s an infant to indict
I’ll book this little crook tonight[…]
Like a forensic pediatrician, I’ll complete this inquisition
I will name the neonatal from the cradle that proved fatal
I will find the perpetrator who did murder to their mater
Or
Coochie-coochie-coo
What if none of it is true?
Has my inspection been too cursory
Should I look outside this nursery?
6. “The Light in the Piazza” (The Light in the Piazza)
→ music and lyrics by Adam Guettel
Adam Guettel’s relationship to Sondheim matters here — not in a reductive sense, but because Sondheim recognized something in Guettel’s writing. On his list of “Songs I Wish I’d Written (At Least in Part),” he included Guettel’s “The Riddle Song” from Floyd Collins. The Light in the Piazza, which opened on Broadway in 2005, is a show poised between musical and opera. The title number is essentially an aria, Clara’s surrender to a love she can’t fully articulate. Like the most moving Sondheim set-pieces, it earns its ecstasy as much through what it withholds as what it releases:
Tiny, sweet...
And then it grows
And then it fills the air!
Who knows what you’ll call it
I don’t care!
Out there somewhere
I have something I have never had...
As sad, as happy...
That’s all I see
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7. “Four Sea Interludes: IV. Storm” (Peter Grimes)
→ music by Benjamin Britten
Sondheim was clear that he was no indiscriminate opera devotee, but he was certainly an admirer of Benjamin Britten. “There’s always some acid and unexpectedness and drama,” he said in 2009, when asked what attracted him to Britten’s work. Peter Grimes, Britten’s 1945 opera about a misanthropic Suffolk fisherman hounded to self-destruction by his community, is among the great operatic works of the last century, and its Four Sea Interludes are orchestral portraits of both the sea and the characters’ inner worlds. The “Storm” interlude is a thrilling example of dramatic orchestral writing — and, to Sondheimian ears, unmistakably Sweeney Todd weather. An outsider condemned by society, the same musical “spiking” of beauty with acid…
8. “Talking Business”
→ Dessa
Dessa is a Minneapolis-based rapper, singer and writer, a member of the indie hip-hop collective Doomtree. “Talking Business,” released in 2021 as part of her IDES singles series, is a masterclass in lyrical economy, and it achieves that economy through a brilliant formal constraint: the lyric all but dispenses with verbs. The story arrives in shards, but with complete clarity. That is a deeply Sondheimian pleasure: economy that does not simplify, compression that intensifies. By withholding the usual grammatical machinery, Dessa forces every noun to work harder, as evidence, clue, and atmosphere. The result is a miniature crime film assembled from props, gestures, and traces:
Cash fare
Rideshare
Taxi to the airport
Gate 5
On-time
Baggage just a Jansport
Business-class so rum and cola
Guiltless sleep til Mexico then
On the beach like any other rich resorter’s doctor’s orders
9. “The Games I Play” (Falsettos)
→ music and lyrics by William Finn
There is an obvious Sondheim-world link here in James Lapine, who collaborated with Finn on the book of Falsettos. But the real interest of “The Games I Play” lies in how unmistakably William Finn sounds like himself while still offering pleasures a Sondheim-attuned listener will recognize. The show’s emotional world is one of brittle wit, sexual candor, fear, yearning, and family improvisation. Whizzer’s song catches all of that in miniature. It has the shape of a standard confessional number, but the harmony keeps shifting beneath him, and his self-description keeps changing too: swagger, defence, hurt, appetite, real attachment.
I bet on the horses
I die by degree
I am sure his divorce is
A tribute to me
Ask me if I love him
It depends on the day
These are the games I play
10. “Quiet” (Matilda)
→ music and lyrics by Tim Minchin
One of the admirable things about Tim Minchin’s writing for Matilda is that he refuses to write down to children, either musically or intellectually. “Quiet” gives a child character a full-scale interior event. Minchin has described the song in terms of sensory overload, imagining what it would feel like to have a mind as busy and bright as Matilda’s. The song begins with an extraordinary passage about color, light, and subjective experience that is almost Seurat-like… Here, those questions are refracted through a child’s mind, and no less philosophically alive for it:
Have you ever wondered
Well, I have
About how when I say, say, red
For example, there’s no way of knowing
If red means the same thing in your head
As red means in my head when someone says redAnd how if we are travelling at almost the speed of light
And we’re holding a light
That light would still travel away from us
At the full speed of light
Which seems right in a way
11. Piano Sonata No. 6 in A major, II. Allegretto
→ music by Sergei Prokofiev
Prokofiev’s Sixth Piano Sonata is the first of the so-called “War Sonatas”, and its second movement offers a Nondheim pleasure that is purely musical, but unmistakably theatrical in its gait. There’s a slightly mechanical insistence to this movement, offset by more lyrical or mysterious writing. That combination — propulsion, nervous wit, sudden shadows, chromatic veering — is part of why it recalls the musical language of Into the Woods. In both cases, we recognize something distinctively purposeful, quick-footed, and edged with irony.
12. “96,000” (In the Heights)
→ music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
“96,000” is one of those numbers whose very architecture is exhilarating: not just one fantasy, but a whole neighborhood’s worth of desires, each one colored by class, ambition, romance, frustration, or political feeling. Miranda’s wizardry here recalls the layered ambition of something like “A Weekend in the Country” or “God, That’s Good!”: a big set-piece in which wit, character, and contrapuntal momentum conspire to raise the stakes in ever more thrilling ways. Pick any slice of this lyrical pie and I’ll show you a miracle marvelous rare:
USNAVI:
It’s silly when we get into these crazy hypotheticals
You really want some bread? Then go ahead, create a set of goals
And cross ‘em off the list as you pursue ‘em
And with those ninety-six, I know precisely what I’m doin’VANESSA:
What you doin’?USNAVI:
What am I doin’? What am I doin’?
It takes most of that cash just to save my ass from financial ruin
Sonny can keep the coffee brewin’
I’ll spend a few on you
‘Cause the only room with a view is a room with you in it
13. “I’ll Be Here” (Ordinary Days)
→ music and lyrics by Adam Gwon
Ordinary Days, Adam Gwon’s sung-through chamber musical about four young New Yorkers whose lives briefly and consequentially intersect, premiered off-Broadway at Roundabout Theatre Company in 2009. In “I’ll Be Here,” Claire tells her story in the plainest possible terms: the meeting on an icy corner of Bleecker and Mercer, the first date, the terrible play, the marriage, the dog they hadn’t yet got — and then, the morning everything stopped. The song moves through that loss and all the way out the other side. What Gwon does with harmony throughout is characteristic of the best musical theatre craftsmanship. His progressions have the outward shape of a familiar ballad, but he keeps making small, beautifully judged moves we don’t quite anticipate, tiny tugs in one direction or another.
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to ruin your evening
By bringing up all of this stuff
You’re probably wondering why I even called you tonight
Well, today something happened that spooked me all right:
I saw this storm cloud of papers fall down from the sky
And I thought of that day, and I started to cry
When as sure as I breathe, I heard John clear as day
Saying, “Hey, you’re allowed to move on, it’s okay”
14. “Better” (A Class Act)
→ music and lyrics by Edward Kleban
A Class Act is built around the life and songs of Edward Kleban, with a book by Linda Kline and Lonny Price, and framed by friends gathering after Kleban’s memorial while Kleban himself shadows the action. Lonny Price’s presence alone makes the track irresistible as part of this playlist, but “Better” earns its place on its own terms. Kleban takes a simple premise and proves it again and again through variation. The lyrics are an utter delight, bursting with charm and logical play:
I’ve been good, I’ve been bad
Bad is better
Need’s okay
Having just had is better
I’ve been fire, I’ve been ice
I’ve been naughty, I’ve been nice
I’ve been naughty once or twice
Twice is better
15. “Yellow Field” (The Names We Gave Him)
→ music by Peter Foley, lyrics by Ellen McLaughlin
It feels right to end this first playlist here. Peter Foley was, in the fullest sense, a Sondheim mentee: he wrote to Sondheim as a teenager in Berkeley, received a detailed reply — hand-copied Xeroxes of unpublished scores arriving in large manila envelopes — and a friendship developed. Sondheim told him to go to Yale. He attended the opening of Sunday in the Park with George and had drinks with Sondheim afterwards. And as his widow Kate Chisholm described it in our interview last year, the connection went deeper than influence: Foley felt he had “an almost mystical connection to Sondheim’s music,” said he could turn a page of a Sondheim score and have already anticipated the next chord, “even if it was something quite unusual, which it often was.”
“Yellow Field” takes the form of a dying man’s act of remembrance — Henri, lying in a field with Virginie, willing himself to hold on to the moment of beauty before it passes. It is a fitting close for this collection, not only because of what it says about Foley’s gifts, but because of what it says about the art we cherish. A yellow field, a moment, a kiss, a song — held carefully, shared generously — “can always be like this.”
And I tell myself: remеmber this
I promise I’ll remember this
So I keep the memory of your kiss
And the sweetness of your taste
And the thrill of your caress
And your hair across your face
And the buttons of your dress
And the sound of the songbirds flowing
Like a river above us
And the smell of the warm earth growing
With the summer below us
And the shadow that I threw
On the beauty that was you
Listen to the full playlist on Spotify by clicking here.
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