Now It Begins, Now We Start

How Sondheim’s musicals begin, and what those openings ask of us

His children are falling from the sky.

That’s how Hilary Mantel begins Bring Up The Bodies, the second novel in her Wolf Hall trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. It’s my favorite first line.

The audacity of those words! The scale, the stakes of them. Breathtaking.

First lines do disproportionate work. Aristotle gives us the classical fra…