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 framework in his Poetics: a beginning stands alone, the first cause in a chain of causes, and that gives it a particular weight. Stephen King puts it plainly when he says an opening line should invite the reader in, should say: “Listen. Come in here.” It’s a threshold moment, a hand extended. We cross over. We enter.
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In prose fiction, something of a cult has developed around the great first line. That most of us can recite a handful of them by heart has become its own truth, near-universally acknowledged. We prize these first statements, salute these flags planted in literary soil. They make a claim on us. They are, perhaps, a kind of promise.
A theatrical first line, unlike its novel-opening cousin, does not—cannot—stand alone. It shares space with image, with sound, with gesture. With the houselights dimming. With a figure in silhouette. With the quality of silence before the first word is spoken. Theatre begins before language does, or alongside it, or sometimes in spite of it.
Musical theatre complicates the question further. “Firstness,” in a musical, is braided. First sound, first image, first downbeat, first word… These firsts might be bound tightly together, or held slack, each discernible on its own. And then we might ask: if there’s an overture, does that count as our opening? Or should we think of it as preamble, as preface, as blurb?
As we consider Sondheim’s first lines and opening gambits, let’s remain alive to these questions without drowning in them. There is much to explore in the first lines themselves. In particular, I’ve found it useful to think about these openings in terms of their relationship to us, the audience: how they position us, what they ask of us, what kind of door they open and how they open it.
The Direct Summons
Sometimes, Sondheim and his collaborators begin by looking us straight in the eye and saying: I’m going to tell you a story. Come closer. Listen.
Into the Woods gives us the purest version of this summons, and it does so with breathtaking economy. Three building blocks, arriving in rapid succession, tell us almost everything we need to know about the show. First: “Once upon a time—” The Narrator speaks the oldest words in storytelling, and we’re immediately inside the grammar of fairy tale. Second: music kicks in, sharp and steady, interrupting the Narrator. Third: Cinderella sings “I wish...”
In less than six seconds, Sondheim and Lapine tell us we’re in the realm of archetype (once upon a time), that this will be an urgent and propulsive tale (that driving, disruptive music), and that human desire will be at its heart (“I wish...”). It’s a thesis statement that doesn’t feel like one because it moves too fast to announce itself as such. But we are fluent in the language of the show before we realize we’re being taught how to speak it.
Sweeney Todd summons us too, and the hand it extends is cold. Before anyone sings, before anyone speaks, there’s that organ—a massive, Victorian, funeral-parlor shudder of sound, telling us we’re entering a space of ritual and death. Then a man steps forward and sings: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.” Not “Let me tell you” or “Have you heard”—attend. It’s a command, and that verb carries both its meanings: pay attention, and also, serve, wait upon, be present at. We’re witnesses at a dark ceremony.
This is the opening line Sondheim wrote about in most detail. Attend, he tells us (in Finishing the Hat), is just archaic enough to signal a period piece, while tale invites us to take what follows as a fable or folk ballad rather than kitchen-sink realism, opening us to the bizarrerie to come and foreshadowing the recurring Ballad refrains that punctuate the evening.
The opening Ballad gives us the entire story in miniature, before the plot proper begins. But perhaps we might best understand the opening of Sweeney Todd not just as a précis, but as a warning, a dare. Sondheim understands that the show isn’t a mystery in the whodunit sense; we need to know where we’re headed so we can watch, with horrible fascination, as we get there.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum offers the most overtly classical version of the direct summons, and it knows it. After a “proper” overture, Prologus addresses the audience directly, declaring: “Playgoers, I bid you welcome. The theatre is a temple, and we are here to worship the gods of comedy and tragedy. Tonight I am pleased to announce a comedy.” He’s channeling every Roman prologue ever written, every bit of metatheatrical framing from Plautus onward, and he’s not subtle about it.
He’s also winking. “Comedy Tonight” is as much about undercutting pretension as establishing it. Prologus invokes tradition only to dismiss it, promising low comedy and lots of it. What makes this a summons rather than mere exposition is the contractual clarity: I’m going to sell you an evening of farce, and I’m going to be obvious about the selling.
The Frogs is a queasier cousin of this same impulse. In the 1974 version, Dionysos and Xanthias enter already in character, peering out at us. Xanthias worries about how he ought to begin: “I suppose I should say something screamingly funny. Absurd? Dirty? I could say…” He toys with the options, even considers running “bare-ass,” before giving up and suggesting he simply pick up the baggage so they can “begin the play.” It’s a summons that can’t quite bring itself to summon, an opening about the problem of openings.
The 2004 rewrite makes that self-consciousness even plainer. Now two actors step in front of the curtain: “Good evening. The time is the present. The place… is ancient Greece.” When the second actor objects—“What the hell does that mean?”—the first shrugs it off as “just a theatrical convention.” The pair bicker about what story to tell, floating Oedipus as a crowd-pleaser. Where Forum’s Prologus is a confident huckster, closing the deal with “Comedy Tonight,” The Frogs stages the negotiation itself: the actors argue over how to address us, what frame of time and place to adopt, what kind of story this is going to be. It is still a direct summons, but a nervy, self-questioning one.
The Eavesdrop
Other Sondheim openings refuse to welcome us at all. We arrive, and life is already in progress. We’re simply there, catching up, piecing together where we are and who these people might be.
First, an eavesdrop disguised as a direct summons. Assassins opens with the Proprietor’s shooting-gallery pitch: “Hey, pal—feelin’ blue? / Don’t know what to do?” It certainly sounds direct, but the summons isn’t to us. We’re overhearing a recruitment speech, watching him invite the disaffected and forgotten onto a stage our gaze is already fixed on. That slippage—am I the “pal” being addressed?—is disconcerting, to say the least. And that sense of unease, of complicity even, is something we must reckon with for the rest of the show.
Company is the purest example of the eavesdrop strategy, and it’s formally radical. Robert’s apartment. An answering machine. One by one, his married friends leave him messages about his birthday party: Joanne’s bored sarcasm, Peter’s nervous chatter, April’s panicked misdial. We’re listening in on private communications, overhearing jokes we’re not part of, references we don’t yet understand. Who’s Judy? What party? Why does April sound like she’s having a breakdown? The show drops us into a social world mid-stream and expects us to swim.
That’s the eavesdrop contract: you’re not a guest, you’re a witness. And what Sondheim and Furth understand is that this creates a different kind of intimacy: not the storyteller’s “let me tell you,” but the voyeur’s “let me show you what it’s like to be inside this.” The answering machine is perfect because it’s literally a technology of absence and overhearing. And in a sense, that empty space becomes the subject of the entire show.
Saturday Night, Sondheim’s earliest, unproduced work, shows this impulse in simpler form. After a traditional overture, the curtain rises on a front porch in Flatbush, 1929. Three boys are hanging around, and one of them, Ted, is on the phone trying to pick up a girl he barely knows. “Hey, Dino - easy, will you?” says another boy. “She’s comin’ to the phone.” We’re in the middle of adolescent scheming; the show trusts us to catch up. The dialogue is vernacular, immediate, unstudied. Saturday Night’s opening has none of the formal innovation of Company, but it shares the same instinct: drop the audience into a moment already happening and let them figure out who these people are by watching them be themselves.
And what tends to follow a Saturday night? Why, Sunday, of course. Sunday… Is there a more revered, adored opening in the musical theatre canon? There is something so foundational, so elemental about it.
GEORGE
White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge: bring order to the whole.
Through design.
Composition.
Balance.
Light.
And harmony.
As an opening, it resists easy categorization. George, after staring at his pad, turns to the audience to say these words. But he’s not talking to us, is he? Or is he…? To describe this opening as a Company or Saturday Night-like eavesdrop feels reductive, insufficient. It’s more like the witnessing of genesis, of creation itself. George, perhaps, is not talking but thinking, and we just happen to be inside his head.
George’s words teach us that the show will be about process, about making. We eavesdrop insofar as we’re privy to something private—but that eavesdrop is disguised as, or elevated into, something closer to invocation.
A Note on Temporal Architecture
Before we turn to our final category, we should acknowledge two openings that don’t quite fit the framework we’re building, and yet remain essential to understanding the range of Sondheim’s approaches to theatrical beginnings.
The strategies we’re exploring all concern themselves with our relationship to the stage: how we’re invited in, whether we’re acknowledged, what position we occupy as witnesses. But as Merrily We Roll Along and Follies open, the work of their openings is not primarily to position us per se, but to establish and assert their distinctive temporal identities.
Merrily We Roll Along is the most radical example. As performed today, after an overture that’s bright and brassy and full of promise, the first thing we hear is: “Yesterday is done. / See the pretty countryside. / Merrily we roll along, / Roll along, / Bursting with dreams.” The lyric, in a famously backward-moving show, keeps insisting on forward motion.
“Yesterday is done” doesn’t mean what it should mean. In a forward-moving narrative, that line would be almost throwaway: leave the past behind, move on. But these words begin a coda, not a preface. We might even think of “Yesterday is done” as a kind of epitaph for the story we’ll soon see unfold. Merrily’s first line, like the rest of the show, is weighted by a future that is already past.
As Follies opens, we meet Sally Durant Plummer in the ruins of the Weissman Theatre. She is early, eager “to be first,” talking about not having seen New York or her friends for thirty years, remembering how glamorous it was to be a Weissman Girl. She cannot see the showgirls who circle her, but we can; the stage is holding past and present at once. The slow, strange underscoring swells and suddenly snaps into bright 1920s–30s pastiche (the show’s overture) as the other living guests arrive. From the very start, Follies opens a temporal crack; we know, or at least we sense, that we’re being asked to watch memory, fantasy, and the present moment share the same space.
The Ceremonial / Ritualistic
And then there are the Sondheim openings that feel like entering a sacred or primal space—openings that establish their world through atmosphere, through sound and ritual, before language can pin anything down.
A Little Night Music may be the purest expression of this impulse. The show begins with a quintet of voices vocalizing—no words, just “la la la”—and then recalling fragments of romantic encounters (a beach, a café, a tenor on a boat, and so on). It’s an opening that tells us Night Music will be about the rituals of courtship and compromise, about desire as something cyclical and inescapable. And it does this without anyone stepping forward to explain. We simply enter a ceremony already in progress.
Pacific Overtures opens with a different kind of ceremony altogether: the ritual of storytelling as cultural memory. Three Japanese musicians enter and take positions on a low platform. One plays briefly on the shamisen and sings. Then, from offstage, a bass drum and wooden blocks strike sharply. Blackout. When the lights return, a Reciter stands in prayer position and begins: “Nippon. The Floating Kingdom. An island empire which for centuries has lived in perfect peace, undisturbed by intruders from across the sea.”
That opening positions us as witnesses to a formal act of historical recitation, in what is the most explicitly ritualistic of all Sondheim’s openings. The Reciter is performing a rite of cultural transmission; we’re present at the ceremony.
Passion takes the ceremonial impulse in a startlingly different direction. Lights slowly illuminate Clara and Giorgio making love, the orchestra substituting for Clara’s voice as she reaches orgasm. Then stillness. Clara sings, “I’m so happy, / I’m afraid I’ll die / Here in your arms.” It’s intimate, carnal, private.
This is, of course, an eavesdrop of sorts, but there’s nothing casual about it. It’s too choreographed, too operatic. We’re witnessing something ritualistic: the act of physical love elevated to spectacle, made ceremonial through music and staging. The opening establishes that Passion will traffic in extremes—ecstasy and obsession, beauty and grotesquerie—and that it will make private intensity uncomfortably public.
A Coda
Here We Are, Sondheim’s final show, opens with an exclamation: “O, isn’t this wonderful?!” Marianne is greeting newly arrived friends at her apartment, thrilled by the gathering. It’s an eavesdrop that harks all the way back to Saturday Night: social life in progress, no frame, no guide. It is even preceded by that most traditional of musical openings: an overture. This overture, though, is taut, slight, a mere 30 seconds long.
David Ives’ opening line, with its theatrical emphasis, suggests something as performed as it is overheard. And isn’t that a beautifully apt first line for the final Sondheim collaboration? It points, like so much of his work, in two directions: to what we see, and to what we’re being asked to see through.
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This absolutely rocked. Thank you for writing it!
Another great breakdown of yours! Super insightful.