What 96 People Taught Us About One Man
Last Sunday, we published 96 personal tributes to Stephen Sondheim on what would have been his 96th birthday. The responses came from costume designers and students, from actors who knew him personally and teenagers who found him on PBS, from a Grammy-nominated recording artist and a nine-year-old watching Bernadette Peters on a family desktop. Re-reading all of them together, certain patterns begin to surface, threads that become visible only when you step back and look at the whole canvas.
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The most striking pattern across all 96 tributes is a single word: permission.
Our 96 contributors each wrote independently, in different countries, across different generations and disciplines. And yet, in tribute after tribute, the same framing appeared. Kelvin Moon Loh: Sondheim “gives me permission to be obsessed.” Olivia Bloom: “permission to tell the truth.” Emily Phillips: “permission to embrace messiness.” Grace Yurchuk: he taught her not to “censor yourself.” Becca Jimenez found in Sunday in the Park with George the ability “to stop needing the validation or approval of others.” Joaquin Pedro Valdes described “Give us more to see” as offering “not a verdict — permission.”
This is worth us sitting with a moment. Sondheim is routinely described as demanding, rigorous, difficult. His work is intellectually complex in ways that can feel intimidating. And yet the dominant emotional experience reported by the people who work with it, who were shaped by it, is one of liberation. It turns out that precision and freedom aren’t opposites. Watching someone mean exactly what they say, and say it with complete conviction, tells you that you’re allowed to do the same.
Several contributors mentioned letters. Claybourne Elder has one framed on his wall: “I think you’ll be very proud of yourself. And if you’re not, you should be.” Christine Toy Johnson wrote to ask for sheet music she could have simply bought, and received the vocal selections in the company mail, “with completely non-judgmental generosity.” Nathan Loughstein, writing to request a dissertation interview, was told it would take Sondheim longer to write email answers than “to compose a new show” — so they should meet instead.
Kevin F. Story wrote a letter complaining about musical theatre’s sorry state, and received back “a lesson in hope.” Ethan Heard pitched a production concept for Sweeney Todd and got a detailed, several-paragraph rejection that is somehow one of the most generous things in this entire collection. Natalie Jasso, through the Instagram account @sondheimletters, has spent years collecting letters that other people received from him.