Born On This Day- March 22nd... Musical Great Stephen Sondheim

In the spring of 1973, I saw A Little Night Music in the pre-Broadway tryout in Boston. In my late teens, 1000 miles from home, & sporting a huge red afro, I sat in the darkened, half-filled theatre & let the magic & enchantment wash over me. This was not my 1st Sondheim. I had of course, seen West Side Story & Gypsy. At 17 years old, I had talked my parents into letting me go to San Francisco all by myself to see the original cast (minus Dean Jones) of Company (I had more than just a little fun being footloose & 17 in San Francisco). I had worn out the Original Cast Album of Follies the same year.


5 years later, I would get to play Henrik in A Little Night Music, a fabulous role & the closest I ever came to playing an ingenue. The character plays the cello, & traditionally the orchestra’s cello plays the music while the actor mimes the playing. Because I can actually can play the cello, & I was able to do my own cello work, I thought this gave my performance a bit more authenticity, although I had to practice for hours & hours to be able to the play cello & sing at the same time.

Your host as Henrik in A Little Night Music 1977

I would go on to play Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum on 2 occasions, including a long run at Seattle Civic Light Opera. I did another long run, sold out, & extended, of Side By Side By Sondheim, a musical revue of collected songs from several produced & un-produced Sondheim musicals. Among the songs I was so lucky to perform in that show, was my favorite Sondheim tune- Anyone Can Whistle. I sang Not A Day Goes By From Merrily We Roll Along for auditi ons for a few years, until I decided that singing Sondheim for auditions was cliché & too gay, even for me.

I was aware early on, that Stephen Sondeim was gay, & it did give some solice when I was grappling with coming out. Sondheim: “if I had to live my life over again, I would have children. That’s the great mistake I made. It’s too late now. The idea of being a homosexual & raising children was one that was just not acceptable until, my goodness, I’d say the 1970s or 1980s. You want to live long enough to see your children grow up, they’re not puppies. The joy is not just to have them, but to watch them change & grow. So, yes, that is a great regret.” There is the work though; about 20 major stage shows, including Gypsy, Company, Sweeney Todd, Into The Woods, & some film work: the songs in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, & the music for Alain Resnais’s 1974 movie, Stavisky. “But as Bach proved to a great degree, you can have both. It would be nice to have both. But to have any outlet for creative energy is indeed a very good emotional substitute for not being able to put that energy into the raising of a family.”

Sondheim came out as gay only when he was 40, & he did not live with a partner until he was 61. He shared his life with writer- Peter Jones, until 1999,  living at the Turtle Bay house that has been Sondheim’s home & writing place since the early 1960s. Katharine Hepburn used to live next door & he has recounted how he was “up one night at about 3, pounding on the piano, writing The Ladies Who Lunch for Company, when I heard this banging on the door. There she was, in a babushka & no shoes, saying, ‘Young man, I cannot sleep with the noise you’re making’.”


There is common thought on Sondheim that although he can do LOVE in a theatre piece, he struggles when it enters his own life. Even people who follow him closely have assumed that he was single again. That’s why it came as a surprise in 2006 when he announced: “I have someone else now, his name is Jeff. We celebrated our 7th anniversary. Jeff is a great joy in my  life & once I had tasted the joys of living with someone, I wanted to live with someone else when it broke up.”




In March 2008, Sondheim & Frank Rich of the New York Times appeared in an interview/conversation in Portland, titled A Little Night Conversation with Stephen Sondheim. One of my favorite revelations from that evening was that we share a favorite non-Sondheim musical in She Loves Me. He was very funny & charming that evening. I was thrilled. During the Company/Follies era, Sondheim appeared on the cover of Time with the caption-  The Boy Wonder of the Theatre. The boy went on to an Academy Award, 8 Tony Awards (more than any other composer) including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards including Song Of The Year for Send In The Clowns in 1974, & a Pulitzer Prize. He turns 80 today. We both got old & we both got lucky. Oddly enough, he shares this birthday with the composer of that weird musical with the singing & dancing CATS. Go figure.