"Sondheim & Me" and Me

Having kept every issue of The Sondheim Review from its debut in 1994 to its demise 22 years later, I had already internalized every article that Paul Salsini references in his new book Sondheim & Me: Revealing a Musical Genius (Lacrescenta, CA: Bancroft Press, 2022). Still, I read the book straight through and enjoyed the 60+ pages of pictures.

What's new are a number of personal letters that Sondheim wrote to Salsini, fan, journalist, and founding editor of the Review.

In those letters, Sondheim comes across, first, as generous. In 1984, Salsini wrote Sondheim a fan letter with questions about Saturday Night, a musical project from 1955 that hadn't reached fruition because its producer died. In a short, courteous note, typed on the stationery he used throughout his adult life -- my own collection spans 1976 to 2010 -- Sondheim thanks Salsini for a help to his ego "at a time when ego-building is of the essence" (7). He enclosed a rare tape of the original cast of Saturday Night singing for potential backers. Writing by hand, he listed the actors.

What was going on in Sondheim's life that he needed "ego-building" when he wrote that note on April 26, 1984? To find out, Salsini checked with Sondheim's collaborator James Lapine. Writer/director Lapine and the composer were in the throes of previews for Sunday in the Park with George, a show that was in trouble [I cover Lapine's book about it, Putting it Together]. The second act collapsed where Sondheim had so far failed to provide crucial songs for the stars Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin, and audiences walked out during the show. Sondheim delivered the first song "Children and Art" on April 24 and the second song "Lesson #8" on April 26. While Lapine and the cast rehearsed with the new material, Sondheim took time to read and reply to Salsini, and to find the tape.

What also comes across in these numerous letters is Sondheim's dedication to truth. Salsini quotes at length a reader who found Sondheim's letters to the editor to be cranky and nit-picking. Sondheim himself responded that he want[ed] the record to be correct. He was especially concerned to give proper credit to others, even if it just meant spelling their names right.

By the way, Sondheim edited himself in interviews rather than settle for a blithe generalization or imprecise image. He even corrected Terry Gross on Fresh Air when she described his music as "discordant" -- which would mean the notes were mistakes -- instead of "dissonant." Another time, she misquoted him and he set the record straight:

GROSS: Now in your sidebar about Ira Gershwin in your book, you describe him as rhyming poison (laughter). So...

SONDHEIM: No, I don't describe him as rhyming poison. I describe - that is an aspect of his writing.

Sondheim's also funny, not just in his lyrics. Asked what he thinks about being called the savior of the American musical, he quipped, "I failed." When Salsini asked what Sondheim thought when he saw the first staged production of his early work Saturday Night, he wrote that the book was "charming" and the score "promising."

All these traits showed when Sondheim responded to a letter from me in 1976, then a junior in high school: he was generous with his time, precise, and funny. My letter told him that I wanted to be like him, a writer of scripts, lyrics, and music, just as he in school had aimed to be like Noel Coward. So said his mother, according to People magazine. "Dear Mr. Smoot," he wrote:

Don't believe everything you read in the magazines -- I never said i wanted to be Noel Coward, that's merely my mother's version (I suspect she wanted to be Noel Coward).

He gave great advice for an aspiring composer: skip courses in music appreciation and get straight into music theory. He recommended colleges that I now recognize to have been the alma maters of his famous friends. He finished with best wishes.

The second photo shows letters from Sondheim to me, 1976-2010, framed over my piano. The two in the middle arranged his meeting with me and friends following a performance of Side by Side by Sondheim at the Music Box Theatre. We had performed his songs that year. See a photo of that meeting, along with links to many, many articles about him and his work at my Stephen Sondheim page. The text of the final letter is included in a short blogpost, How Stephen Sondheim Responded When I Told Him His Impact on Me]