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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to Broadway Nation. I'm David Armstrong, and after a brief summer break, I'm thrilled to be back with an all-new episode. My guest this week is author Richard Schoch, whose recent and much-acclaimed book is titled How Sondheim Can Change Your Life. Just when you thought there might be nothing left to say about the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, this book opens up a new treasure trove of fascinating analysis and insight. But before we begin, I need to thank all of the followers, listeners, and patrons of this podcast who have been so patient and supportive over the past few weeks while I took that break I mentioned to release my first book titled Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical.

This book was inspired by the course I teach at the University of Washington School of Drama, which of course also inspired this podcast. And it was published just last week, July 24, 2025, by Methuen Drama, which is an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. And so far, the response has been just amazing. The first review that came out was from David Benkoff, the Broadway maven, on his popular Substack newsletter Marquee, where he writes that Broadway Nation is a delightful and revealing look back at musical theater since its earliest days, and he calls the book a rare, essential addition to the Broadway bookshelf. Thank you, David. I'm especially pleased that the publishers have released the book both in hardcover and paperback simultaneously, and have priced the paperback at only $34.95.

You can find it everywhere books are sold, but I recommend that you go to the publisher's website, bloomsbury.com, where you'll receive an even further discount. If you enjoy this podcast, I know you'll love the book. Now let's talk about Sondheim. As I said, my guest today is Richard Schoch, who is Professor of Drama at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, and is the author of eight books, both popular and academic, ranging from musical theater to Shakespeare to Queen Victoria. Here we go. Richard Schoch, it's so great to have you today on Broadway Nation to talk about your recent book, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life.

[2:20] Richard Schoch: David, it's great to be with you and your listeners. Thank you so much for inviting me. You are indispensable to this show, considering who my audience is and the subject matter of it. So to not talk about this book would probably start an uprising.

[2:36] David Armstrong: That's very kind.

[2:37] Richard Schoch: Crime of the theater.

[2:39] David Armstrong: Exactly. So you've written a number of books on a range of theatrical subjects, especially in regards to Shakespeare and the history of the British theater. How did you get from there to Sondheim and the American musical theater?

[2:54] Richard Schoch: You know, I'm an academic. I'm a professor of drama at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, and before that at Queen Mary College at the University of London. You can tell from my voice that I'm American by birth, but I've been over here in the UK for 30 years. Wow. And as an academic, one of the luxuries of that job is that I have the joy of teaching, and I get paid for it, and I have the joy of researching and writing books, and I get paid for that, too. Publish or perish. The university wants you to write books. Of course, all my books, being professor of drama, are about the theater, and often I get ideas for books through the classroom. They kind of bubble up. About five years ago, I started teaching musical theater, sort of in addition to the Shakespeare classes that I teach.

So that kind of put me in the zone. Personally, I've just always had a love for musical theater. Since I was a kid, I just had never written on it. And I said, you know, it's time. There are only so many books left that I'm going to write. I better get around to writing that one on musical theater. And of course, Sondheim is revered in the United States, but I would say even more revered in the UK.

[4:02] David Armstrong: I'm not so sure.

[4:03] Richard Schoch: Really? Yeah. You know, Sondheim always divides audiences, which I take as evidence of genius. If everyone is just moderately pleased with your work, you haven't accomplished very much. But if you divide your audience, that means your work is actually taking a stance. It's putting itself out there. I think on the whole, Sondheim is actually less known over here in the UK. But ironically, the really, really hardcore Sondheim fans over here in the UK are super committed and super receptive to the works. I don't think it's an accident that, you know, Maria Friedman did the famed Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez turned a profit when the first Merrily 40 years ago ran for nine performances.

So Maria Friedman directed that on Broadway, but she directed it first in London a decade earlier at the Menier Chocolate Factory, which has a kind of line in revisionist Sondheim. Assassins has had some wonderful productions. I saw one last week at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but also a great production at the Chichester Festival in southwest England. And because of the distance from the US, an audience is more receptive to the rather troubling issues that a musical like Assassins raises. And then we have Jordan Fine's production of Into the Woods coming up at the Bridge Theatre in late 2025-2026. Again, on the one hand, Sondheim is not as generally popular and well known as in the US.

But for those who like Sondheim, audiences, I think, are much more receptive to what audiences in the US may find troubling or unsettling. So it's an interesting cultural difference. And of course, the revival of Company started in the UK as well.

[6:05] David Armstrong: Marianne Elliott's gender swap production of Company around 2020, around the time of COVID with Patti LuPone in both productions.

[6:12] Richard Schoch: Yeah. So it's interesting about how there's a certain groundswell of revisionist or innovative Sondheim that is starting over here in the UK and then going back to the US. Although the other way around is the National Theatre just finished up its production of Here We Are, Sondheim's last show, which of course started in New York at the Shed. You mentioned audiences there. And on the first page of your book, you talk about, and I quote, "the people who truly own a musical theatre song are neither those who write it nor those who perform it." You go on to say the ones really in charge are those who receive it. What exactly are you getting at there?

[7:05] Richard Schoch: So it's a slightly unnerving experience to hear one's words read back. You always think, well, which word would I change if I had to rewrite it? But I mean something that I think every theatre goer will intuitively understand. For a song to really work, it is not just to be beheld or appreciated or admired. You know, like a good joke, the song has to land with you. The song somehow has to leap over the footlights and you absorb that song. You take it up within yourself. You start to think, well, what is the relationship between me and this song? Which is why I talk about Oscar Hammerstein's, Sondheim's mentor, Hammerstein's song title, The Song Is You. But again, we all know this intuitively when we tap our toes or sigh or laugh or silently sing along, mouth the words.

These days, some not so silently. We are doing that very thing. We are merging ourselves and the song. And that is the true litmus test and in a way is the kind of ground or foundation of the book, which is that Sondheim's works aren't just brilliant, adventurous, complex, aesthetically intricate. They are all of that, but they are also deeply moving and they touch us. They affect us in a deep and lasting way. And we carry those songs with us in our hearts, in our bodies, in our minds throughout our lives. You know, equipment for better living. This is what I mean when I say the audience owns the song. If the audience is not moved in their interior by a song, then the song isn't really worth it.

[8:25] David Armstrong: And in that regard, you say the audience comes first and Sondheim had to learn that the hard way. Elaborate on that for us.

[8:32] Richard Schoch: Yes. This is my sense of part of the failure of Anyone Can Whistle, a 1964 show for which he did music and lyrics, the second show for which he did music and lyrics. It was a notorious flop. And even worse than Merrily, I think it ran six or eight performances. It was a very, very strange show. It's sort of a cult classic now, but it's sort of a satiric attack on nuclear weapons, bourgeois conformity, McCarthyite red baiting, who's on the inside, who's on the outside. Although these issues are very timely as we speak today, the show didn't work. And one of the New York critics wrote, "Anyone can whistle, but nobody can sing." Even though Angela Lansbury was one of the three leads in the show.

And what critics pointed out especially, and Angela Lansbury herself, was this number called Simple at the end of Act One. It was 15 minutes long, the longest piece of theatre music that Sondheim wrote until putting it together 20 years later. It ends with the lights going out on the stage, the lights coming up on the audience, and then the lights coming back up on the stage. And the cast is sitting in theatre seats as if they are the audience, and the audience are the actors. And the actors on the stage pretending to be an audience are fanning themselves with the program, and then they start clapping and laughing at the audience. And that's how it ends. And of course, you know, the idea is for us to think about the roles that we play in our life, how we perform in certain parts.

But it didn't go down well, because the impression it made was that, well, here's a Broadway show making fun of its audience. As Lansbury put it, you know, "Don't make asses," that was her word, "of your audience." Audiences will take a lot, but they don't want to be made fun of. This seems to me the lesson of Anyone Can Whistle. It wasn't the material. It was the way you shared that material with your audience. You have to respect your audience, take them seriously, don't make fun of them. And Sondheim himself said, yeah, we kind of crossed the line from smart to smartass. So don't be a smartass. Show some respect for your audience. And it seems to me that he learned that lesson pretty quickly. But I will die on the hill that musical theater, you might say all kinds of theater, are ultimately about the audience, not the material itself. The audience is not moved. The show is not working.

[11:03] David Armstrong: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I've produced a number of new musicals over the years, especially during my time at the Fifth Avenue Theater. And I would often take writers, especially young writers, and during previews, have them come down and sit on the side. If you sit way down on the side, far seats at the Fifth Avenue Theater, you just turn your head slightly, and you can see about 300 people. And I say, OK, you've seen the show. Now watch the audience. Watch your show. It was very, very instructive, sometimes not received well by the authors who didn't want to know what the audience was. It was simple lessons like, well, you can just tell they're bored because they start slumping in their chairs and they start fidgeting and looking at their phones and things like that. Well, that's where you have a problem in your show. Whatever you need to do, somehow you have to maintain their interest.

[12:08] Richard Schoch: Exactly, which is why previews or, you know, in the old days, the out-of-town tryouts were so important because you don't really know what you have. And Sondheim himself said this. You don't really know if a song is going to work until you have an audience to listen to it, which is why, you know, songs are rewritten right up until opening night. So, yeah, pay attention to your audience. They're in charge. The show isn't complete until the audience is there.

[12:13] David Armstrong: Exactly. You refer to Sondheim as our teacher. With each of the shows that you cover, you assign a lesson that he has for us in the subtitle for those chapters. For example, the subtitle to your first chapter on Gypsy is "How to Be Who You Are." Is this a self-help book? I guess that's my question. Do you view it that way? If it's a self-help book, that's just a hook. I love the book's title, but it is not mine. This is quite usual in trade or

[12:44] Richard Schoch: The author may or may not be responsible for the title and certainly not the cover. The author may have no say. My publishers are wonderful. We had a meeting of minds, but it was not the original title. The original title was Being Alive, which all Sondheim fans will recognize from Company. And then the subtitle was What Sondheim Can Teach You About Life. Being Alive, What Sondheim Can Teach You About Life. And at some point, the publisher said, we need a shorter title and we think Sondheim needs to be at the front of the title, not at the end of the title, which made sense. So they landed on How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, which we thought was a great title. And someone actually might be interested in picking that book up, right?

The purpose of the title is to get you to pick the book up. Absolutely. As is the cover, right? And then the job is done. And then you can engage with the deep content, if it's deep, of the book. But it is not a self-help book in substance. It's sort of a critical appreciation. Critical meaning in search of understanding. Critical not meaning negatives. It's a love letter to Sondheim. But the self-help is really just to pique your interest. And then I hope readers will think it's a thoughtful encounter, show by show, with most of Sondheim's works. But I do believe there are things Sondheim can teach us in all of his shows. Gypsy, about being who you are, that's Louise. She spends most of the show not being who she really is.

Or Sweeney Todd, being about revenge and injustice. A Little Night Music, about regret. Company, about fear of intimacy. These are issues, often very dark and troubling and painful and upsetting. That's Sondheim territory that we all know. These issues pertain to us throughout our lives. And Sondheim has a word, a thought and insight to share with us. So again, this is part of my belief that it's really how the shows affect the audience. Who other than Stephen Sondheim would give you Little Night Music, some beautiful, beautiful music, but really two and a half hours to think about bad choices that you've made, and when it's time to stop making them. Better living through Sondheim.

[14:51] Richard Schoch: So in order to do that, to go that deeply into the analysis of the shows that you do, you have to engage nearly as much with the work of Sondheim's collaborators as you do with Sondheim's music and lyrics. And I found that holistic approach very refreshing and very on point, because I always say the most important aspect of any show is the story, not the book, the story, because the story is the responsibility of all of the authors. When it works, it's because they've collaborated so brilliantly together to make that happen. And of course, Sondheim always gives such credit to his book writers.

[15:27] David Armstrong: Thank you so much for saying that. I appreciated that that approach had meaning for you as you read the book. But also what you say is very important and very true. Musical theatre is probably par excellence, the most collaborative kind of theatre that there is. So it's not just the music and the lyrics, it's the music and the lyrics and the character and the story and the design and the choreographer, as it's all put together. There was one review, I can't remember where it was, but there was one review that kind of wrapped my knuckles for not talking about the directors and the librettists. And I was thinking, I think I talk about them all the time.

[16:06] Richard Schoch: You do indeed. Michael Bennett, Hal Prince, they're all in there.

[16:10] Richard Schoch: Exactly. You know, with the exception of Sweeney Todd and probably Passion, the spark of the idea or the story didn't come from Sondheim. It came from one of his collaborators. I think lots of Sondheim fans will know the story of James Lapine and Sondheim, you know, sitting down in his apartment in 1982, not long after Merrily, when Sondheim was in a pretty, pretty low place. Lapine, a new collaborator. And Lapine was just a graphic artist by training, just showing him lots of images. And one of them happened to be Seurat's painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grange. I think Sondheim said, it looks like a stage set. And then maybe he, I can't remember that he or Lapine next said, ah, but there's someone missing, the painter.

And then that was it. That was the sort of genesis of the whole story. But in a way, you could never script that moment. That was a completely organic moment of people responding to an image, seeing what was there and what was not there. And out of that coming a scenario, a predicament, a situation that became Sunday in the Park with George. And Sondheim was a great procrastinator. But maybe this was all to the good, because we talked a few minutes earlier about shows developing, they need an audience, they need people to respond to it. So if you write, if you come in with all the songs done, they may not be the songs you need, or you may need to rewrite them. So sometimes procrastination, writing songs at the very last minute, including during previews, lesson number eight in Sunday was written during previews just a couple days before the opening.

And I think most Sondheim fans will know the story of Send Him the Clowns, his most well known song being written at the very last minute for Desiree, Glynnis Johns. And up until that time, everybody thought it was going to be written for Friedrich, the leading man, not for Desiree, but Sondheim waited. And it all worked out very well.

[18:06] David Armstrong: So what I'd love to do is touch at least briefly on each of the shows in each of the chapters in your book and just go a little more depth into that, if we can. And of course, let's go back to Gypsy. Don't go away. Richard and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[18:23] ♪ Musical number: "I Had a Dream" — performed by the cast of Gypsy ♪

[25:05] Richard Schoch: Again, your subtitle for Gypsy is How To Be Who You Are. Exactly. And you say that nowhere in Gypsy will you find a hint of sentimentality. Instead, we're going to find ugly truths. But those ugly truths eventually turn consoling. Talk a little bit about that. And, you know, what's, again, so amazing about Sondheim's work and that show in particular with his collaborators is that it's a musical comedy. It's a wildly entertaining musical comedy, but at the heart of it, it's about ugly truths. That's right. Sondheim himself said it was the last, and he also said one of the best, musicals in the Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition. So it feels like, and to some extent is, a golden age musical. It has everything you want.

Strong characters, pizzazz, numbers, showbiz, enthusiasm, showstoppers, one after another. And some wonderful choreography, Jerome Robbins' original choreography is often preserved in productions. But Sondheim also said it is a dark and not very likable story because the story is, and this is Sondheim, your mother doesn't love you. And that is the story of Gypsy. One of the things I tried to do in the Gypsy chapter, which was the first chapter I wrote, I didn't write them in chronological order, but I did start with Gypsy. And I thought, Madam Rose, I never call her Mama Rose because nobody in the show does. Madam Rose gets all the attention when people talk about Gypsy. And of course, it's the lead role. And I thought, but, you know, the character that is calling to me, the character that I want to know better and want to know how that character relates to me is Louise.

[25:17] David Armstrong: The title character.

[25:17] Richard Schoch: The title character. There you go. And I was particularly interested in her journey, because as we said a couple of minutes ago, she spends most of the show as somebody she's not, in a variety of disguises and costumes. She's a newsboy in the vaudeville act. She's a farm boy in the vaudeville act. I think she's a soldier at one point, and she's the rear end of a cow. And she is unloved, unwanted, and told she is untalented and just there because they need a body on the stage and somebody to stitch costume behind the scenes. And of course, all of that changes when June walks out at the end of Act One. And suddenly, Madam Rose is forced to say, I'm going to make Louise a star because there's nobody left.

That's the only other child that she has. And so and suddenly, this child who's essentially been traumatized by being made to feel outcast in her own family, is now told you're going to have the world on a plate. How is a person supposed to deal with that? You go from zero to hero, as it were, in one number, everything's coming up roses, which of course, in its very lyric tells you the song isn't about Louise, it's still always about Rose. So I thought, you know, the real story here is about Louise finding out who she is. And the beautiful irony is that Louise finds out who she is by becoming the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, because she has to strip away all these disguises and concealments and impostures that have been placed on her by Rose.

So for all the years of her life, she has to literally and metaphorically strip so that she can become who she is. The miracle of this is that she looks into the mirror in the dressing room of the Burlesque House of Wichita, Kansas, and says, and here we must credit librettist Arthur Lawrence, says, I'm a pretty girl, Mama. I'm pretty. And she is reborn in womanly triumph as Gypsy Rose Lee. And that is the most remarkable and consoling. So I deliberately use the word consoling. For me, Gypsy is the most emotionally, psychologically healthy person in that show. She triumphs. She finds out who she is and she lives her own truth. And because she is living her own truth, she's able to not abandon Rose.

Everybody in the show abandons Rose and everybody in Rose's history before the show has abandoned her, her husband's and her own mother. Her father doesn't have much love for her either. But Gypsy, because she has forged her own path, is strong enough and compassionate enough to stand by Rose in that wonderful last scene where she puts her mink stole around her, you know, and gives her the last word. And then you find that Rose has a change of heart as well. And I thought this is such an extraordinary and powerful narrative arc. Louise becoming the person that she is. I thought that's going to be the focus of my chapter because I think one way or another, we all feel at one time or another in our life that people are casting us in a role.

A lot of musical theatre fans are gay men, not all, but you know, LGBT community especially knows a lot about growing up with people casting you in a role that doesn't feel truthful or authentic for you because it's not. But that's just one example. There are many. But I thought this is something that not just some people, but a lot of people can relate to, which is how do we stop other people telling us who we are? And how can we find out for ourselves who we really are? Gypsy is a wonderful way of exploring that issue.

[25:22] David Armstrong: Absolutely. And you write, the truth is that we're not doomed to be prisoners of our own lives and that hurtful patterns can be disrupted.

[25:28] Richard Schoch: I hope so because I think that's what happens in Gypsy.

[25:27] David Armstrong: See, it happens in the final three minutes, but by God, it happens. In the course I teach at the University of Washington, I have my students watch "Gypsy" and write about it. And at the end of the quarter, I always ask them. They've had to watch 13 musicals and talk about many others. What was their favorite character? And the young women often choose Louise as their favorite character because, of course, they identify so strongly with that young woman in the story.

[25:54] Richard Schoch: That's so interesting to hear. I'm not surprised, but it's really gratifying to hear that, you know, "Gypsy" is 1959 and that character is still resonating with young people today. Well, lucky students to be taught by you.

[26:08] David Armstrong: And of course, that's in comparison to Rose, who, of course, is, in my mind, the most fascinating character possibly in the theatrical canon, musicals or plays included, at least one of the top ones for me. But I understand why they gravitate towards Louise in that regard.

[26:26] Richard Schoch: It is a titanic, epic role, as we are speaking today, currently being performed on Broadway by Audra McDonald.

[26:32] David Armstrong: Well, that was my next question. Did you have a chance to see that production and how did it either reinforce your feelings about the show or change them?

[26:40] Richard Schoch: I did not see it, though, of course, like many musical theater fans, I'm a huge admirer of Audra McDonald and it's a wonderful cast. So it's impossible for me to render an opinion on the production. But what I can say is that I think we are now in the era and have been for a little while of revisionist might be too strong a word, but strong interpretations of Sondheim so that when Audra plays it, Rose is an African-American woman with African-American children in the 1930s. And that becomes part of the story. It's Rose having a dream, not being able to fulfill it, but also not being able to fulfill it because of bigotry and oppression and white supremacy and Jim Crow laws and all that sort of thing.

That's not written into the story itself. But we talked earlier about theater being the most collaborative form of art. Well, that's part of the collaboration that makes productions fresh and innovative, relevant and exciting, just like the gender swap in the production of "Company" in recent years, which Sondheim himself approved. I think it is terrific that theater artists are empowering themselves to make these strong interpretive choices that can enrich and add poignancy and relevance and power to Sondheim's productions. And that makes me hopeful for the future that, you know, "Company" is more than 50 years old. It feels like it was written, says me, feels like it was written yesterday.

Right. But it gives me hope that Sondheim's works will not fade in the future, not come at the cost of new work, but won't fade because like Shakespeare, we will always find ways of making those works speak to us.

[28:33] David Armstrong: And here we come all the way back again to the audience. How are we finding ways to make old works say new things and an old work that can say a new thing for me is the very definition of a classic.

[28:48] Richard Schoch: Absolutely. And of course, Sondheim was famous for allowing people to reinterpret, restage, rethink his shows and sometimes was criticized about that even by Hal Prince who would feel like, why is he letting these people screw around with the show so much? But I think he loved the fact that the shows were being done and didn't want to stand in the way of them being done.

[29:11] David Armstrong: That's right. I mean, he would use the word organic, meaning alive. The theater is alive. It's not a museum artifact. Of course, I can well understand directors and designers think of intellectual property that must be respected. And whenever you do "Sweeney Todd," you know Hal Prince's name is going to be on the poster. OK, but there are also other sets of issues. We don't stage a revival to go backward in time. We stage a revival to go forward in time. Sondheim learned his lesson from, you know, the song is you. It has to be fresh for the audience. As you said, he just had this nonchalance is not the right word, but he had this wonderful openness or receptivity to people being inventive and trying new things with his work. So I have to say he was not a big fan of an all-male version of "Company" that was done in a workshop. I think that may have been a change too far. So even for Sondheim, there were limits.

[30:11] Richard Schoch: It will be interesting to see in the years ahead the view that Sondheim's estate will take on future production. It's probably too early to tell, but we will see. Estates are famously less willing for the work to be adapted in any way.

[30:26] David Armstrong: That's right. They are often more cautious and conservative than the artists themselves.

[30:31] Richard Schoch: Which is somewhat understandable because they feel an obligation to protect that work. They are custodians of the legacy. But even the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization allowed Daniel Fish's production of "Oklahoma."

[30:44] David Armstrong: They did indeed. Don't go away. Richard and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[31:22] ♪ Musical number ♪

[31:26] David Armstrong: Let's talk about that show that feels as fresh as today, "Company." So the lesson there is how to get close as you do in a couple of chapters. You vary your approach to these things, which I think is great. The book becomes not in any way repetitious because you sometimes are focusing on elements of the story, elements of the plot, and sometimes you focus more specifically on particular songs. "Sorry, Grateful" is one of those songs that you hone in on in the show and especially I don't know what the right word is, but the dichotomy between the words and the music in that song.

[32:00] Richard Schoch: That is the right word. Dichotomy is the right word. There's a contrast and opposition, whether it's between the words and the music and between the words themselves. Just to do kind of a quick recap on "Sorry, Grateful," it's sung by three of the husbands in the show. All the couples are trying to get Bobby to get married and he's saying, I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready. He's really not. He's very ambivalent about it. And he asks one of the husbands, Harry, are you ever sorry that you got married? And that's the kind of cue for this beautiful kind of soft rock ballad, "Sorry, Grateful." And I don't think I'm breaking any copyright rules by speaking some of the lyrics. And Harry sings, you're always sorry.

You're always grateful. You're always wondering what might have been. Then she walks in and still you're sorry. This wonderful moment of Sondheim not letting you off the hook. And then two other husbands join in one by one and then one of them leaves and the other leaves and it's just Harry. So it's one, two, three, three, two, one. That's the sort of the number of voices in the song. And the lyrics are all about the ambivalence of a relationship. So it's not that marriage. And for me, marriage is just a shorthand. Heterosexual marriage was the only kind in the 1970s. Sondheim and George Firth, two gay men in the Stonewall era, were not particularly interested in marriage as such back then. But Hal Prince said we have to make it about marriage.

But really, I think everybody gets that the show is about intimacy and commitment in whatever category you want to put that. So in marriage or any kind of committed relationship, you're going to feel ambivalent. We are going to feel ambivalent. There are days when we feel secure, unsupported and loved and cherished. And there are days when we feel trapped and stifled. There's no air and we have to we have to escape. So sometimes we're sorry and sometimes we are grateful. But what I love about the song, there are a couple of things I love about this song. And one is that it is not troubled. It's very gentle, a very easy song. Sounds in a way almost like a music parody of itself. It's so mellow.

Whereas Bobby's songs are always so frantic. Bobby is always troubled when he sings. He's in a state. But the husbands are not. But what they are singing is, yeah, sometimes you're sorry that you got married. It's true. But sometimes you're also grateful. And they hold that tension and they live with it. And they are not bothered by it. And this seems to be the message of the song. You are never in any relationship. And I think we all know this from life. We're never going to get rid of those contradictions, those dichotomies, to use your own word. That's fine. We don't have to spend any energy trying to get rid of them. What we have to do is withstand them and move through them, hold them in tension.

And that is how a relationship endures, because we understand the full reality of it. And Sondheim is such a genius. If you listen just to the lyrics of "Sorry, Grateful," you think, God, I never want to be in a relationship with anyone. Bobby's right. Stay at home. Play the field. But do not settle down. Because the lyrics don't paint such a great picture. The lyrics are about divided emotions. Sorry, grateful, regretful, happy. But the music is bridging the lyrics. Just where the lyrics divide, the score underneath is linking them.

[35:23] ♪ Musical number ♪

[36:05] Richard Schoch: One may not understand this in a technical, compositional way, but your ear knows it. Your ear hears that the music is drawing the lyrics together, not pushing them apart. The way that the lyrics sit on top of the music is itself the very sound or the very image of how a relationship should work. You accept that you're sorry. You accept that you're grateful. But you hold it all together. Now, for me, "Sorry, Grateful" is the masterpiece, the central song of "Company." It's not "Being Alive," and it's not "Ladies Who Lunch." It's "Sorry, Grateful." And I'm on a one-person mission for everybody to show more love for "Sorry, Grateful," because I think it's underrated.

[36:47] David Armstrong: I'll join you on that mission.

[36:48] Richard Schoch: Hurrah.

[36:51] David Armstrong: And you also write that Bobby's mistake is to suppose that feeling ambivalent about your marriage, as expressed in that song, is an error that needs to be corrected.

[37:02] Richard Schoch: Exactly. Bobby is ambivalent, and he thinks that's the problem. It's not. That's life. That's the way things are. So he's trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. And of course, by the end of the show, it's Joanne who teaches him. But he seems, right up until the end, awfully unwilling to learn anything.

[37:21] David Armstrong: And let's jump right to there. You say that mean girl Joanne turns out to be Bobby's best friend. Elaborate on that for us.

[37:29] Richard Schoch: Yeah, who would have thought? Ice Queen of the Insult Joanne, as created by the Ice Queen of the Insult, Elaine Stritch, would turn out to be the most loving character for Bobby in the show. The others treat him as kind of a therapy pet or a surrogate husband. But Joanne basically throws a chill, dry martini in his face and says, snap out of it. Wake up and face the reality of what's going on. It's not in a song. It's in this wonderful scene by George Firth in the nightclub at two in the morning. And they're both drunk. She says, you know, meet me tomorrow afternoon. We're going to hook up. When are we going to make it? And it's all a ploy. They're not. They're not going to have a hook up the next day.

[38:41] Richard Schoch: Not who will take care of me, which is who will love me, but who will I take care of? Who will I love? Who will I be close to? And Joanne, you know, wise as an owl, says, I'm going to paraphrase, I just heard a door open that's been closed for a long time. And again, all credit to George Firth, and she's right. You know, the door, you could call it the door of the heart, opens in that final scene, and Bobby acknowledges his desire to love, not to be loved, but to love. And then we get the song "Being Alive," but he doesn't have that moment until very, very late in the show. And only because Joanne stages her intervention of a sort in the nightclub. I love that you voice that in the book. I've directed Company three, maybe four times.

It was always my interpretation that Joanne is doing this on purpose. She's not serious about wanting to sleep with him. She is purposely provoking him into this moment. But, you know, of course, that's not in the script. It's in the subtext. You have to read that. You have to detect that in the show. And the key line for me is always when Larry comes back, she says, I just did somebody a big favor. I think David, you and I are of one mind on this scene. But I think that subtext is there because if we don't see Joanne's whole drift of conversation, her whole line of inquiry as a staged provocation, then we don't get Bobby being thrown off script. And then we don't earn Joanne's line, I just did somebody a big favor. She has stage managed, drunk as she is, has stage managed that entire conversation. I think it's the greatest act of love shown to Bobby is in that scene.

[40:33] David Armstrong: What I think is so remarkable, and I think that Sondheim needs to be given credit for this, even though it's not technically his work. Two moments that we've talked about, Louise, you know, standing in front of that mirror and saying, Mama, I'm a pretty girl. They did not make into a song. This particular moment is not a song. It's the turning point that drives us to the end of the show, which will lead to a song we'll talk about in a minute. But again, not a musicalized moment as being two key moments in these shows that you highlight for us.

[41:04] Richard Schoch: Yes, that's such an intriguing way to look at it. And David, I'm not surprised that you as director yourself, you've landed on something very important, which is that Sondheim knew when to write a song and when not to write a song. And knowing when not to write a song is probably in some ways even more important because he could write a song for any moment in a show. But knowing when music is not needed is a very significant understanding. And he had it. And of course, we know that before anybody wrote anything with these shows, there was weeks and months of conversation about these stories that Sondheim is participating in.

[41:36] David Armstrong: Right.

[41:37] Richard Schoch: It's impossible to know where the story elements came from. You know, it's all the ingredients of the soup are thrown into the pot, just to offer another metaphor. And there are all these conversations. And, you know, there are letters that survive. Somebody be in New York, somebody would first would be in L.A. and they'd be exchanging letters about Company and sort of, you know, plotting, at least provisionally, where the songs would fit and where they wouldn't fit. In quite a number of shows, Sondheim would, this is certainly true in Sunday, would, just as an aside, would take sort of first draft dialogue and then tweak it and turn it into a lyric. There are parts of song lyrics in Sunday that actually began with James Lapine writing dialogue. So always, again, back to this earlier point that you can't really divide up the show so neatly between librettist and composer, lyricist. Everybody's fingerprints are on everything.

[42:37] David Armstrong: Absolutely. You mentioned "Being Alive" a moment ago, and you offer some surprising assessments of that song, one of the most beloved songs, which was almost the title of your book. I think you have some controversial opinions about that.

[42:49] Richard Schoch: Well, good. I'm not afraid of controversy, and neither was Sondheim. If I could just go off on a little tangent, when I was writing the book, I knew that the risk was me being too much the professor, because I'm a professor. And God forbid lecturing the reader about this is the way to think about Sondheim, let me tell you. And I thought, that I cannot do. That is not the kind of book that I want to write. So I'm going to avoid that at all costs. At least I've tried to. But my goal has never been that the reader would agree with me on every last point. That has never been my goal. My goal was to have a conversation with the reader. Now, of course, slightly artificial, because I'm not there. But if they have the book in their hands, the reader generates a conversation by their own thoughts and their own responses, or what they post on social media, or for critics who write, that's all part of the conversation.

I thought my task here is not to somehow have the last word on Sondheim. That would be insane. My job is to initiate a conversation, a dialogue with the reader. So when readers disagree with something I say in the book, I'm always delighted because it means they have engaged with the material and mulled it over and thought about it and come to their own view, as audiences always will. Controversy in and of itself, I in fact welcome for a book.

[44:13] Richard Schoch: Now, "Being Alive," as a lot of your listeners will know, was not Sondheim's first choice for the last song in the show. It was not his second choice for the last song in the show. It was the third choice. And Sondheim himself always thought it was a bit of a fudge, a cop-out, in some ways the risk of it being too sentimental by the end. This abrupt 180-degree volt fast turn in Bobby was just too sudden and abrupt to be plausible, even for the most sympathetic audience members. He just thought it was, you know, kind of an emotional band-aid put on the end of the show. But Hal Prince was insistent that it should be "Being Alive." So in a way, I took my cue from Sondheim, which is this song, in some ways, is a little bit of an imposture at the end of the show.

But I do think that the interesting question raised by "Being Alive" is, is Bobby telling the truth? Or is he, as he has been doing all throughout the show, continuing to fool himself, right? Is he still kiddo? Is he still kidding himself? Is he playing a role?

[45:23] David Armstrong: Exactly, just as he did in Barcelona. Has he really stopped being an actor? Did he learn the lesson that Joanne taught him? And I think for anybody who is performing "Being Alive," certainly in the context of the production, but I would say even as a standalone in a concert or cabaret, anybody who's singing "Being Alive" has to decide whether Bobby truly has changed, hasn't changed, but just thinks he has. He's deluded. Hasn't changed, knows he hasn't changed, but is pretending for his friend's sake that he has changed. And I think this is such a wonderful interpretive gift for the performer to make up their mind about what their point of view, because you have to have a point of view, otherwise the song doesn't work, what their point of view is going to be in the performance of "Being Alive."

[46:13] Richard Schoch: And as I tell my students, do not make this song, because they say in the book, I tell them every year and they ignore me every year, but do not make "Being Alive" sound too comfortable because it is not an easy song. What Bobby's asking for is not sweet and loving and pleasant. He's asking for someone to crowd him, to force him in a way to sort of bludgeon and batter him with love. So if you listen to the lyrics, it's not sweetness and light. It's, you know, bring on the battalions.

[46:46] David Armstrong: And in the full performance with all the crazy married people around him, it's basically a therapy session.

[46:52] Richard Schoch: Exactly. And whether...

[46:54] David Armstrong: A tough love therapy session.

[46:56] Richard Schoch: A tough love therapy session. And whether it works or not, I think is open to debate. My beef with "Being Alive," if that's the right way to put it, is that the dramatic challenge of it, what's really happening to Bobby, I think is sometimes not considered as deeply as it might be, because "Being Alive" could be the ultimate moment of dishonesty in Company or could be the ultimate moment of emotional maturity. If Bobby has finally grown up, who can say?

[47:26] David Armstrong: My question would be, if he doesn't change, if he hasn't been changed by the song, why have we sat there for two and a half hours?

[47:34] Richard Schoch: As Hamlet says, the mirror held up to nature. I think that's why. So we've had two and a half hours to think about, through Bobby, our own reality. You know, Firth and Sondheim said they wanted Company to be a show where they laughed for two and a half hours and then went home and screamed. And I think that's the point. You can enjoy the show and then you realize, oh my God, that's me. Am I just as bad as Bobby? I better have a reckoning with myself. That, it seems, is the ultimate therapy moment of Company happens when you're at home screaming.

[48:11] David Armstrong: Fascinating. So let's talk now about Follies. You opened with advice to high school drama teachers.

[48:18] Richard Schoch: It's a little bit of a joke how I start the chapter on Follies. And I say that high school drama teachers should get their students to perform Follies and not Into the Woods.

[48:27] David Armstrong: And that's where we'll pick up the conversation on the next episode of Broadway Nation, when Richard Schoch returns with more fascinating insights from his recent book, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life.

[48:39] ♪ Musical number: "Being Alive" — performed by Richard Schoch ♪

[49:03] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as $7 a month, you can receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the interviews featured on this podcast. I often record twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited public episodes. And you also have the exclusive opportunity to hear additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host, Albert Evans. And all patrons will receive special on-air shout outs and acknowledgments of your vital support. To join, simply go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. That's all one word, broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. Or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Powell's Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[50:11] ♪ Musical number: "Being Alive" — performed by Richard Schoch ♪