This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Alan Seales: Welcome back to The Theatre Podcast, intimate personal conversations with the theatre's biggest names. I'm your host, Alan Seales, and this episode is with Rick Pender, who is an award-winning theatre critic, and he's actually based out of Cincinnati, but this guy is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to everything Stephen Sondheim, and he has now published a book that is now a literal encyclopedia about Stephen Sondheim. It's a 600-plus page book that he pretty much wrote every word of that is about Stephen, his career, the songs, the shows, the people that were involved in his orbit. It is just an incredible book by an incredible man, and even in our limited conversation, in the little time we had for this episode, he painted Sondheim in such a different light in my mind.

I have this idea, as I'm sure many people do, about who Stephen Sondheim is, and just asking Rick about how Sondheim grew up, and what his dynamic was with his teachers, and why he teaches other people the way he does, and even got into modern-day Sondheim, as many people call Lin-Manuel Miranda, right? This conversation went to so many places that I did not expect. Rick, thank you for an amazing conversation, so incredible. Make sure to visit me online on Instagram and Twitter at theater underscore podcast. Visit me on the web at thetheaterpodcast.com. Please leave a rating, leave a review, follow along, hit that follow button, that subscribe button, wherever you are listening. And now, everybody, please enjoy this episode with Rick Pender.

[1:47] Alan Seales: My guest today has been an award-winning theater critic since 1986, and this former editor of the Sondheim Review has compiled a trove of detailed entries about nearly every subject Sondheim touched, bringing to life not only the man's well-known collaborators and projects, but also many names you may have glimpsed in programs or on cast albums, as well as gathering definitive descriptions of lesser-known works and influences that you'd have to search dozens and dozens of books to uncover. So now, here to discuss his book, The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia, available now. Rick Pender, welcome to The Theater Podcast.

[2:28] Rick Pender: Thank you so much, Alan. I'm glad to be here.

[2:32] Alan Seales: I am just floored by the amount of information that you have culled into one book. And originally, when this came across my desk, I was like, oh, this guy wrote a biography of Sondheim, but it's not. It's not a biography at all. It's a true encyclopedia. It starts with A for George Abbott, first director to stage a show for which Sondheim wrote both book and lyrics. It ends with Y for You Could Drive a Person Crazy, which is the final song he wrote for company. Why did you decide on an encyclopedia format and not just write an autobiography?

[3:17] Rick Pender: Well, that's because someone else asked me to do it, I guess is the simple answer. Because of my work on the magazine and a variety of other things related to Sondheim, I was approached by the publisher about doing this. They had approached one other person previously, a pretty well-known authority in the musical theater world, a man named Mark Horowitz, who was at the Library of Congress. And Mark is busy working on cataloging and organizing Oscar Hammerstein's correspondence. He said, I don't really have time to do this. Mark and I have had a lot of interactions. He wrote for the magazine frequently and was a fabulous resource to me. So he suggested they call me. And when they asked me initially, I thought they were asking me to coordinate the assembly of a lot of material about Sondheim.

I mean, that's sort of what an encyclopedia is. Usually, it has a lot of contributors. Well, no, no, they really only had me in mind. And they sent me a contract, which said that they expected 300,000 words from me. 300,000. That's a lot of words. That's like three or four novels.

[4:36] Rick Pender: Right. Which I've never written a novel. So I thought, wow. I picked myself up off the floor and said, well, I'll give it a try. And that's pretty much how I generated it. It took about 18 months altogether to put it all down. But I had a lot to draw upon from the episodes of the magazine that I had edited for 12 years. And the magazine had actually been around for 22 years. So I had four times 22 issues that I could rely upon. There are a lot of books about Sondheim, a very good biography, in fact. So I didn't really need to write a biography, although that biography was published in '98. And well, here he is 23 years later, still doing stuff. So that probably needs to be updated. And I do have a biographical entry in this that is pretty thorough, not nearly as comprehensive as Meryl Seacrest's biography of Sondheim, but it touches on all the major points.

So that's there. But there are 131 entries altogether in there. And I'm the author of most of them, except I have to give due credit again to Mark Horowitz. He had written 10 essays for the magazine called Biography of a Song, in which he dug way deep into some very well-known Sondheim numbers. And those pieces were extraordinarily long for a magazine, and really more than you'd want for an encyclopedia entry. But with Mark's permission, I was able to cut them down. They're now 1,500 to 2,000 words, which is still a lot. But Mark's original pieces were anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 words. It would have gotten me to 300,000 faster if I'd used the whole thing. But I didn't think that people would maybe have the patience to read that much.

[6:41] Alan Seales: Well, this is 636 pages, most of which you just said you wrote yourself, which I think is a feat unto itself for getting this done in 18 months, right? And I want to back up in your life, because I'm going to read the first paragraph of the book's intro. It says, you write, when I set out to write this introduction, I thought I might mention my early attraction to the lyrics of West Side Story, the first LP soundtrack I purchased as a teenager. I could have described seeing the motion pictures of Gypsy or Forum, but it wasn't until I saw stage productions of Company and Follies that I really began to take notice of Stephen Sondheim. I was swept away by A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, charmed by Into the Woods.

And by the early 1990s, I was wholeheartedly enthusiastic about anything he created. So let's step back to being a teenager. What kind of teenager were you before you ran across West Side Story? And then what was it about West Side Story that just clicked for you?

[7:41] Rick Pender: Well, I guess I would say I was kind of a theater geek. I mean, I was on stage in high school, not because I was a talented performer. I always say it's because I was a boy who was willing to go on stage. But I did do some of that, and I loved theater. I had a wonderful English teacher who did all the theater productions, and she inspired me to have a love of theater in general. I remember seeing the movie of West Side Story and being deeply moved by it, and decided that it was time for me to start buying an LP or two. And that, honestly, was the first LP I bought was the soundtrack to West Side Story. And I listened to that, I think obsessively would be the right word. And what I was particularly drawn to, I mean, Leonard Bernstein's score is, of course, fabulous music, but it was the words to some of these songs that something's coming.

To me, it was just, it was this amazing anticipation that something, some amazing thing was about to happen. And I sort of, I don't know, I resonated with that. And then, of course, I laughed out loud to the lyrics to something like G Officer Krupke. And so I was caught up in all that, but I didn't know who Stephen Sondheim was at that point. As you have read there, I did see the movie of Gypsy, which I thought was pretty good and had great lyrics in it. And Forum, the movie was kind of tedious, but it was there, there was some great music in it. But it was really in the 70s when Sondheim's most, I guess I'll say most respected shows were produced through that decade that I really began to capture him.

I will tell you that the thing that happened in the late 80s that really kind of pushed me over the brink was that I'd had some surgery, and I knew I was going to be laid up for a while. I went to the library and got an armful of CDs, including one called A Collector's Sondheim. It was three discs with, you know, so about three hours of music. It had been released in 1985. And it had on it music that although now I was beginning to put together that this guy had done all these different things, but there was stuff on there that I'd never heard of before. There was this thing called Evening Primrose, which had some really sweet music in it. So there was some instrumental music that he'd written for a movie called Stavisky.

And it was just sort of fascinating to see the length and breadth of his work. And I listened to that the whole, I was laid up for about a month with the surgery. And so I listened to that over and over again. And that was when I really began to think, this guy is an amazing lyric writer. I mean, his music, of course, is also, you know, sort of unbelievable. But for me, it was really the words. So I guess the other thing I should add is I, after I was an English major in college, I went on and got an MA and a PhD in English literature. So words are the things that particularly draw me into much of this. Now, Sondheim is amazing to work with because, you know, he composes the music and writes the lyrics. And so they are especially integrated in meaningful ways with one another. But it was the words that first drew me in.

[11:22] Rick Pender: I was going to ask what you went to school for, because personally when I listen to music, I'm immediately attracted to the beat and to the melody, the instrumental side of it, and then if I like that, I go back and I start dissecting the lyrics. It's like I'm listening to the lyrics and I don't even hear them, because I'm picturing how my mind works, is I picture all the instruments individually as they're playing this music, and then the lyrics are kind of secondary. So it's really cool to me that, especially as a teenager, you start getting drawn into these lyrics, and the things that you like over the years end up all being written by the same person, without you realizing it at the time.

I guess the other thing I would say is that by virtue of having all that education in literature, the whole concept of storytelling is very important to me. And so when I see a show, you know, I want to know what it's about, who the characters are and what they're doing, and that Sondheim very much writes music according to that concept, because he doesn't like sit down and write a bunch of songs and then they put them together and make a show. He really goes at it the other way. He works with a book writer, the story is put together, then they begin to identify places where music could be used to enlighten us about a character, or motivate some action, or set a scene, or whatever. But he writes the music to fit that, and to fit the character, and to expand on the character. So his music is very highly integrated into the storytelling, and I think that's part of what captured me.

[13:09] Alan Seales: Why Sondheim specifically, though, do you think? Because I guess coming up in those particular decades, there was also Weber, and there was Macintosh, and so I guess those were the three leading the races there. But what was it about Sondheim? And looking back, though, at your love of theater and your love of the arts, what do you pull out about, I guess him specifically, that made you want to start learning and writing all about him, and not other people? Or maybe, I mean, do you have like secondary, we'll call these healthy obsessions. Do you have secondary healthy obsessions?

[13:52] Rick Pender: Nothing that approaches Sondheim. I mean, I'm obsessed with musical theater in general, of course, but also with straight theater. I'm a theater critic, I write about, I mean, I write a lot about Shakespeare, and I actually sort of think of Sondheim as a latter-day Shakespeare. When you think about it, I mean, Shakespeare wrote comedies and tragedies and histories, and you look at Sondheim's body of work, he didn't write quite as many as Shakespeare, but he's written a lot more than most people who compose and create musical theater, and there are 18 major shows that I chronicle in the encyclopedia. So there's some of that. I think also, though, he is truly, he's truly an intellectual. I mean, you listen to the words, and the rhymes, and just the clever way lyrics are put together.

I mean, it's just sort of breathtaking sometimes. But it's also, you know, you look at those shows, let's just use the shows that happened during the 70s. So we've got Company, we've got Follies, we've got Night Music, we have Pacific Overtures, and then we have Merrily We Roll Along. Those shows, I mean, if you didn't know, if you just listened to the cast recordings of those, you would not stop and say, oh, these are all by the same guy, as opposed to, you know, a composer like Jerry Herman. These shows, they're wonderful shows, but the music all begins, you know, it sort of comes from the same kind of mind. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber, a lot of his stuff has that sort of melodic overflow that is very indicative of his writing.

[15:36] Alan Seales: And no plot.

[15:38] Rick Pender: Yeah, right, well, that too. But with Sondheim, for one thing, the story is what's driving all of it. But secondly, each show has music that is appropriate to what the story is. So we have a very sort of pop contemporary sound to Company. We get to Follies, and we're back in the 20s and 30s, you know, back with, you know, sort of Broadway Follies, Ziegfeld Follies, and that kind of thing. A lot of the music he wrote for that was very consciously pastiche, recreating the kind of songs by the composers who were dominant during that era. You go from that to A Little Night Music, and he's writing waltzes, and it's like Viennese operetta. Again, totally different. And then we do 180, and it's Pacific Overtures, and it sounds like it's by an Asian composer.

It has all these Asian tonalities and language that feels very spare, like would come out of a Japanese creator. And then you get to Sweeney Todd, and, you know, it just sort of blows you away altogether. So, you know, to me, it was in part being drawn to someone whose mind would create all of those different kinds of things successfully. And I guess the other thing that I would point out is that I mentioned that he is an intellectual. He always has a, to me, a sort of a reserved irony to a lot of the things he creates. And it's not to say that it's cold and without emotion. In fact, there's a lot of emotion as an undercurrent to it. I mean, you look at a show like Company, when you get down to being alive, that's about as passionate of a song as you could hope to hear.

And it grows out of the Sorry, Grateful, and, you know, all those other kinds of songs in the show that kind of lay a foundation for Robert then finally realizing that he does need to have a relationship in his life. So that, to me, says that, you know, the charges against Sondheim that he's cold and unemotional, people have missed the point. They really are not paying close attention.

[17:57] Alan Seales: I don't think, yeah, I agree that I think they missed the point. I don't think he's cold and unemotional. I think, like, he's one of those sort of stereotypical artists that is kind of shy publicly and expresses themselves through their music, through their art. So if they're going to meet somebody in person, he might come across as a little bit mean or a little bit shy. And especially now that everybody wants something from him when they meet him, of course he's going to be a little bit reserved. You know, what I would add to that point, however, is that he's very quick to say, he's writing these songs for characters. This is not to reveal something about himself. You know, a lot of people look at George Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George and say, oh, that's Sondheim's, you know, philosophy of creation, being absorbed by your art and that sort of thing.

Well, I mean, of course, because Sondheim is a creative artist, he probably has some simpatico with some of that sort of thing, but he's not writing about himself. And, you know, it's wrong to extrapolate too far from that sort of thing.

[19:04] Rick Pender: Fair point. And, well, you actually got a lot of input from him to write this, right? Like, how did that relationship develop?

[19:13] Rick Pender: Well, that came about largely because of the magazine. So from 2004 to 2016, I was putting out a magazine every quarter. And sometimes I interviewed him for art when he published the lyric study volumes. We had long phone conversations, came to Cincinnati several times because John Doyle came here and staged that original revival production of Company with Raul Esparza in it. Sondheim came to watch the tech rehearsals for that. And he sat down with me in a radio studio with our local NPR affiliate that I did some interviewing for. And we had like an hour long conversation there. So we had some foundation for relationship there. With the magazine, you know, he would get the magazine, he would read it from cover to cover, and then he would let me know what we got right and what we got wrong.

And, you know, he wasn't hesitant to say, well, you totally missed the point on this, or why did you let that writer say that? But it was wonderful to have that kind of feedback. And then I would typically try to reflect that back in a subsequent issue.

[20:18] Alan Seales: Okay, okay. So there's something that I guess we'll talk about Sweeney Todd a little bit. And to that point, because he's telling you what you got right and wrong, but I mean, everything's open to interpretation. Of course, the artist, does the artist, in your opinion, have the final say on what gets created, right? Because where I'm going with this is, Sweeney Todd, Sondheim says it's about obsession and revenge, but Hal Prince thought it was about something altogether different. You know, so the director is thinking it's all about something different, but the person who wrote it is telling you about this, and the director doesn't want to take it that way. I mean, so who has the final say there? Who's right?

[21:02] Rick Pender: Well, apparently the director, since Hal Prince staged the production that was more a condemnation of the grinding impact of the Industrial Revolution on society, which cranked out somebody like Sweeney Todd. And that was quite successful. And I don't think that Sondheim begrudges it, it's just that's not the approach that he would have taken. And there have been subsequent productions that John Doyle's production of Sweeney Todd, you know, with Michael Cervas and Patti LuPone in it, that was certain, that was a much more intimate, almost inside, was inside the head of one of the characters, really, you know, in an insane asylum. You have the production that was done more recently in London, in the pie and mash shop, where, you know, people were sitting at, like, picnic tables, and the actors were among them.

What Sondheim liked about Sweeney Todd, you know, he saw a theatrical non-musical production of it by Christopher Bond, which is what drew him into saying, you know, he approached the guy and said, I'd like to take this and turn it into a musical. I think Bond thought, well, okay, good luck. But, you know, so Sondheim did that. And what he liked about it was that it was scary. You know, he likes evoking powerful emotions. And that was what he just, he wanted to create a show that would scare the bejesus out of people. And that's what he felt he created and what some of these latter productions have accomplished. But I don't think he would say that, you know, he didn't like what Hal Prince did with the original. I mean, my God, they won the Tony Award and made a lot of money on it. So, you know, clearly it worked for a lot of people. It's interesting to me.

[22:45] Rick Pender: I guess it speaks to his character that, I mean, we don't know how much fighting or if any fighting happened behind the scenes between him and Hal, but when he, you know, he writes the score and writes the show and then turns it over to the director and the director's like, I'm going to do something completely different with it. I would suspect that a lot of composers would probably kind of put their foot down and say like, no, this is not why I wrote this. This is not what this is about. But I guess, you know, it speaks to his character a little bit that he trusts in the vision of the director. I think that part of why Sondheim works in musical theatre is that he loves the collaborative process of working with other people.

I mean, you look at several of his other shows, look at Company. That started off as a series of little one acts that George Firth wrote. And Firth came to Sondheim and said, what do you think I might do with this? Sondheim kind of threw his hands up and said, I don't know. He said, let's ask Hal Prince, because he's pretty creative about this stuff. And Prince said, let's make a musical out of it. And I think they were both, I think that Firth and Sondheim were both kind of like, wow, how are we going to do that? And it was Hal Prince who pushed everybody into doing Pacific Overtures. John Wideman, who did write the book for it, had written a play about the opening of Japan in the 19th century.

But it was a play. It was a very straight ahead kind of historical drama. And suddenly Prince said, let's make a musical out of this. Sondheim said, I don't know anything about Asian music, but he dragged people into it. So I think there was a strong degree of trust between Sondheim and Prince. And Sondheim knew that if they worked together on it, it was going to be a good thing. That all sort of fell apart when they were working on Merrily We Roll Along. And that was in part because Prince never got his concept pulled together on that. And what went up on stage was a mess. And yet everybody recognized the great score and the lyrics for it. And the fact that they made a cast recording after it closed almost immediately really preserved that show in ways that enabled it to have a future.

And the fact that Sondheim and Firth went back to it with Lapine directing and changed it in some ways that makes it work better. Some people still think it's not quite right, but it works a lot better than it did originally. And you don't have teenagers playing with older people.

[25:27] Rick Pender: We're going to take a short break. Stay tuned for more of the episode. There's some obvious parallels that I think a lot of people would draw between Sondheim and Miranda. Lin-Manuel Miranda, of course. When Hamilton made the big splash that it did at first, people were like, you got to go see. You got to go see Hamilton. You got to go see Hamilton. It's the show about it. Blah, blah, blah. On paper, a show about the Founding Fathers that has rap and R&B is not something that would appeal to most people. But look at what happened. And again, parallels to Sondheim, there aren't a lot of songs you can take out of Hamilton that you can hum. But it's all about the storytelling. And you said something earlier about Sondheim, too, that I think Lin does very well is the wordplay and mixing up the rhyming scheme mid-song and all of these things.

It's phenomenal. So I would love your cone of safety. Anything you say here will not be judged. What do you think about people calling Lin the modern-day Sondheim? But I think that the talent is certainly there. Let me tell you, this is exemplary of Sondheim, but it involves Miranda. So let me tell you a little bit here. When Miranda was in college, I believe he was in a production of Merrily We Roll Along. He also played Charlie in the Sondheim celebration at the Kennedy Center back in 2002. So he'd already begun to sort of make his mark. And Sondheim got to know him, especially in D.C. Sondheim was around as they were putting those productions together. There were other ways in which they crossed paths, one of which I'm pleased to say I was actually involved in.

Shortly after I got named as the managing editor of the magazine, I got a call one day from a man in New York City who was asking me to come and moderate a conversation on stage with Stephen Sondheim. Now, I mean, I admired the man, but I hadn't really had any close personal relationship with him. And somehow there was some raffle at an event, and this guy had won it and got Sondheim to agree to come to this event. And he wanted him to come and make a speech. Sondheim doesn't like to make speeches, but he will sit on stage and have a conversation. And he suggested to the guy who was putting the event on call up Rick Pender and say, you know, why don't you come to New York and do this interview?

So I did. Now, I tried to get Steve to say, OK, here's some questions, you know, we'll talk about this. He said, I don't know. I don't want to know what you're going to ask me. So I'd rather just respond off the cuff. But he said it would be good to have some music, you know, in between. We can talk about songs and that sort of thing. So I end up in New York and we're in a supper club in the theater district. And I meet Sondheim at a cocktail hour a little bit before that. And then we go and check things out on stage. And I meet this guy named Raul Esparza, who's going to be singing these songs. Now, he wasn't all that well-known yet, but he was, in fact, at that moment, auditioning to play Bobby in Company in Cincinnati and then come back to Broadway with it.

So, you know, there was all of that. So he sort of played a part in this and it was clear to me that Sondheim loved to be mentoring people. So move on a little bit further. Arthur Lawrence is doing, at the age of 94 or something like that, is doing another production of West Side Story. And Sondheim suggests, and some others suggested, that maybe they should have the sharks sing in Spanish. I mean, you know, they're Puerto Rican or whatever. Why not? Well, Sondheim said, I can't write lyrics in Spanish, but I know this young guy, Lin-Manuel Miranda. And so he wrote, he translated all the shark songs Miranda did into Spanish. Well, they were, yeah. And they used them on Broadway for about six months and then they decided that audiences were having a hard time following what was going on.

I don't know if they were doing it with super titles or not. I think probably not. And so they reverted back to using the English. But just the fact that Miranda could put the lyrics into Spanish was kind of astonishing. And there's been actually, it's a little footnote, but there's been a ton of international productions, Sondheim shows, translated into other languages. I don't speak other languages to any great extent, so I've not really seen or paid a lot of attention to them, but they seem to do pretty well. But at any rate, while they were working on that production, Sondheim said, so what are you doing next? In the Heights had already been a hit on Broadway. And Miranda said to him, I'm working on a musical about Alexander Hamilton.

And Sondheim apparently just threw his head back and laughed and said, that is exactly what you should be doing. The sort of thing that nobody would expect from you after what you've done already. Which is, I mean, think about that. Isn't that exactly what Sondheim has done throughout his career? Every show has been like, where did that come from? That's nothing like anything else. So Sondheim has mentored so many people who are Broadway creators. I mean, it's been interesting to me. We had a series of features in the magazine for a while called Following Sondheim. And I got people like Aaronson Flaherty, I mean, all sorts of well-known people who so admire Sondheim, who Sondheim gave advice to when they were coming up in their careers. He is a mentor and a teacher to many, many people, including Lin-Manuel Miranda.

[32:01] Alan Seales: That's incredible. That is incredible. Yeah, I've never met the man in person. I've always gotten the feeling that he is just overall very helpful and he wants to see the industry as a whole succeed and thrive. And obviously, these stories you're telling just further reinforce all of that. It's also really fascinating to watch him do master classes with singers, with his songs. They're easy to find on YouTube. And watch him as he studies a singer, then he will stop them and say, all right, now think about this a little bit more, change this emphasis a little bit. Okay, now try it again. He's not being critical or mean or anything like that. He's being very encouraging. And as they get it better and better, big smiles on his face.

So he loves to be a teacher. He's the first person who a dedicated teaching position, a dedicated professorship at Oxford University was made in his name. And he was appointed to it when it was started back in the 90s, I believe it was. And he did some, it wasn't like he taught a course three days a week, but he came in a couple of times and lectured the students there.

[33:07] Alan Seales: Well, speaking of mentorship, actually, you talk about this in your encyclopedia that Sondheim himself was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein, of course, wrote the lyrics for South Pacific and Sound of Music and all these other golden age musicals. So do you know much about the nature of that relationship? I mean, I think like, what was I watching? I was watching Netflix last night, a show and there was a line, it was like monsters make monsters, right? So if you're mean, then you're other people, right? So I feel like that I suspect Hammerstein was probably a pretty good mentor too, to then mentor Sondheim, who is mentoring all these other people and it's kind of paying it forward, right?

[33:49] Rick Pender: Yes. So here's the story. Sondheim's parents divorced when he was about 12 years old and his mom, because it was a very bitter divorce and she wanted to get away from his father and she moved out to Bucks County, to Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

[34:07] Rick Pender: There was a place where people could live and commute into the city, but it was kind of remote. Very, very rural, I guess I would say. And lo and behold, who owns a farm that's within walking distance? Oscar Hammerstein. Oscar, Aki as the family called him, and as Steve referred to him when he was a kid, had a son named James or Jimmy. And he and Sondheim were about the same age. And they went to school together, a school nearby there in Doylestown. And so Sondheim ended up going over to the Hammerstein farm to kind of hang out. There were always a lot of creative people around there. Richard Rogers' daughter, Mary, who was about the same age, was there. So they were all sort of mixed up and friendly with one another.

But Sondheim was really lacking a father figure. I mean, he still saw his father, but his father did not have a lot of influence on his creativity. And he just gravitated to Oscar. And to this day, he has said things like, if Oscar Hammerstein had been a geologist, I would probably be a geologist. So I guess we should all be grateful that he was involved in musical theater. But he was such a great influencer. In high school, Sondheim wrote a couple of school shows. They were more just like sort of comedy scenes rooted in school events and that sort of thing, which he and his classmates apparently thought were quite hilarious. And one day he took it to Oscar to show him, thinking Oscar would look at this and his eyes would widen and he would say, this is amazing.

We should put this show on Broadway. And that's not what happened. Oscar read it and he said, it's one of the worst things I've ever read. And as little Stevie started, you know, tearing up a little bit, he said, but it's not without promise. There's some good stuff in here. And if you'd like to learn more, I'd be happy to help you figure this out. And if you want to try to write musicals, here we go. And he set four lessons for him, different kinds of projects, take a play and try to, an existing play, you know, musicalize it. Take a song by, you know, anyway, it was four different exercises. And over the next year or two that he had in high school and then his time at Williams College, he did all four of these.

And none of them are shows that existed. A few songs are still around from them, but he really learned from those things. And when Oscar Hammerstein was dying of cancer, Sondheim was a young man, still went to see him, still really worshiped him. And he asked Oscar to autograph a photo so that he would have a picture of him. And Oscar had to think about it for a while. And when he gave it to Steve, Steve got home and looked at it and said, to my teacher. So, you know, he felt that he had learned things from Steve as much as Steve had from him. So it was a tremendous relationship. And that, you are absolutely right, that had to have some impact on him, his admiration of teachers. You know that the Kennedy Center in Washington has an annual Sondheim Award, and it is an award for schoolteachers who, you know, teach direct kids in plays and things like that. And it's a wonderful tribute to Sondheim that exists that way.

[38:02] Alan Seales: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Gosh, there's so much about him and about his legacy that I wasn't aware of and like digging into the encyclopedia and just even having this brief conversation with you, I am walking away seeing him as a completely different type of person. And everybody has a background. Everybody has a story. And just knowing, I'm so glad you brought up the story about him and Oscar Hammerstein, because like knowing that about him and I don't know where I'm not going anywhere with this, but it's touching. It's a very touching story. I can see it. So there are three standard closing questions that I ask everybody to wrap up the episodes. And the first one very simply is, what motivates you?

[38:47] Rick Pender: What motivates me? I guess I would answer that expansively. My writing about theater in general is to inspire people to go to the theater, whether it be drama or musical theater or whatever. But I especially like to inspire people to dip their toes into the oceans of Sondheim and find how much there is there. So it is sharing those kinds of things and helping people to appreciate them even more. And that's part of what I hope the encyclopedia accomplishes.

[39:22] Alan Seales: Awesome. Okay. So the second question is, what advice would you give to your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[39:26] Rick Pender: I have traveled down so many paths in my career. I thought I was going to be a high school English teacher. And so I did. I've taught almost everywhere. I mean, I did a little bit of high school teaching. When I was getting my graduate degrees, I taught freshman English and I had a teaching fellowship. I have worked at places where I've edited other people's writing. I worked for about 10 years. I was the executive vice president of a public relations agency. And I gave applicants writing tests and scared the bejesus out of most of them with my markups on things they had written. So I guess that path is one that I think is a valuable one. And looking back, I didn't really know that's what I was doing.

But I would say to myself, write and read as much as you can. Now, I've done a lot of that. My path has been rather circuitous because my work, my doctoral dissertation was in medieval literature, a long way from musical theater or anything like that. But it was about storytelling. I wrote my dissertation about Sir Thomas Mallory's Morte d'Arthur, the King Arthur legends. I mean, what greater storytelling is there out there than that sort of thing? So, you know, that played a part in that. But then I worked much of my career in public relations and marketing and used my writing skills for that. People who are able to write can always refine their skills. It is magic to people who struggle with writing.

But I would say that if you are, if you move in the direction of writing, just read as much as you possibly can. I mean, I voraciously read newspapers and magazines. You know, I get The New Yorker and try not to let it stack up too much next to my bedside table because it gets ahead of me sometimes. But I love to read the short stories, the profiles, all the kinds of things in there. And I'm a little bit, this relates. One of the things Sondheim says is that he loves to read about how things are done. You know, he said, if somebody describes to me how tin cans are manufactured, I'm interested in that. I like to understand those processes. And I feel like I am a little bit of a kindred spirit in that way.

I love to read things that are about stuff that I don't know anything about. So I think that those things are likely to expand your horizons. And that's a way for someone to get to be a better and more comprehensive writer. Okay, I'll tell you one more thing here. That is that at the same time that I was writing this book, I was writing another book that's called Oldest Cincinnati. It's like a list of old things here in town. A church, a school, a theater, all of those kinds of things that people can go around and check out. So again, I'm interested in lots of different things.

[42:41] Alan Seales: Oh, I love that. That was a long-winded answer to your question.

[42:45] Rick Pender: No, I get it, I get it. Okay, so then the final question. This is the hardest one. If you could only see one show for the rest of your life, but you can see it as many times as you want, what would you see?

[42:56] Rick Pender: Good Lord, what a question. I guess that I would say Sunday in the Park with George.

[43:10] Alan Seales: All right, all right.

[43:11] Rick Pender: Because it is about the creative process and people who struggle with it, I think the music in it is beautiful. It's not my favorite Sondheim show, but it is the show that makes me think more about things. And if I'm going to listen to it over and over and over, that's probably the one I would listen to. Now, if I were you, who resonates with the music, I'd probably say A Little Night Music, because I love the waltz melodies in that.

[43:41] Alan Seales: I performed that in college.

[43:45] Rick Pender: Your question is akin to the question that I do often get asked, which is your favorite Sondheim show? And I say, all right, you have to let me qualify that by what day of the week is it and what's the one I've seen most recently? Because every one of them has things that are worth talking about or writing about. And it sort of depends on what you like. It's also sort of like asking someone with a bunch of kids, who's your favorite child? You love them all, and there's reasons for...

[44:17] Alan Seales: Depends on who pissed you off the most.

[44:21] Rick Pender: Absolutely. You got it.

[44:24] Alan Seales: Yeah. I wanted you to know, though, that when I asked that question, and I've asked that 130 something times now on this podcast, by far the overwhelming answer has been Sweeney Todd.

[44:34] Rick Pender: Well, I can understand that. I mean, it is a gorgeous show, and it has so much music in it, and the humor is so dark that I think that it appeals to the people who are the most archetypal Sondheim fans. It's a total package. I can see that.

[44:54] Alan Seales: Yeah. You can find more of me at thetheaterpodcast.com. I'm on Instagram and Twitter at theater underscore podcast on facebook.com slash official theater podcast. Please leave a rating and a review. Hit that follow button to make sure you don't miss an episode. This has been edited by Well-Rounded Hoodlum Productions. Thank you to Jukebox the Ghost for the intro and outro music, and Rick Pender, thank you so much. This has been incredible.