“Be careful the things you say,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, “children will listen.”
Just a lyric in a fanciful musical called “Into the Woods,” you might think. But what fine advice for living.
How often we’ve wished that some of the politicians and other flawed humans we frequently write about on these pages (“Send in the Clowns,” ever redux) might have heeded the wisdom of the great composer and lyricist, who died Saturday at age 91, casting a long shadow over the Thanksgiving weekend. In our more reflective moments, we have sometimes wished we had better listened ourselves.
Make no mistake, Sondheim, winner of the 2011 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement and long a focus of both the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, was no ordinary American artist. This was the William Shakespeare of musical theater, someone who understood the complexities and paradoxes of life and yet who remained something of an enigma. By intention.
In obedience to neither an ideological agenda nor a particular aesthetic style, Sondheim was able to range freely and fearlessly over a disparate array of subject matter and themes, to work with numerous collaborators and to comment on everything from creativity to the human need for love. He was as comfortable articulating the musings of a boy with a beanstalk or a needy Parisian woman dotting a painting as with the twisted obsessions of those who wanted to make cannibalistic mince pies or assassinate a president.
Most of the tributes to Sondheim that flowed across the media this past weekend told you far more about the writers of those odes than the frank but shy object of their affections. Everyone could see some aspect of themselves in Sondheim, a generous artist who was forever determined to pay back the debt he felt he owed to Oscar Hammerstein II, his surrogate father. A gentle giant has taken to the sky; we feel lucky to have witnessed so many of his steps on earth.
Chicago Tribune
