Sondheim, etc.
Stephen Sondheim’s death hit me harder than I thought it would. Not that I was sitting around wondering what I would feel when Stephen Sondheim died. Or regularly listening to his music for that matter. But he died, and it took a couple of days to sink in, and then I was like, wait, what the fuck.
I pulled up the Bernadette Peters concert at the Royal Festival Hall from 1998, which consists mostly of Sondheim songs. Peters is generally considered to be the foremost interpreter of Sondheim’s songs, which reinforces my belief in fate, specifically as described by Rachel Cusk: “the reverberation of [one’s] will.” How incredible to find someone whose art you can make your own, someone for whom you can make art, someone with whom you can make art. How incredible also to commit to that bond over time.
I have a long piece coming out on Sondheim soon, and I won’t scoop myself here, but I wanted to share the concert and tell you that even if you’re like me — a musical theater skeptic, someone who loses patience when some dude is on stage singing for way too long — you will still be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t watch Bernadette Peters sing Sondheim.
She just gets it. She gets what each song is meant to evoke; she gets how to communicate that with her voice. I cannot watch her sing “Not a Day Goes By” (it’s at around an hour and five minutes) without feeling the stretching expanse of forever, bleak and desolate, into whose center heartbreak deposits us. She is a phenom, and if you watch her sing Sondheim, you will understand what he was doing.