How Sondheim Can Change Your Life

August 5, 2024
Schoch (The Secrets of Happiness), a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast, pays affectionate tribute to the late composer Stephen Sondheim and the lessons his musicals offer. Covering the full span of Sondheim’s career on Broadway, Schoch posits that Louise’s break from her domineering mother to become a burlesque dancer in 1959’s Gypsy teaches audiences to live for themselves; that Bobby’s apparent victory over his fear of intimacy in the final minutes of 1970’s Company reminds viewers that “love isn’t there to make our lives less frightening... it’s there, if we can find it... to give us more life”; and that 1979’s Sweeney Todd forces spectators to grapple with the banality of evil. Here We Are, which was posthumously staged in 2023, reveals that beauty can be found in the unfinished or improvised—as in life itself, Schoch argues, since the “wild, wondrous mystery of ourselves won’t ever be fully revealed.” While some of Schoch’s interpretations can feel like a stretch, he illuminates with appealing and unbridled enthusiasm how Sondheim plumbed the depths of human experience. Musical theater lovers will be delighted.

September 15, 2024
Life lessons gleaned from the work of a musical theater master. Drama professor and devoted fan Schoch, author ofShakespeare's House, lovingly explores Stephen Sondheim's musicals, aiming to show how they can help people achieve a more fulfilling life. "His works understand us as much as we understand them," the author avers. Zeroing in on 13 shows, he enthusiastically walks us through the essence of each to demonstrate that "Sondheim, if we let him, can change our life." Schoch notes that in his first musical, Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim tried to impart the lesson, "Be aware of the roles that you enact in your life," but it was a flop because he forgot to "put the audience first." He never forgot it again.Gypsy tells the story of a toxic mother-daughter relationship, but the vivid characterizations expressed in song demonstrate that "hurtful patterns can be disrupted and then replaced by the benevolence of a nurturing heart, beginning with our own." In the plotlessCompany, Sondheim anatomizes the "loneliness of modern urban life," then suggests how we can overcome it in the song "Sorry-Grateful" (a "true masterpiece"). "Whenever I hear the quintet inA Little Night Music warming up," Schoch writes, "I hear a rehearsal for life."Sweeney Todd, the ultimate revenge piece, asks us howwe would respond to injustice.Merrily We Roll Along, poorly received when it opened in 1981 but a Tony-winning hit in 2024, oozes with feelings of personal regret. OnSunday in the Park With George, Schoch remarks, "How can wenot pay attention to a play that honors so elegantly the lost art of paying attention?"Into the Woods confronts "not knowing which path to choose," and Schoch softly brings down the curtain withHere We Are, which opened in 2023, two years after Sondheim's death: "a perfect theatricalnon finito: not finished, and that's by design." A lively, thoughtful self-help book--sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2024
Drama professor Schoch pays tribute to one of the gods of musical theater in an exploration of some of his works and how they speak to us. This isn't a catalogue but, rather, a guidebook to Sondheim's world that considers 13 of his shows in chronological order, from 1959's Gypsy to 1979's Sweeney Todd to 2023's Here We Are. These are shows, he writes, "that in [his] opinion best reveal what Stephen Sondheim can teach us about life." He discusses each show's songs and characters and parses its overall meaning and message, and there are also plenty of stories about productions and performers. Schoch is a scholar and teacher of theater practice whose students call his class ""Sondheim boot camp."" He informs and challenges readers in this lively interpretive study that includes a bibliography of works by and about Sondheim. Schoch's unique approach will resonate with Sondheim's legions of fans and those whose interest in Sondheim will now be deepened.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 1, 2024

Schoch (Shakespeare's Victorian Stage), a theater director and professor of drama at the University of Belfast, provides a generous reading of composer and lyricist Sondheim's (1930-2021) variegated musical productions. What results is a show-by-show look at the human condition with its unpredictable ups and downs (more often downs, in Sondheim's works). Listeners and viewers respond to how a work of art speaks to them, makes them feel, and helps them accept their own lives. Readers may not come to Schoch's conclusions in each instance, as it's a very personal book for him, but the author's respect for and delight in Sondheim's multihued, thoughtful, and fascinating productions ring true, as does his take on what's at stake in these shows. From 1971's Follies to 1987's Into the Woods, Sondheim's glorious musicals explore the possibilities and toil of human living: how past, present, and future intertwine, and how realized living inevitably diverges from expectation. Seldom are all hopes fulfilled. How, then, shall we live? Writes Schoch, we don't escape life; we confront it. VERDICT A generous reading of the works of a master composer and lyricist who reinvented the American musical.--David Keymer

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.