r/Sondheim

And it just occurred to me that I have to get through “No One is Alone” without making a fool of myself.

Has this happened to you? Bawling over a song in the theater? I know there’s more than one Sondheim song that would do this to me.

I really want to like this show because I love dark and somewhat sexual themes in musicals and I love Sondheim. I can concede that Giorgio does fall for Fosca, despite my initial misgivings of me feeling there being no reason for why he does- i’ll buy it for the theatricality of the show. here’s where i get confused- if you truly love someone with every fiber of your being, you probably want to maintain their health and have them live a longer time, right?
This being the case and Fosca being a weak and ill individual- why the hell would Giorgio risk her life to consummate their passion? yes it’s also Fosca wanting it and expressing her passion too but I don’t know, I feel like if Giorgio really did love Fosca, he wouldn’t sleep with her if he knew it would cause her death. Has anyone read the book? I am curious if he was aware of this if the book has a similar ending.

sorry if i seem naive about this - i just would love to hear other peoples opinion :)

I recently did a production of into the woods and found a cool detail in the script. I’ve never seen anyone talk about it but I’m sorry if this is some common knowledge I missed

So In the act one opening in the last part there is a moment when the Baker and Cinderella both break from the rest of the music to say “There’s something in the glade there.” What I, and probably a majority of people think after hearing that is it is just a general line about fear and uncertainty in the woods but it is actually foreshadowing of both of their partners infidelity. In act two, right after Moments in the woods, the stage directions indicate the Bakers Wife and Cinderellas Prince go off into the woods, but it also says an exact location. The glade! This thing that seems at first to be just building of an atmosphere really is subtle foretelling of events. What a Sondheim move to have what appeared to be a throw away line come back into play almost and act and a half later! Just so awesome

Keep it civil though. I'll go first:

Sunday in the Park With George has uneven pacing in its second act. Sondheim had a lot of trouble figuring out what music would go in the story, and wrote some of it last-minute and it shows. Still has strong themes though. (And yes, I do "get it." I've extensively explained to many theater fans what the second act is trying to accomplish.)

Pacific Overtures isn't as memorable as some of his other shows in terms of characters. The themes of tradition and culture seem to take center stage before anything else. Although Mako is definitely iconic.

Act 1 of Into the Woods can get a little old if you're in the show and having to sit through it dozens of times. It can also lose a lot of magic if a production doesn't embrace the humor.

So having seen multiple productions of every Sondheim show, both live and recorded, and knowing most of them by heart, I tried to accomplish the impossible and rank every single one of his stage musicals (aside from The Frogs, which I haven't seen). I am aware that some of the placements will be fairly controversial, but this is mainly just a jumping off point for discussion around the various shows and not a serious matter.

The list goes:

18 - Do I hear a Waltz?

17 - Saturday Night

16 - Anyone Can Whistle

15 - Road Show

14 - West Side Story

13 - Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum

12 - Company

11 - Passion

10 - A Little Night Music

9 - Into The Woods

8 - Merrily We Roll Along

7 - Gypsy

6 - Assassins

5 - Follies

4 - Here We Are

3 - Sweeney Todd

2 - Pacific Overtures

1 - Sunday In The Park with George

Watched Follies for the first time yesterday (the National Theatre Live recording w/ Imelda Staunton) and was struck speechless by "Losing My Mind". One of the best torch songs I've ever heard, up there with Billie Holiday's "Solitude." It's just so naked and simple and desperate . Been listening to any version possible. Which recording is your favorite? I like the original 71 a lot but also have found the Elisabeth Welch rendition to be stellar. The Liza dance track is a choice and it works, it's just not what I'm looking for when I want to listen to the song.

Please hello, fellow Sondheim enthusiasts.

This post has been a long time in the making, with me returning to it every few months after rewatching one of Sondheim's shows and wanting to record my thoughts. Mostly, this is a chance for me to gush about Sondheim and his work, which I hope will be appreciated here, and also an opportunity to generate discussion.

This is of course a subjective ranking, based on my own opinions and preferences.

I really love most of the musicals that Sondheim wrote, and since they are all so different, comparing them to one another is difficult. If I made this on a different day, my order might be slightly different — however, the top few and the bottom few will likely always remain the same.

For the sake of not rendering these rankings entirely meaningless, I'm only including full stage musicals that he wrote the score and lyrics for (so no West Side Story or Gypsy, no Evening Primrose)

And now, the rankings. Thank you for reading!

16. The Frogs

The best thing I can say about The Frogs is that for a musical that Sondheim wrote as a favor to his friend, premiered by a college swim team in their swimming pool, it's not actually that bad. There's some witty humour and catchy tunes (the titular song specifically has no right to be as catchy as it is). But I think The Frogs is supremely uninteresting. The characters are caricatures more than individuals, most of the songs are just eh, and the story is so padded with low humor that it fails to provide anything of substance.

15. Saturday Night

Saturday Night was a young Sondheim's first dive into writing for professional theater. It's actually quite charming. There are plenty of witty lyrics, and the opening "Saturday Night" melody is infectious. I'm also a fan of "What More do I Need?" But it's obviously not particularly interesting or serious. At best, Saturday Night is sufficiently entertaining for an evening to the theater, but it is certainly not meant to be dwelled on for any extended period of time.

14. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

This is nothing but fluff — very clever, entertaining fluff. The book is very well written, and the music is quite lovely. Like Saturday Night, this was written in Sondheim's early years, before he really found his voice. The opening number "Comedy Tonight" is a lot of fun, and I also like the songs "Free" and "I'm Calm". The rest of the score is somewhat mediocre though. I like Forum, but it doesn't deserve to go higher than any of Sondheim's other, more substantial projects.

13. Road Show

I feel conflicted about Road Show.

This project went through 4 major iterations (and 4 titles) over the course of 10 or so years before Sondheim and book writer John Weidman finally felt content with the finished product. They believed strongly in it — there's a reason they kept coming back to rewrite it over and over for 10 years. Sondheim especially was very proud of the final result, as he expresses is in his book Look, I Made a Hat.

I think Road Show is an ambitious musical, in terms of its artistic scope. It tells the story of the Mizner brothers, Addison and Wilson, real people who were famous in the early 1900s for being successful American pioneers. Through telling their story, Road Show explores the American attitude of ambition and frontier seeking. In the musical, the two brothers embody two contrasting versions of this attitude: Addison embodies the constructive desire to create and to find his own calling, while Wilson embodies a more destructive "Get Rich Quick!" impulsiveness, which sees him forsake the things and people he cares about in search of money and thrills. As such, Road Show is simultaneously a story about two individuals and their individual conflict, as well as a story about two conflicting branches of American ideology. I think that is an very interesting idea.

There's just something about it doesn't work for me. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. Maybe it's that the quality of the writing and its comedic tone doesn't sit right with me; I find that the lyrics and dialogue have an unfortunate tendency to feel cheesy, take for example the songs "Brotherly Love" and "The Best Thing that Ever Has Happened". Maybe the insights this show has about America are... somewhat irrelevant in the face of current political events (I think it's safe to say Willy is running the show entirely these days). Maybe it's that I struggle to care about the main characters. Road Show opens by informing you in an uncerimonious fashion that the Mizner brothers ultimately failed to do anything important, and their legacy was nothing but wasted potential. I find it somewhat difficult to care about two guys that lived 100 years ago and wasted their lives fighting with each other.

Or maybe this musical would come to life for me if I were able to watch it in full rather than just listening to the soundtrack and watching clips. Whatever it is, despite how interesting the premise might be, I don't feel much fondness towards Road Show (besides the song "Get Out/Go", I love that song).

12. Anyone Can Whistle

Despite putting it so far up the list, I really like Anyone Can Whistle. I appreciate when shows aren't afraid to be weird, and Anyone Can Whistle is about as weird as musical theater gets. It has many great moments. To list some of my favorites: I love when the actors applaud the audience at the end of act one. I think the opening of act two is great, with everyone passionately marching in their assigned groups. Hapgood is a wonderful character. "Simple" blows my mind every time I listen to it. The song "Anyone Can Whistle" is great, and I adore "With So Little to be Sure Of".

However, Anyone Can Whistle unfortunately doesn't deserve any higher than 12th on this list, because it has a lot of major hiccups that detract from the moments I've described above, and ultimately result in a musical that is more confusing than it should be. Sondheim himself identifies the show's biggest issue to be its inability to articulate its own premise. Essentially the entire first act is spent clumsily trying to introduce us to the town, its mayor Cora (and various other people in positions of power), the Cookie Jar and Nurse Fay, Hapgood and his backstory etc etc... and it just doesn't quite work. There are too many moving parts and philosophical implications thrown at you in such a short amount of time, that one ends up not quite understanding what precisely the show is about. Is it commenting on capitalism? Religion? Science? A two-party system? Stress? Love? And if the answer is all of the above, then I think that makes it fundamentally unfocused. The latter two acts do a better job at pacing the story, but face a similar issue of feeling confusing at times, as well as being somewhat disjointed from the first act.

11. Here We Are

I was lucky enough to see the original cast of Here We Are live. Here We Are is weird and creative and funny. I enjoyed it a lot, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was going over my head. Maybe that's because I haven't seen the movies it's based on, I'm not sure. It's clear to me that Here We Are is saying something existential and potentially profound. But I can't grasp what that something is. The people who I saw this with are much more knowledgable than me when it comes to cinema and the movies Here We Are was based on, and they didn't feel the same way as me. So I assume I am missing some required reading. I'm curious what you all thought of this show.

10. Follies

I consider every musical from here on out to be basically a masterpiece, so it hurts to put any of them in 10th place. Follies has the misfortune of taking the spot.

Follies is wonderfully clever. It is a show inside of a show, where the characters are performers in more sense than one.

Follies alternates between diegetic pastiches reminiscent of the 20s and 30s, and nondiegetic character songs. This is a very intentional use of pastiche. It emphasizes both the deep nostalgia that the 4 main characters feel, and their attempts to “perform”, to hide and hide from their profound melancholy.

As the show progresses, the characters each reveal more and more of their existential regret until, at its dramatic height, the stage shifts and the show transforms into a series of 4 performances each sung by one of the main characters, each a mockery of their life. The line between diegetic and nondiegetic is blurred. It's theatrically brilliant, as the ultimate "Folly" of their lives is finally brought to center stage.

The reason Follies lands further down my list is mainly due to how unlikable the characters are. Though you feel for their suffering, they come across as kind of pathetic. They seem unable to take control of their own lives, and are constantly stuck in the past. At a certain point, I feel, their situation is nobody's fault but their own. Also, some of the pastiches feel just a tiny bit tedious.

9. Sweeney Todd

I think Sweeney Todd is masterfully crafted and very entertaining. It is enthralling, slowly unfolding before you as you gradually come to understand all of its sinister details. One's first time watching this show is a complete joy, and the second time through you notice all the little details that seemed inconsequential at first. "A Little Priest" is insanely clever. And the image of Sweeney's barbershop on top and Mrs. Lovett's pie shop on bottom, running their charitable little business, is so iconic.

Sweeney Todd lands further down my list simply because I do not feel particularly attached to it, at least not compared to a lot of Sondheim's other shows. I enjoy it a lot whenever I see it, but it doesn't speak very deeply to me.

8. A Little Night Music

Aww this show is so lovely. I don't have a whole lot to say about it, but it is a deeply entertaining comedy with a luscious score and a good heart. Send in the Clowns is a beautiful song, and its reprise is a lovely note to end on. Now/Later/Soon is one of Sondheim's cleverest creations. "The Miller's Son" might actually be my favorite song from the show — joyous and wild and unexpected.

7. Company

When I think of Company, the first word that comes to mind is "dated". I generally dislike the idea that art can even be dated. I think Sondheim said something along the lines of "all art is always relevant", and that's a statement I passionately agree with. Still, it is difficult to talk about this show without acknowledging that it is, at least on the surface, very heteronormative and "of its time". Every gay person I've watched this show with has had a gut reaction of repulsion, especially towards the comedic scenes that portrey wives and husbands fighting with each other. I felt that repulsion too initially. On first watch, it can feel like you are getting preached to and told: this is how your relationships will look like.

The first act of the show in particular can come across as dated and irrelevant in 2026. Other types of relationships, beyond "man marries woman for life", are so much more widely recognized as real options now, so a show whose characters seem trapped by societally imposed requirements of marriage, monogamy, and heterosexuality, while still trying to say something meaningful about the nature of human relationships, can be difficult to care about.

That said, after watching Company and listening to it more, I found myself falling in love with it. My defense of the show is always that it is simply about heterosexual (mostly) people in the 1970s, and even though it is using those characters to say something universal, it is not universalizing their kind of relationship as more legitimate. For me, that initial repulsion dissipated once I realized that the show is really about Bobby's self-discovery, trying to understand what he wants from life and from love. This musical also possesses a subtle irony that I think it is easy to miss. The reason it dwells so much on couples fighting is because that is exactly what Bobby is worried about. Those are the points of interest. And it simultaneously acknowledges those fights while also making fun of them. “You see what you look for, you know?”

Another Hundred People is a gorgeous song. Being Alive is also stunning. Sondheim is always very good at endings, but Company’s ending is particularly remarkable in the way that it makes the entire rest of the show suddenly make complete sense, its full emotional impact finally resonating with you.

6. Assassins

Sondheim is so fucking good at irony. It's there in a lot of his work — Company, Merrily, A Little Night Music, Sweeney — but nowhere is it more central than in Assassins. This show eloquently articulates a lot of America's ideological problems. It feels very of the times these days. It is also extremely funny.

Assassins is wonderfully meta and creative. The narrator, the "balladeer", presents everything under a traditionally optimistic American lens, the idea that anyone can achieve success and happiness if they simply work for it. Of course, that is the very ideology that our assassins are desperately rebelling against. So the show's central conflict is between the narrator and his characters, a conflict that escalates to Another National Anthem, which sees them directly arguing with one another. As Sondheim says, "content dictates form", and what a clever, apt form in which to present this content. It really captures the two-faced nature of a lot of American ideology.

Assassins is pretty unique among Sondheim's musicals in that most of the action happens outside of the songs. The score functions kind of like a backdrop to those more impactful monologues and dialogues. The ones that have really stuck with me are Santa's final monologue before Another National Anthem (I forget the name of the actual character lol), and of course the scene between John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. Weidman's work here is truly outstanding.

5. Pacific Overtures

Pacific Overtures is the single most unique musical in existence. I am about…… 80% confident in this statement. You know how there are some works of art that are just so unlike anything you've seen before or since, that they become difficult to really talk about because you have no real point of comparison for them? That's what Pacific Overtures is to me. It feels like it was made totally outside of a lot of musical theater conventions, probably because it was primarily inspired by kabuki theater.

I adore this show. It is insanely clever. The plot, the storytelling, the aesthetic — it is all so imaginative. Also, out of all of Sondheim's extended song-scenes, Please Hello is without a doubt the most brilliant, witty, and rewarding one to really engage with.

Musically, the show is strung together by a repeated drum beat that seems to signal narration, and the songs are otherwise self-contained events that are often microcosms of the show's larger themes. This is most obviously the case in "Bowler Hat", "Poems", and "Pretty Lady" — songs that function both as moments in the narrative and as self contained metaphors for the entire show.

Someone in a Tree is... strange. The concept of a song that is about the fact that "we can't write a song for this scene because there is no Japanese account of this moment in history" sounds crazy. And yet it is one of the most profound moments ever written for musical theater. I don't know how to describe it. The song is almost comedic, and yet it's like the show just ascends to outer space suddenly, out of nowhere. No other song has made me stop and marvel at Sondheim's ridiculous creativity to the same degree.

My only issue with the show is that the ending has never quite worked for me. It seems like "Next" is supposed to be mourning the death of traditional Japenese culture, and yet lines like "the air quality in Tokyo is now acceptable!" seem to undercut that and make me think — like ok but isn't that actually a good thing?

Pacific Overtures also unfortunately suffers from the existence of cancel culture. A group of white men writing about japanese culture and history, mimicking japanese style and using asian actors, is a tough sell, at least in the circles I find myself in. Which is a shame, because once you know it, it is obviously progressive.

4. Merrily We Roll Along

God this show is just bursting with creativity. Merrily We Roll Along is a tragedy in a pretty unique way. Normally when we think of tragedies, we think of stories that progress from normality to despair. Merrily, on the other hand, regresses from normality back to a height of intense hope. It begins at the end and moves progressively backwards in time, so that the finale, which is so full of optimism and life, is the most soul-crushing moment of the entire piece.

I find the dynamics between the characters very compelling. Frank is both the hero and the villain, and you really feel for him despite his own bad decisions. Charlie and Mary seem like victims of their own loyalty — Mary especially, whose love for Frank (which we can understand since we see Frank's goodness) runs so deep that she is unable to move on from him.

The music is brilliant. Merrily does something unique in that its main theme is kind of diegetic — it is used to represent Frank's musical compositions. It works so well. We get to see the main theme literally evolve (or rather, devolve) as Frank's composition progresses (regresses), while it also gets developed nondiegetically in other parts of the score, and those nondiegetic developments are poignant since it is so clear what the theme represents.

Merrily also takes the crown for being Sondheim's catchiest score. This music is insanely infectious. It's actually unfair. I'm not a big dancer, but I can't listen to this score without my body moving of its own volition. Do be warned that after listening to this a couple times it will get stuck in your head for like the next year.

3. Passion

As brilliant as all the previous shows are, 3 musicals in Sondheim's discography stand head and shoulders above rest — and those are his collaborations with book writer James Lapine. These men working together are a force of nature. They cannot be touched. Passion, the final musical they wrote together, takes the 3rd place slot.

There are very few songs in Passion — rather, it plays out like a constant stream of singing/talking, only resolving into an actual musical number very rarely. This is an enthralling method of storytelling. I remember my first time watching this show; I was so entranced I didn't even realize the show didn't have an intermission until it was over. The music is gorgeous. "No One Has Ever Loved Me" brings me to tears.

Passion is Sondheim's most criminally underappreciated work. It's not necessarily an entertaining musical, and it lacks Sondheim's signature wit, which would be entirely inappropriate in a show this serious and melancholy. What Passion is, however, is the most genuine, moving reflection on true love that I have ever seen. It took me a full day to emotionally recover from it. This is the kind of art that sticks with you and haunts you, and I find myself thinking about it often.

2. Into the Woods

Into the Woods was my introduction into the world of Sondheim. I first saw it when I was very young, and I adored it. I listened to this musical constantly growing up, and it continued (and continues) to blow my mind. This show is utterly brilliant. Every lyric, every note, every corner of Into the Woods is brimming with artistic intention. I've listened to it more than any other musical, and every time I come back to it I am reminded why.

Into the Woods is about so much. It is about yearning, about how there will always be more to yearn for, and so we will never be entirely fulfilled. It is about coming of age, and the loss of innocence. It is about the dangers of individualism, and the importance of community. It is about how morality is never as simple as we'd like it to be. It is about the lasting impacts of our simplest decisions. It is about coming to terms with the past. It is about parents and children. How to be a good parent. How to be a good person.

The magic of Into the Woods is that it can be about all of these things, while remaining entirely cohesive. These themes are seamlessly woven together so tightly, such that every time I listen to this musical I hear something new. A new implication I hadn't understood before, or a repetition of a musical motif I hadn't noticed before. Into the Woods is a feat of artistic creativity, and my second favorite musical of all time.

1. Sunday in the Park with George

How do I write about this musical? I have so much to say about it, and yet I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it justice.

Sunday in the Park with George changed so much for me, about the way I think about art and the way I think about the world. More than anything, it taught me what I value in art, and how to express that.

In trying to explain to friends what this musical is about, I landed on the following phrase: "Art is life, and life is art." Meaning: art is profoundly important, and life itself has inherent beauty. Of course, the musical is about more than that, but that's the most succinct and accurate way I have found of summarizing what I find so meaningful about it.

This is Sondheim at his most poetic and his most deeply personal. If I were the kind of person to get tattoos, there would be many quotes from this musical that I would want to get tattooed on me. A lot of them from "Move On."

I cannot for the life of me understand how "the second act is weak" has become a common point of critisicm for Sunday. It seems to me that one must fundamentally misunderstand the show in order to pose that as a serious critisicm. Analytically speaking, the second act is perfectly structured as a mirror to the first act, which aids its function as a deeply profound resolution. Move On is a contender for the greatest moment ever written for musical theater, and its intense profundity is a result of how well structured the entire rest of the show is. "Sunday", and its reprise, are also contenders. "Past the verticals of trees, forever...."

I mean I could talk for ages about the music and plot of this show, but that would be a post in and of itself and this is already long enough lol. So I'll leave it at that.

Something that impresses me about Sweeney Todd is how it subverts the "young lovers" subplot trope - usually the weakest element of a story (I'm thinking of everything from Marx Brothers movies to Les Miz to Pirates of the Caribbean) and transforms it into something much more fraught and interesting. "Kiss Me" is too paranoid to be a typical lovers lament which only makes the fleeting "love you/even as I saw you" refrain more swoon worthy.

"Green Finch and Linnet Bird" takes the most obvious metaphor of an imprisoned damsel and is able to complicate it through irony - she sings disbelief about caged animals futiley belting their all.

These complexities make me invested in a way I never would have if it were just well executed cliches. That's the kind of stuff that makes a masterpiece.

❤️

This is one of my favorite Sondheims and favorite musicals of all time. I was listening to the original (Len Carriou/Glynis Johns) yesterday and pondering something I've always wondered about:

When Fredrik reveals that Anne is "unfortunately still a virgin," why is Desiree so *angry*? I can imagine that she would be aghast by the situation, appalled that her lover is such an idiot that he married a naive teenager and has no idea how to communicate with her, or even that she would laugh at his predicament. But she seems specifically angry at Anne. Why does Desiree say that if she met Anne "I'd strike her first" and in order to meet her she would need "hat and my knife"? Is a woman in this world, even a sheltered teenager married to a widower more than twice her age, so expected to do her "duty" sexually that she is somehow a criminal if she doesn't want to?

So recently I've been getting really into Assassins. I haven't had a chance to see the show yet (this might make my following question obsolete) but I've been listening to the music a ton and really enjoying it.

One thing has been bothering me. This might be a stupid question, or a nit-pick-y question. In Another National Anthem, there's the line, "There's another national anthem, folks, for those who never win, / for the suckers, for the pikers, for the ones who might have been."

I find the word "pikers" here very strange! It is a word I had personally never heard before (I'm from the northeast US); looking it up has revealed so many different definitions (a cheapskate, a chicken, a gambler) but none feel "right" in the song. I think it's said by Czolgosz but none of my research has made it sound like a particularly Polish piece of slang. It's not rhyming with anything so it's not like Sondheim had extremely limited options.

Anyway. I believe that the word is there for something, since it's such a climactic moment in the show (and the show is among his best lyrically imo), but I just don't really understand it or what it's doing here lyrically/poetically. Any insight?

Had no idea there is a gorgeous BBC4 recording of this from the London production on YouTube! Fully wept my way through all 2+ hours of it last night. Michael ball’s could I leave you was thrilling! Among a million other beautiful moments. The slideshow of him from a baby to his wizened old self was truly moving.

Just realized that as different as they seem, "Some People" and "Epiphany" are essentially articulating the same message. The singer separates themselves from the unwashed masses by taking life by the reigns in either show business or murder. Rose even tells them they can "rot", Sweeney is just more active in that regard.

what are other disparate but thematic pairs across the ouevre?

Initially, I thought that Tamate killed herself purely because she was driven by grief by Kayama's departure (as I thought the scene after There Is No Other Way was implying) However, my thoughts have changed completely after learning about jigai, a ritual suicide practiced by women of the samurai class in anticipation of defeat.

The purpose of Jigai was to perserve a woman's dignity in avoiding capture or sexual violence by enemy forces, typically carried out swiftly with a tantō (much like the blade Tamate takes out at the dramatic end of the scene) Moreover, the women usually tied their legs together and sat upright so that they would be in a dignified pose when the enemies found them.

Rather than having acted out of emotional despair, she appears instead to have expected the consequences of an American victory and took measures as it meant in her culture of the time.

https://preview.redd.it/5dbbmnx3wqyg1.png?width=2230&format=png&auto=webp&s=42fcaa67943f50a3db1e6f7ff1ba656fe301b813

Did anyone else see this show five years ago? Created and performed by A Strange Loop's Larry Owens, I remember it being a relentless hour long medley. It was incredibly impressive, I wish there was a recording available.