A Conversation with Gabe Mollica
We speak to comedian Gabe Mollica about Sondheim and stand-up
In July, comedian Gabe Mollica posted a video about his correspondence with Stephen Sondheim online, and went somewhat viral. The five-minute clip is an excerpt from his show Solo: A Show About Friendship, which he has performed all over the world. The full clip in question, and links to Gabe’s social media pages, are included at the bottom of this interview. Gabe speaks so brilliantly and touchingly about Sondheim, and it was a privilege to talk to him. Our conversation begins below:
It’s great to meet you! We’re speaking a few weeks after your Sondheim story went pretty viral online. Were you expecting that level of reaction?
I've been telling that story for years as part of my off-Broadway show Solo, which is a show all about male friendship. For years, I would do the show and I would talk about musical theatre, and the bit was basically that in school I played sports, but I also loved Sondheim, and I felt like I never fit into either group. And so for years, I just had the line, “Oh, I used to write letters to Stephen Sondheim.” And from that line, people kept being like, “Wait, what?” And they would come up to me afterwards like, “Tell me more about that.” That one line ended up turning into a two-minute story, and then a four-minute story, and now a five-minute story right in the middle of the show, and so it came pretty organically. So I knew in the room that it really worked, because it's a thing that people would want to talk to me about afterwards. That's really the only gauge. But the thing about real life sometimes is you don't know the scale.
So when I posted it online, part of me was like, “Oh, it's a five-minute clip. Everyone's attention span is 30 seconds.” It’s hard to even post five minutes on Instagram. When you go to post a reel, it only gives you 90 seconds, so it's like the whole world is telling me, “Hey, what you do, this long-form thing, doesn't work. Don't do it.” And so when I posted it, I wasn't that optimistic. But it was a collaborative post with the Sondheim Letters account on Instagram. The woman who runs it and I, we’ve become friendly, and we send each other articles and things. But I thought that if I share it with that account and she agreed, then it'll at least find those people. So I was like, “Oh, maybe a few thousand people…” but the reaction has been insane. Emails from you, and even on TikTok, and people from college... So, that I did not anticipate.
It was so brilliant. And I think I must have seen it first through that Sondheim Letters account—which is so great, by the way.
Yeah! And you know what's funny? I actually have four letters from him, because we kept corresponding, which is not in the story. And I'm actually looking at them right now, because I'm going to make a video just talking about them, holding them up. [Gabe has since posted this video too, and you can view it here.] The first letter I wrote to him was just compliments and about how much he meant to me. And then in college, I got a grant to write a research paper about Into the Woods, and I sat with a professor one-on-one and we broke down how it was constructed. At first we were looking at consequence, meaning how does the music change from the first act to the second act? The first act is about getting what you want. The second act is about consequence. And what we discovered when we went through the musical song by song was that that's not actually how the music works. What actually is happening is that the prologue gives you all of the musical phrases that you're going to use for the rest of the show, and so we rerouted. And I was like, “I've written the Sondheim before,” and so I started following up with him.
I have four letters from him, starting with me asking him about something he said—and then him being like, “I'm not really taking a phrase and being like, ‘Oh, I'll use this musical phrase another place.’ It's all character-based.” Sweeney Todd does that a little bit more with motifs, but Into the Woods is really this song, this character, this moment, and then this new character, this song, this moment. So he took the time to explain to a young musicologist, which was so sweet, and he didn't have to do.
My favorite detail in the letters that he gave me is from November 1st, 2012. The P.S. says, “I broke my wrist about a month ago and therefore I can't sign anything personally for a while.” So that's the one letter I have for him that's not hand-signed—which in some ways is even better, because it's this little personal note. It's like, “Hey, I'm sorry I can't sign this. I know that would be nice.” It feels sort of unique and fun.
You mentioned sport and Sondheim both being important to you at school, and now of course you’re a comedian. How comfortably did you find those different strands of your life sitting alongside each other?
Growing up, I felt like—and I think a lot of people feel this way—whenever I was in a group, I always felt defined by the thing I wasn't doing. So when I was with my bros, playing sports, they were like, “Oh, Gabe's the musical theatre guy.” And then when I was with my theatre friends, I think there was a part of it that's like, “Oh, Gabe's the bro,” and so that always frustrated me. And in the show, I talk about wanting to meet people who saw all of me and embraced all of me. And Sondheim for me is such an earnest love that it's nice to have grown up and gotten to know people and connect with people about that too. You can be a lot of different things. You can be nerdy, and you can also like to stay up late and watch sports with your friends. I don't see them as opposed anymore, like I did when I was a kid. But I think in a search for meaning as a kid, I understand why I was frustrated by it.
After college, I moved to Edinburgh and I taught for a year. When I was living over there, and this is part of my Solo show, but my best friend and my girlfriend fell in love. And so I started to do comedy, one, as a way of coping, but two, I just needed something to do all day. I bought notebooks and suddenly I had a purpose. Or I was like, “Oh, I can go to this coffee shop and write all day and my day matters, and my experiences matter.” This thing really hurt me. But if I could turn it into a piece of art, that felt useful to me.
When I was constructing the show for years and years and years, I never thought the Sondheim piece would be a part of it. I really didn't. And now it's a key element. In my show, I quote Sondheim lyrics throughout. And it's not for everyone, but the people who get it are like, “Oh my God!” When phrases like “I know things now” or “Who's like us?” pop up, you're rewarded for being a Sondheim person. But I don't think you're penalized for not being. Plenty of people see the show and they're like, “Oh, it was great. I liked it. I like the jokes,” or whatever. But the Sondheim piece, it's one of those things where you work in a piece of art for so long, and I've been doing this show for a really long time. It ran in New York off-Broadway. I brought it to the Edinburgh Fringe twice. It's had quite a life. And I knew it was starting to get good because it was starting to sound the way I speak. It was starting to sound conversational, where I’d take a tangent to talk about a Sondheim-related thing. I was like, “Oh, that's how I am in conversation.” But it took a really long time. It took years to get there. And when the Sondheim story took off and we started showing the pictures on stage, I was like, “Oh, now I'm connecting with those people.” And it's truly become my favorite part of the show, to be honest with you.
And in that part of the show, you allude to Bobby from Company, surrounded by all those married people. Is that a show and a character you feel particularly close to?
Yeah. Bobby in Company, George in Sunday—and he didn't write this one, but Candide is another character I relate to a lot. I played Candide at college. Those three characters make up what I think are the combinations of my personality. It's funny, I'm working on another show right now that I'll hopefully take to Fringe next summer, and a big element of it right now is Bobby and George and feeling behind. That theme in life of, “Oh, everyone knows about this thing that I don't know about, and I feel late.” And Company’s sort of about that, right? He's turning 35 and he's behind. I really relate to that. And Company being a series of vignettes, it's a lot easier to glom onto because there are all these individual moments. For me, “Sorry-Grateful” and “Being Alive” are the two songs where I'm totally locked in. I feel like I'm learning something every time. If anything, I might be learning more from “Sorry-Grateful,” because it's about after the “Being Alive” moment, after that moment of saying, “Oh, I need to open myself up. I want somebody to disrupt my life in this beautiful, messy way.” “Sorry-Grateful” is actually like a set of instructions on how to keep going, because marriage is so difficult. And so, yes, Bobby speaks to me very much.
And when you reference Company, you’re talking about learning of Sondheim’s death—and you say something really poignant, about realizing that no one will ever have a first letter from him again.
I think that's what I was mourning. He gave us enough music, I think. Plenty of artists die at 30: you get one or two albums and then that's it, and it's a tragedy. Like, “Oh, what would they have made?” But the thing that made me so emotional is that personal connection, that feeling that I got—that so many people got, it turned out. That is a real consequence of death. As artists, we want our art to live on in some way. And that's maybe not that worthwhile, because I think the individual things that you can give another person while you're alive is in some ways more valuable. Those letters hit me at a time when I really needed them, in the same way that his musicals hit me at a time when I really needed them. But they felt just for me. “Hey, I broke my wrist. I can't sign this” felt like a thing he was just he was just telling me—and he was. He's been doing these letters since pre-internet, so there was a whisper network. A Broadway blog is sort of an obscure place. I love the Sondheim Letters account now, because it allows people to connect in that way. “Oh, you had one too, and I had one too, and oh, what a beautiful experience.” But for a long time, I don't think people knew that this was a thing, and so his desire to connect with individual people is something that I really love.
And as we eventually put out my special and connect with people, my hope is that at the end I'll be like, “Hey, if you want to write me a letter, here's the address. I have a typewriter. I will write you back.” It's a thing I'd like to continue—obviously on a smaller scale. I do not think my contributions to comedy have reached Sondheimian levels yet, but I guess I don't want to rule that out…
Absolutely! And on that note, what’s next for you and this show?
I'm still touring it. I just toured it all around the country, so I was just in California. I did Los Angeles and San Francisco. The show has run 80 performances off-Broadway, six extensions, so it had a lot of success in New York. And my goal is to keep taking it to places I haven't been. The goal is to bring it to London at some point, and then to film it and distribute it in some way. I have a few ideas about how that might work. And it would be great if through the Sondheim story that more people find my show, because I really believe in it and want it to play really great venues. But yeah, I just want people to to see it, because whether it's about friendship or Sondheim or summer camp or a love triangle or a joke about the Spider-Man musical, I feel like my show has something for everybody. That's one of the things I'll say to people in the first 10 minutes: “Oh, don't worry, this show has something for you.”
Below is Gabe’s Sondheim story that went so wonderfully viral on social media, in case you didn’t see it. You can follow Gabe on Instagram by clicking here, and on X/Twitter by clicking here.