A Conversation with Richard Schoch
On his new book, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life
Today I am delighted to share our interview with Richard Schoch, whose book How Sondheim Can Change Your Life is released on November 19. Richard is Professor of Drama at Queen’s University Belfast, where he teaches classes on Sondheim and acting for musical theatre. Richard is the author of eight books, including Shakespeare’s House (Bloomsbury, 2023). More information about How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, including a link to pre-order/order it, is available by clicking here, or by clicking here if you’re in the UK. Our conversation begins below:
Richard, it’s so good to meet you. How Sondheim Can Change Your Life is far from your first book, but we’re talking at that exciting time when it is just about to be released into the world. As someone for whom Sondheim and the community around Sondheim is so important, I’d love to know what this moment feels like for you.
I promise I’m not going to start every answer with a Sondheim lyric quote, but I feel like Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods—which is to say excited and scared. Excited because I honestly think it’s a good book. I wouldn’t allow it to be published if I couldn’t stand behind it. I do think Sondheim fans will be delighted by the book, informed by the book, and hopefully appreciative of it. So, I feel excited that it’s something that fellow Sondheim fans will enjoy and appreciate. But scared too, honestly, because many thousands of books are published.
I’m very fortunate to Ebury Books in the UK, part of Penguin Random House, and in the United States I have Atria Books, part of Simon & Schuster—so I have big, reputable, established publishers who are enthusiastic about the book, and who’ve done a beautiful job in designing it. But even so, even with all that support behind me, you walk into a bookstore and there are thousands of books. You go on Amazon and there’s an infinite number of books you can choose. The scary bit is you never know if you’re going to reach the people that you want to reach. It’s like producing a new show: you’re excited for the work that you’ve done, but you’re scared that you may not fill the house.
And in the introduction, you write about the moment that sparked this book—and you also describe what the book isn’t, as well as what it is. The way that Sondheim’s work affects us as human beings is clearly front and center in your mind throughout this book; did you know pretty quickly that that would be your route into writing it?
You’ve got to exactly what I’ve been trying to do in this book, and I really appreciate you pointing out what kind of book it is not. It’s not a biography of Sondheim. You can read Meryle Secrest’s book, and David Benedict is working on his biography too. It’s not a musicological analysis like Stephen Banfield’s wonderful book. It’s not a coffee table book. It’s not a book of interviews. It’s not a behind peep behind the curtains, although it does tell lots of stories. It’s essentially life lessons from Stephen Sondheim—how he can teach us about how to live better, wiser, more fulfilled lives. So in some ways, it’s Stephen Sondheim meets self-help. But isn’t this what theatre is all about? If a work of musical theatre, dramatic theatre, any kind of theatre is not going to touch you, then why is there theatre at all?
One of the ways I describe the book is it’s not so much about Stephen Sondheim as about what we can learn from Sondheim. And yes, I’m a theatre historian, I’m a drama professor, I’m musically literate—but really, I’m writing it from the perspective of another fan of Stephen Sondheim. The author is a fan of Stephen Sondheim, the readers are going to be fans of Stephen Sondheim, so that’s the perspective. It’s written for the general reader, for the fan of musical theatre.
In the chapter about Company, you talk about Bobby, and you write something that really struck me: that he is “less a person than a parable.” You apply that specific phrase to him, but we can understand so many of Sondheim’s characters not just as the specific people we see on stage, but through what they represent and what they can teach us. That felt like the nub of the whole book to me, and it’s a beautiful turn of phrase.
The reason why I use the very specific word parable, and I’m glad you landed on that, is that the purpose of a parable—sacred, secular, profane, whatever kind—is not to reveal the character in the story. It is to tell the truth, or to teach a lesson, which means that the truth and the lesson are always about the person who is listening to the parable. There’s a loop from the audience member into the story, and then back to the audience member. Whether it’s in a parable, in a story, or in theatre, everything must begin and end with the audience member. Otherwise, there’s no point in doing it.
I quote an Oscar Hammerstein lyric at various points throughout the book, which is also a song title: “The song is you.” That’s the nub of my argument. Yes, there are characters on stage, but ultimately, the song and its lesson, its insight, its meaning, must be returned to the audience. The song is you. If the song is not ultimately about the audience, then really there’s no point to it. And as much as we can be involved with these characters on the stage, the real power of those characters—whether it’s Louise in Gypsy or Bobby in Company, Desirée in A Little Night Music, and even the assassins in Assassins—is that they are reflecting something back to us about ourselves. And that is why we find Sondheim’s works not just entertaining but moving. They move us in a way that lots of musical theatre does not.
Your chapters are structured chronologically, and you take us from Gypsy all the way to Here We Are. It’s great you were able to include that, by the way.
Yeah! I think this is the first book that actually talks about Here We Are.
Was that always the plan? I was trying to work out the timeline of when you would have seen that show during the writing process.
Oh, that’s a great question. I saw Here We Are towards the end of its run, in January 2024. And by that point, I had just delivered the first draft to my editor. On the first draft, it had chapters 1 through 12, and it ended with Passion. And then I had written, “Conclusion? Do we need one?” They said, “Yes, we do need a conclusion. You should go and think about what that’s going to be.” And that night, I went to see Here We Are. I wasn’t even five minutes into the show when I thought, “This is it. This is how I’m going to end the book.”
It’s not so much a summing up of Sondheim’s career, but to allow the weight of that final show to register, and ask, “What is this work that is finished but not finished, that is complete but not complete? How might that be thematically summing up all of Sondheim?” And the point I try to make is that something that feels complete but not complete, finished but not finished, is our own life. It’s finished because we don’t get to repeat any of it. Life isn’t a rehearsal. But it’s not finished because there are always things that, no matter how long we live, we’ll never get around to doing. So in a beautifully poetic way, Sondheim’s last show is—wittingly or unwittingly—his final gift to us, for us to meditate upon. What is being alive really about?
When you were writing, did you find you were able to focus on just one show at a time, or did you find yourself hopping around between chapters?
That’s such an interesting question, because it gets to these questions of how does a writer conceive of their project, what are the building blocks of the project, and then in what order are you going to build it? When I first thought about this, I had a very fancy structure for the book in which the chapters were arranged thematically, and then they were grouped by issues about individuals, and then couples, and then groups. It got very complicated, and I thought the book is going to be nothing but cross-references. I went round and round to think about what is the best structure to present the material and to give the reader a valuable, hopefully memorable experience. And I had to go around and around to come back to the most obvious, most traditional way, which is one musical per chapter, in chronological order.
And for readers, that means they can start anywhere they want. They can start with the musical they know the best or the musical they know the least. Who knows? You can read them in any order that you want. And for me, it meant that the writing process was very focused, because I basically only had to have one show at a time in my head, but it has to really live in my head. For the first draft, it took about three weeks per chapter to read and think and write, read and think and write, but really living inside the bubble of each show for those three weeks.
I started writing in order. I started with Anyone Can Whistle and Gypsy. But then I jumped to Into the Woods, and then I went back to Pacific Overtures. So I reassured myself with a little bit of chronology at first, and then I went wherever my fancy took me. Assassins was the last chapter that I wrote, and maybe subconsciously I was trying to avoid his most controversial show, and a show whose themes are very disturbing and unsettling and very dark. I live in the UK, but I’m American, so US politics is never far from me. As we’re talking today, US politics seems to be never far from anybody. So that whole story has a kind of edgy resonance for me that I guess subconsciously I was trying to put off until the very end. But I’m glad Assassins was the last chapter I wrote, because I felt that I could tackle it with confidence and avoid the risk of making the show too comfortable, because I think it is the least comfortable of Sondheim’s shows.
And you need these particular routes that you’ve found into each show, because you could easily write an entire book on every single one of them. With Pacific Overtures, for example, you brilliantly lead us into that through your experience of the Take Me To The World 90th birthday celebration. Were there any shows for which it was particularly hard to find the key that might unlock a chapter-length exploration?
I felt confident in the process, which was to be really honest and upfront about what the deep personal issue is in each show—and that becomes my laser focus. Follies is about surviving your past; A Little Night Music is about dealing with regret; Gypsy is about being who you are, and in a way, overthrowing all the roles that other people want you to play. Company is about overcoming your fear of intimacy. And I’m hardly the first person to say these things, but I have tried to put those very intense, sometimes emotionally dangerous issues front and center.
The one that you’ve mentioned, Pacific Overtures, was conceptually a slightly tricky one, because the issue there is very abstract. This idea in “Someone in a Tree” that we are fragments of the day, that history is happening, as the song says, but somewhere else—not here. And it sounds like a very woolly theoretical concept, that you’re just a fragment and you’re part of a whole, so how do you make that personal and individual?And I realized that the best way to do that was essentially to lean on the song “Someone in a Tree,” because that’s what Sondheim does. He dramatizes the old man, his younger self, the warrior, and the reciter, and he dramatizes in such a memorable way what it feels like to be a part of the main event. And again, that’s a metaphor for every individual life. We all like to think of ourselves as the hero in the story of our life. We see the world as a story in which we are the main character—but “Someone in a Tree” says something else. Actually, none of us is the main character. There is a vaster, wider reality that is always there, and we’re just a part of it, like the pebble dropped into the water. So, that was the toughest one to make real for the individual reader. But fortunately, I was able to avail myself of Sondheim’s work, and in some sense, he did the job for me.
And I can’t resist asking this: you’ve written about Shakespeare a lot, and I wondered whether you might actually be the perfect person to ask about this idea that we hear again and again, that Sondheim is musical theatre’s Shakespeare. As someone who is deeply familiar with both figures, do you have any reflections on where the truth might lie in that comparison?
Mandy Patinkin, who knows a lot about Shakespeare and Sondheim, has said that very thing, that Sondheim is the Shakespeare of musical theatre. I actually wrote the book in Stratford-upon-Avon, because I had some Shakespeare things I was also doing. But I thought, for the very reason you suggest, that Stratford-upon-Avon is the perfect place to write a book about Stephen Sondheim, because he is a genius figure in the genre of musical theatre in the way that Shakespeare was and is in lyric drama, or tragedy, comedy, and history.
And it can sound glib. It can sound like idle praise. What’s behind it, I think, is that there is something about Shakespeare and something about Sondheim that goes right to the questions and issues and predicaments that support us, scare us, plague us, haunt us, encourage us in our lives. Whatever you are feeling, whatever you are fearing, whatever you are dreaming about, Shakespeare has something to say about that. And Sondheim has something to say about that. And I don’t think that’s glib at all. I think that is testament to the enduring substance and appeal of Shakespeare’s plays and Sondheim’s music and lyrics. As Hamlet says, they hold a mirror up to nature. They show us the shape and form and likeness of life itself, which is why people keep going back to see those works, in Shakespeare’s case, 400 years later. But remember, West Side Story was 1957. Company is 54 years old, and it feels like it was written yesterday, because the issues are timeless. Shakespeare and Sondheim represent the pinnacles of achievement in their respective genres.
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life is released worldwide on November 19. Find out more and pre-order/order the book by clicking here, or by clicking here if you’re in the UK.