Now You Grow

Maya Angelou, Stephen Sondheim, and the price of maturity

We’re obsessed with coming-of-age stories. They fill our books, our screens, our stages—tales of transformation, of innocence lost and wisdom gained. But these stories often simplify what it means to grow up. Maya Angelou, in conversation with journalist Bill Moyers, challenged this notion with an unflinching declaration:

Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs to love and lose, to dare and fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth.

The conversation aired as part of Moyers’ PBS series “World of Ideas,” but Angelou’s response, delivered with her characteristic blend of gravity and grace, would resonate far beyond that television studio. Her words cut through our comfortable assumptions, dismissing the conventional markers of maturity—credit scores, marriages, parenthood—as mere window dressing. These are just the trappings of getting older, she suggests, the superficial checkpoints of a life lived according to schedule. True growth demands a profound transformation, one that “costs the earth.”

Most striking is Angelou’s insistence on the genuine costs of emotional experience: loving, losing, daring, failing, and—perhaps most provocatively—succeeding. Real growth, she suggests, demands we engage with the full weight of our experiences, both painful and joyous, rather than simply surviving them. This isn’t about the surface-level prices we pay, but about the deeper transformation each experience demands of us—if we’re brave enough to let it transform us at all.

It’s this very territory—the costly terrain of emotional growth and its attendant transformations—that Stephen Sondheim and his various collaborators plumbed so deeply. Time after time, their characters grapple with precisely the kind of growth that Angelou describes: growth that demands everything, costs everything, changes everything.

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Consider the second act of Into the Woods, where Sondheim and Lapine’s fairy tale characters grow up in ways that both echo and complicate Angelou’s framework. These characters must face what Angelou might call the “truth of it”—the price of their choices, the weight of their responsibilities, the genuine cost of becoming who they need to be.

The Baker’s journey particularly emphasizes the distinction between getting older and growing up. When his wife dies, his first impulse is to run away, to abandon his child just as his own father once abandoned him. In the pivotal “No More,” he confronts this cycle of abandonment, this pattern of refusing the true cost of growth. The number begins with his plea for simplicity, for escape from responsibility: “No more questions, please / No more tests.” But the figure of his father—a presence that seems to emerge from memory or conscience—interrupts this fantasy of flight with words that echo Angelou’s insight about taking responsibility for the space we occupy: “They disappoint, they disappear, they die but they don’t...”

Like Angelou’s emphasis on what things cost “in truth,” these words foreground the capacity for our actions (or failures to act) to have consequences that outlive us. The unfinished thought hangs in the air like a ghost—just as the father’s actions have haunted the Baker’s life, just as our own failures to grow reverberate beyond our immediate sphere. The exchange between the Baker and his father reveals the generational price of refusing to grow up—the disappointments, the burdens, the mess left behind. When the Baker finally chooses to stay, to face his responsibilities, he embraces the full weight of what it means to take responsibility for the space he occupies.

What follows in “No More” is a complex meditation on running away—not just physically, but from the harder truth of what maturity demands. The father’s bitter experience infuses every line, culminating in the devastating observation that the further we run from responsibility, the more “undefined” we become:

Trouble is, son
The farther you run
The more you’ll feel undefined
For what you have left undone.
And, more, what you’ve left behind.

Here is Angelou’s distinction between mere aging and true growth made manifest: the understanding that escaping responsibility doesn’t free us, but rather leaves us increasingly formless, increasingly distant from our true selves.

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If the Baker’s journey shows us the pivotal moment of choosing growth, Sally Durant Plummer’s story in Follies reveals the devastating alternative. In “Losing My Mind,” we witness what Angelou might call the cost of not paying “the earth.” For decades, Sally has lived in what she believes is merely a state of waiting—for Ben, for her real life to begin, for the resolution of a story she’s been telling herself since youth. But what appears on the surface to be a traditional torch song of lost love reveals itself as something far more complex: the moment when refusing to grow up becomes no longer sustainable.

The conventional posture of “Losing My Mind” conceals something more complex. Sally’s seemingly simple proclamations of devotion gradually expose themselves as symptoms of psychological collapse. “The sun comes up, I think about you / The coffee cup, I think about you” may sound like standard love-song fare, but in Sally’s context, these words speak of a life that has refused Angelou’s challenge to “take responsibility for the time you take up.” Instead of growing through her experiences, Sally has spent decades mentally rewriting them.

In Follies, the other characters’ fantasy numbers (“Buddy’s Blues,” “The Story of Lucy and Jessie”, and “Live, Laugh, Love”) at least partly acknowledge the weight of time’s passage. “Losing My Mind” traps Sally in an eternal present of obsession. “I dim the lights and think about you” is thus a line that transcends the literal action it describes. By retreating into fantasy, Sally attempts to soften the harshness of her present, illuminating instead the illusion that sustains her.

Sally Durant Plummer embodies Angelou’s warning about the majority who “get older” without growing up, who never fully accept “responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy.” Sally’s tragedy is that the space she occupies remains largely imaginary—a dream of Ben’s apartment, a fantasy of a life unlived, a refusal to engage with the actual cost of her choices.

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While Sally’s story warns us of the cost of refusing growth, and the Baker’s tale shows us the price of choosing it, Sunday in the Park with George explores what Angelou would recognize as the rarer, costlier path: choosing to grow up by engaging fully with “what it costs us... to succeed.” We learn that true artistic growth—not just getting better at one’s craft, but genuinely maturing as an artist—demands precisely the kind of total engagement with reality that Angelou describes.

“Move On,” of course, isn’t about career advancement or achieving recognition. In Dot’s usage, it’s about fully inhabiting each moment of creation, about accepting that growth demands continuous engagement with uncertainty. “I chose and my world was shaken,” she tells George, “So what? / The choice may have been mistaken / The choosing was not.” Here is Angelou’s costly truth laid bare: real growth isn’t about avoiding mistakes but about taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences.

This meditation on artistic growth and responsibility finds its dark mirror in Merrily We Roll Along. If George must learn the cost of genuine artistic engagement, Franklin Shepard’s story shows us the price of evading it. Through its reverse chronology, Merrily reveals perhaps the highest cost of all: the price of success itself. And we come to understand that Frank’s chief failure might well be his refusal to recognize these costs as they mount.

When the young Frank sings of “worlds to change and worlds to win,” he has no idea that this endeavor will cost him his oldest friendships, his artistic integrity, and ultimately his capacity for genuine connection. Frank’s tragedy is not that he succeeds, but that he refuses to acknowledge what Angelou calls the “serious business” of that success—the responsibility for the emotional space he occupies in others’ lives.

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This tension between surface achievement and genuine growth finds perhaps its most poignant expression in A Little Night Music. As an aging actress still playing the same ingenue roles, still drifting through a life of casual affairs, Desiree Armfeldt initially seems to embody those who “get older” without truly growing up. But Sondheim’s best-known number, “Send in the Clowns,” offers us something remarkable. Through it, we are able to observe the precise moment when such a life becomes unsustainable.

Desiree, we might note, acknowledges not only Fredrik’s unavailability but her own newfound groundedness: “Me here at last on the ground / You in mid-air.” And might the very first words of this song carry a double meaning? “Isn’t it rich?” seems almost a throwaway remark—a wry, self-deprecating comment on the absurdity of her situation, a hallmark of Desiree’s dry wit. But it resonates too as an existential question: isn’t life rich? And isn’t it rich not only with irony but also with complexity?

“Send in the Clowns” lays bare the cost of genuine growth: the painful recognition of time’s passage, of opportunities missed, of the weight of one’s own choices. When Desiree sings “Don’t you love farce?”, she’s not just being ironically self-aware—she’s acknowledging what Angelou might call the “serious business” of finally seeing one’s life clearly. The clowns Desiree calls for never arrive because there’s no longer room for the kind of artificial performance that has characterized her life thus far. Instead, there’s only the stark reality of what Angelou terms “what it costs to love and lose.”

The final line of this number—“Well, maybe next year”—could be read as a retreat into Desiree’s old patterns of perpetual deferral. But in the broader context of her journey—and particularly in light of Angelou’s words—they suggest something else entirely: an acknowledgment that genuine growth can’t be rushed or forced. It requires, as Angelou suggests, taking full “responsibility for the time you take up,” even when that time involves waiting, even when it involves loss.

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These themes of costly transformation echo throughout Sondheim’s canon; we have touched on just a handful of examples in this essay. Consider Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, whose refusal to grow beyond her self-serving fantasies of domestic bliss leads to her ultimate destruction. Or Fosca in Passion, whose obsessive love might seem to resemble Sally’s, but instead forces both herself and Giorgio toward a profound, if devastating, emotional maturation.

Consider too Henrik in A Little Night Music, whose growth demands not just the shattering of his spiritual certainties, but the courage to claim his own desires—a journey that costs him his carefully constructed identity as both a student of theology and a son. His transformation from self-denying ascetic to someone capable of authentic passion represents a particular kind of costly growth, where one must take full responsibility for the space they occupy, even when that space scandalizes others.

Time and time again, Sondheim and his collaborators refuse to shy away from Angelou’s essential truth about the cost of genuine growth. These characters, whether they choose to pay the price or not, remind us that real maturation demands more than simply accumulating years. Through their journeys—their failures, their successes, their moments of choice and change—we see reflected our own struggles with the profound challenge Angelou articulates.

In Sondheim’s theatrical world, as in life, growing up truly does “cost the earth.” But his work suggests that the alternative—remaining frozen in patterns of avoidance, denial, or perpetual adolescence—exacts an even greater price.