Every year we lose some of the many threads that have made up the fabric of our lives. Recently, composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim shed his mortal coil. My home holds a lot of theater history in it. Both musicals and straight plays live on the bookshelves, on the walls, and in the conversations we have. Sondheim records hold a prime slot carved out of my parents’ vinyl collection. I’ve been lucky enough to see quite a few of his shows on Broadway, and those are memories and songs I have in my head and heart forever.
There are hundreds of songs by Sondheim that I could think of. Personally, I’m one of those Sweeney Todd folks who just cannot get over how good those songs are. But I do have one memory to share, something that has grown with me over the years. In the fall of 1987, Into The Woods opened on Broadway. Around Christmas time, a few weeks after it opened, my parents took me and my brothers to see it at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld Theatre) on 45th Street in Midtown, Manhattan. It wasn’t the first or second or even third musical we had seen live. I was about 12, and had one foot planted firmly in wanting to be a teenager and the other foot planted firmly in crying when I didn’t get to watch a TV show.
The promise of Into the Woods was that it wove the story of Grimm’s fairytales. My brothers and I always ended up loving the musicals that our parents took us to, but frequently the sell our parents had to do sounded, frankly, boring. Tell a 10-year-old that instead of seeing CATS, promoted religiously on local New York City television, you were going to see a musical about the unfinished manuscript of Charles Dickens’ last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and you weren’t going to receive the same enthusiasm out of us little ones. But Into the Woods was something we could understand, and the stories were ones we all liked.
The musical, if you do not already know it, works in two parts: The first is weaving together some of the famed Grimm fairytales of Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, the baker and his wife, Jack and the Giant Beanstalk, Cinderella and a witch. It is very clever and moving and funny and makes fun of the fairytales in a way I could understand at the time. The second half of the play is “ever after.” It is the dark and unintended consequences of everyone receiving their wishes from the stories we all grew up hearing and reading.
Towards the end of the first act, Rapunzel’s witch mother (the witch for all of the stories is the same, and was played when I saw it by Bernadette Peters) discovers that a prince has been secretly visiting Rapunzel high in her tower. We all knew the story of Rapunzel and her magically long hair, and as a child the only interest we had was Rapunzel freeing herself and (depending on whether or not your parents read you the unadulterated Grimm fairytale with the blinding and wandering) finding love with her prince. But Sondheim used this story to talk about something more, and he did so by asking a singular question: Why? Why does the witch keep Rapunzel high up in a tower?
Before Rapunzel rejects her witch mother only to have her hair cut off, the witch sings a song called “Stay With Me.” I remember being so deeply moved in a way I had not ever been moved before. Perhaps it was that first taste of the sadness that life and change bring finding purchase in my developing mind. I didn’t realize it at the time, as I was standing on the precipice of becoming a teenager, soon to be fighting with my mother and father all the time in an attempt at carving out my identity, but all of the empathy I felt for Peters in that moment would elude me for the next decade. The power of Peters’ refrain:
Stay at home
I am home
Who out there could love you more than I?
What out there that I cannot supply?
Stay with me
Stay with me
The world is dark and wild
Stay a child while you can be a child
With me
I am now a parent of two children, both of whom are growing up far too quickly for my personal liking, and while I hope to never hold on to something so tightly that I lose it, I can’t help but feel that in those lines and music and Peters’ performance remains an encapsulation of all our lives’ sublimely painful, exhilarating, frightening, beautiful, and ultimately ephemeral experience together.