How Sondheim Can Change Your Life

Schoch (Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage), a theater director and professor of drama at the University of Belfast, provides a generous reading of composer and lyricist Sondheim’s (1930–2021) variegated musical productions. What results is a show-by-show look at the human condition with its unpredictable ups and downs (more often downs, in Sondheim’s works). Listeners and viewers respond to how a work of art speaks to them, makes them feel, and helps them accept their own lives. Readers may not come to Schoch’s conclusions in each instance, as it’s a very personal book for him, but the author’s respect for and delight in Sondheim’s multihued, thoughtful, and fascinating productions ring true, as does his take on what’s at stake in these shows. From 1971’s Follies to 1987’s Into the Woods, Sondheim’s glorious musicals explore the possibilities and toil of human living: how past, present, and future intertwine, and how realized living inevitably diverges from expectation. Seldom are all hopes fulfilled. How, then, shall we live? Writes Schoch, we don’t escape life; we confront it.