Lifestyle
Stephen Sondheim is cool now
Here We Are was not yet in previews when Sondheim died. It is playing at The Shed in New York.
Emilio Madrid/Here We Are
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Emilio Madrid/Here We Are
Here We Are was not yet in previews when Sondheim died. It is playing at The Shed in New York.
Emilio Madrid/Here We Are
Stephen Sondheim — composer-lyricist for A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and more than a dozen other musicals — is having “a moment” as one of his Into the Woods lyrics might have put it.
Or perhaps a better fit for the Broadway legend, who was widely regarded as brilliant but an acquired taste when he died in 2021, would be a tweak to a lyric from the song “Children and Art” in Sunday in the Park with George:
“There he is, there he is, there he is,
Sondheim is everywhere,
Broadway must love him so much.”
Indeed, the hottest ticket on the Great White Way at the moment, judging from what people are willing to pay for it, is Sondheim’s notoriously troubled musical-that-goes-backwards, Merrily We Roll Along.
Its original Broadway run was a snappily disastrous 16 performances after it opened, and it has never entirely worked until now. But it’s currently playing to SRO crowds and standing ovations at Broadway’s Hudson Theater.
Meanwhile, the hottest ticket Off-Broadway, and already the longest running show ever to play at Manhattan’s new venue The Shed, is Here We Are, the musical Sondheim was still working on when he died.
Also playing to capacity crowds in New York, his penny-dreadful horror tale Sweeney Todd, starring Josh Groban at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. London’s petite Menier Chocolate Factory has Pacific Overtures. And on tour in the U.S. is a gender-reversed revival of Company, the last show the composer-lyricist saw before he died.
Side by Side by Side
All of the revivals were less successful in their original runs in the 1970s and ’80s. As I’ve been catching them, I can’t help thinking how pleased Sondheim would be — pleased and a bit surprised, no doubt — and wishing I could hear him talk about them, especially that new show, Here We Are.
And then, I discovered I could.
“I think the idea,” says his unmistakable growl on a scratchy cellphone recording, “is to do it in the spring of ’18.”
D.T. Max interviewed Sondheim several times in 2017 and 2018 for a New Yorker profile that he turned into a book — Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim was working at the time on what would become Here We Are, or rather, on its first half, which is based on the surrealist Luis Buñuel comedy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, about three couples searching everywhere for a place to eat.
“There is a complete score [for that first act],” he tells Max in the recording, “but I want to add and tweak. Second act there’s a complete draft of the book [by David Ives based on Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel] and I’ve just begun the score.”
Art isn’t easy
Max had recorded his in-person interviews on his cellphone, and while the sound quality isn’t all one might wish, the conversations are intriguing. For instance, this, about how a producer’s stray remark decades ago planted the seed for Here We Are:
“It stems from a remark Hal Prince made in a cab once,” remembers Sondheim. “We were looking out at night — coming back from the theater or something — and he said, ‘Y’know what the dominant form of entertainment is? Eating out.’ Because all the restaurants were lit up and that’s what people were doing. They weren’t going to the theater, they were eating. And I thought, ‘Gee what an interesting idea.’ And I didn’t immediately think ‘oh that would make a musical’ but somehow, on seeing Discreet Charm…”
A scene from Here We Are.
Emilio Madrid/Here We Are
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Emilio Madrid/Here We Are
What Sondheim put to music and to his characteristically witty lyrics, was the frustration of diners who are perpetually being told they will not be getting food, or even coffee.
“We have no mocha.
We’re also out of latte.
We do expect a little latte later,
But we haven’t got a lotta latte now”
“I’m still feeling my way,” says the songwriter, “because it isn’t the kind of tight story that something like Sweeney or Merrily is. There are six main characters and they interact, but there’s very little plot.”
Opening Doors
There’s plenty of plot in his other shows — almost too much sometimes. Back in 1981, audiences got confused by the time-going-backwards thing in Merrily We Roll Along, and also couldn’t keep its characters straight. The original production tried to clear up who-was-who with T-shirts saying things like “Best Pal.”
The current production has a better trick: It cast Harry Potter‘s Daniel Radcliffe as the best pal; it’s easy for audiences to keep him straight. He’s playing a budding writer of musicals in the 1950s and ’60s — exactly what Sondheim was back then.
Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe in Merrily We Roll Along.
Matthew Murphy/Merrily We Roll Along
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Matthew Murphy/Merrily We Roll Along
“It relates to my life,” Sondheim tells Max. “It’s not about my life but it relates.” When asked how seeing a Merrily production generally hits him, he says that remembering the frantic, gotta-put-on-a-show craziness of his youth gets to him every time, especially the deep-in-rehearsal-panic lyric, “We’ll worry about it on Sunday.”
“I always cry,” he tells Max. “‘We’ll worry about it on Sunday’ always makes me cry.”
That song is called “Opening Doors,” and its next lyric is “we’re opening doors, singing ‘here we are’….”
And here we are, four decades later, with his final show — called Here We Are — feeling like a valedictory victory-lap, filled with references to his earlier work.
Finishing the hat
The man who wrote a song (and a book of lyrics) called “Finishing the Hat,” never finished that second act — in librettist Ives and director Joe Mantello’s hands, music disappearing from the characters’ lives becomes a plot point — but his legacy is secure. He talks in Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim about feeling low energy, and even old-fashioned.
“The kind of music I write has nothing to do with pop music since the mid-’50s,” he notes.
When gently reminded that he’s regarded as a genius who’s altered an art form, he deflects the compliment by citing “Stravinsky, Gershwin, Picasso” and saying he doesn’t belong in their company.
He may have been the only person who thought that. But anyway, it’s not up to him — posterity gets to decide who belongs in the genius pantheon.
And with stars and directors clamoring to do his shows and audiences embracing them as never before, the early verdict is clear: Stephen Sondheim’s work — all of it — is, as Merrily‘s characters sing of the show that came out of all those frantic rehearsals…
“a surefire, genuine,
Walk-away blockbuster,
Lines down to Broadway,
Boffola, sensational,
Box-office lollapalooza,
gargantuan hit!”
This story was edited for broadcast and digital by Jennifer Vanasco, and produced for radio by Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento.
On-air challenge
Every year around this time I present a “new names in the news” quiz. I’m going to give you some names that you’d probably never heard before 2025 but that were prominent in the news during the past 12 months. You tell me who or what they are.
1. Zohran Mamdani
2. Karoline Leavitt
3. Mark Carney
4. Robert Francis Prevost (hint: Chicago)
5. Jeffrey Goldberg (hint: The Atlantic)
6. Sanae Takaichi
7. Nameless raccoon, Hanover County, Virginia
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Think of a two-syllable word in four letters. Add two letters in front and one letter behind to make a one-syllable word in seven letters. What words are these?
Challenge answer
Ague –> Plagued / Plagues / Leagues
Winner
Calvin Siemer of Henderson, Nev.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge is a numerical one from Ed Pegg Jr., who runs the website mathpuzzle.com. Take the nine digits — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You can group some of them and add arithmetic operations to get 2011 like this: 1 + 23 ÷ 4 x 5 x 67 – 8 + 9. If you do these operations in order from left to right, you get 2011. Well, 2011 was 15 years ago. Can you group some of the digits and add arithmetic symbols in a different way to make 2026? The digits from 1 to 9 need to stay in that order. I know of two different solutions, but you need to find only one of them.
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, January 8 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
Daniel Tosh
Sells Lake Tahoe Home for Millions
Published
Daniel Tosh has officially sold his sprawling Lake Tahoe compound but the comedian isn’t leaving the area … TMZ has learned.
Real estate sources tell us the 7-bedroom, 7-bath estate officially closed Friday for $10.75 million, and Tosh bought another property across the lake to be closer to friends, which is why he decided to sell.
The gated estate, located on the pristine west shore between Tahoe City and Sunnyside, sprawls across 1.6 acres and features three distinct homes, each with its own character and charm.
The Upper House is the ultimate entertainer’s dream … 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, elevator, game room, industrial ice cream maker, 4-car garage, hot tub, fire pit, bocce and horseshoe pits, and sprawling lawns with breathtaking lake views.
The Middle House keeps classic Tahoe charm alive with knotty pine interiors, 3 bedrooms, 3 baths, a stone fireplace, skylit kitchen, and steam shower — perfect for unwinding after a day on the lake.
The lakeside cabin is a serene retreat with a studio loft, retro kitchenette, modern bathroom, and French doors opening right onto the lake.
Altogether, the property boasts 93 feet of lake frontage, two buoys, and multiple outdoor spaces for fun and relaxation.
Daniel may be moving, but one thing’s clear … he’s still very much a Lake Tahoe guy, just on the other side of the lake now.
Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield.
Netflix
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Netflix
Yes, there are spoilers ahead for the final episode of Stranger Things.
On New Year’s Eve, the very popular Netflix show Stranger Things came to an end after five seasons and almost 10 years. With actors who started as tweens now in their 20s, it was probably inevitable that the tale of a bunch of kids who fought monsters would wind down. In the two-plus-hour finale, there was a lot of preparation, then there was a final battle, and then there was a roughly 40-minute epilogue catching up with our heroes 18 months later. And how well did it all work? Let’s talk about it.
Worked: The final battle
The strongest part of the finale was the battle itself, set in the Abyss, in which the crew battled Vecna, who was inside the Mind Flayer, which is, roughly speaking, a giant spider. This meant that inside, Eleven could go one-on-one with Vecna (also known as Henry, or One, or Mr. Whatsit) while outside, her friends used their flamethrowers and guns and flares and slingshots and whatnot to take down the Mind Flayer. (You could tell that Nancy was going to be the badass of the fight as soon as you saw not only her big gun, but also her hair, which strongly evoked Ripley in the Alien movies.) And of course, Joyce took off Vecna’s head with an axe while everybody remembered all the people Vecna has killed who they cared about. Pretty good fight!
Did not work: Too much talking before the fight
As the group prepared to fight Vecna, we watched one scene where the music swelled as Hopper poured out his feelings to Eleven about how she deserved to live and shouldn’t sacrifice herself. Roughly 15 minutes later, the music swelled for a very similarly blocked and shot scene in which Eleven poured out her feelings to Hopper about why she wanted to sacrifice herself. Generally, two monologues are less interesting than a conversation would be. Elsewhere, Jonathan and Steve had a talk that didn’t add much, and Will and Mike had a talk that didn’t add much (after Will’s coming-out scene in the previous episode), both while preparing to fight a giant monster. It’s not that there’s a right or wrong length for a finale like this, but telling us things we already know tends to slow down the action for no reason. Not every dynamic needed a button on it.
Worked: Dungeons & Dragons bringing the group together
It was perhaps inevitable that we would end with a game of D&D, just as we began. But now, these kids are feeling the distance between who they are now and who they were when they used to play together. The fact that they still enjoy each other’s company so much, even when there are no world-shattering stakes, is what makes them seem the most at peace, more than a celebratory graduation. And passing the game off to Holly and her friends, including the now-included Derek, was a very nice touch.
Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers, Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler, Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, and Joe Keery as Steve Harrington.
Netflix
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Netflix
Did not work: Dr. Kay, played by Linda Hamilton
It seemed very exciting that Stranger Things was going to have Linda Hamilton, actual ’80s action icon, on hand this season playing Dr. Kay, the evil military scientist who wanted to capture and kill Eleven at any cost. But she got very little to do, and the resolution to her story was baffling. After the final battle, after the Upside Down is destroyed, she believes Eleven to be dead. But … then what happened? She let them all call taxis home, including Hopper, who killed a whole bunch of soldiers? Including all the kids who now know all about her and everything she did? All the kids who ventured into the Abyss are going to be left alone? Perfect logic is certainly not anybody’s expectation, but when you end a sequence with your entire group of heroes at the mercy of a band of violent goons, it would be nice to say something about how they ended up not at the mercy of said goons.
Worked: Needle drops
Listen, it’s not easy to get one Prince song for your show, let alone two: “Purple Rain” and “When Doves Cry.” When the Duffer Brothers say they needed something epic, and these songs feel epic, they are not wrong. There continues to be a heft to the Purple Rain album that helps to lend some heft to a story like this, particularly given the period setting. “Landslide” was a little cheesy as the lead-in to the epilogue, but … the epilogue was honestly pretty cheesy, so perhaps that’s appropriate.
Did not work: The non-ending
As to whether Eleven really died or is really just backpacking in a foreign country where no one can find her, the Duffer Brothers, who created the show, have been very clear that the ending is left up to you. You can think she’s dead, or you can think she’s alive; they have intentionally not given the answer. It’s possible to write ambiguous endings that work really well, but this one felt like a cop-out, an attempt to have it both ways. There’s also a real danger in expanding characters’ supernatural powers to the point where they can make anything seem like anything, so maybe much of what you saw never happened. After all, if you don’t know that did happen, how much else might not have happened?
This piece also appears in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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