He wrote great shows, but Stephen Sondheim was also a mentor, a teacher and an audience regular.
In the fictionalized movie version of his life, Jonathan Larson ignores the ringing phone and lets the answering machine pick up.
Sondheim scripted that voice mail for the film himself, and goodness knows he’d had decades of practice, offering just the right words to buoy the spirits of Larson and countless other young artists.
After Sondheim died, Twitter was flooded with images of them.
SONDHEIM CULTIVATED the field by founding the Young Playwrights Festival, where the theater and television writer Zakiyyah Alexander recalls him having “a proud dad vibe” about her and the other teenage winners.
The composer Jeanine Tesori, who spent many hours alongside Sondheim as the supervising vocal producer on the new “West Side Story” movie, got her first letter from him in the 1980s, when she was just out of college.
But what he did was acknowledge that he had gotten it, and he returned it.
In an art form that is so much about being present for the unrepeatable moment, he not only showed up, but he also often did so to experience work that was offbeat and obscure, challenging conventions just as his own work did.
“He made the effort to stay and talk to us and see our eyes get wide and let us ask him a couple questions,” she said.
But Sondheim, far too famous simply to blend into an audience, was cautious about making such appearances.
However much that theatergoing nourished him, as it nourishes all of us when the work is good, it was also frequently an obligation, and he fulfilled it diligently.
“I entered back into New York theater sort of tiptoeing and frightened and not sure whether there was a space for me,” Nottage said.
SONDHEIM’S LETTERS generally weren’t long, but it’s the little things, right? Except that the little things combine to eat up who knows how many hours of a life.
We nonetheless could, artists and audience members alike, seek to borrow from his example — by being adventurous, by being generous, by showing up.