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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode MY FIRST SONDHEIM. Today's episode is going to be a little different. As I record this, it's been just five days since it was announced that Stephen Sondheim had died, and as it happened, my friend, colleague, and frequent co-host and contributor to Broadway Nation, Albert Evans, was spending the Thanksgiving weekend with me, and so we were together when this news began to break and during the incredible reaction and response to this loss over the days that followed.

The coverage of Sondheim's life and legacy in both traditional and social media has been phenomenal, including four full pages in the New York Times, extended tributes on TV, radio, and in other newspapers, trending on Twitter, and a near total domination of all theater-related media and social media. All of this richly deserved, of course, but still somewhat unexpected for someone who was primarily a theater artist. I think this reveals the often hidden and seriously underestimated importance and impact of the Broadway musical to American and even world culture. Most of the time, the media simply ignores Broadway, but once in a while, the Broadway musical breaks through and demonstrates how really ingrained it is in the fabric of our lives.

Of course, Sondheim has been mentioned countless times over the 46 episodes of this podcast, and 16 of those episodes have focused in major ways on his life and his work, and I'll point you toward a few of those at the end of this episode. But today, rather than talk about Sondheim's one-of-a-kind place in the history of the Broadway musical and his impact on the form, as we've done in so many other episodes, Albert and I took our inspiration from the many personal memories that people have been posting and sharing about their own interactions with Sondheim, and especially how his shows and his songs have impacted and affected their lives. So before the weekend was over, Albert and I decided to switch on the microphone and look back at the very first times that the artistry of Stephen Sondheim entered our lives.

Albert, obviously everyone's thinking about Sondheim right now. What was the very first time that you had any understanding of Stephen Sondheim as a name, as a person, as a writer, in any way, shape, or form?

[2:34] Albert Evans: Oh my god. I think it was probably the soundtrack album of West Side Story. I started listening to cast albums and collecting them in the late 50s.

[2:47] David Armstrong: When you were a child, just to clarify.

[2:49] Albert Evans: I was a child. And from cast albums, I got into the habit of reading all the credits, you know, the way you do. And so I'm pretty sure that from, again, the movie soundtrack recording credits, that's when I saw that it had lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein, who I knew already from, of course, the Young People's Concerts and all that. And this movie comes out in 1961.

[3:24] David Armstrong: And you would be how old?

[3:26] Albert Evans: I would have turned 13 that year, in the middle of that year. And it was a sensation. Everyone had that album, all the people I knew in high school.

[3:34] David Armstrong: You're not in New York, you're in Columbus, Ohio.

[3:36] Albert Evans: I'm in Columbus, Ohio, where my family didn't go to movies very much. So I actually didn't see the movie until much later. But I loved these records. I would go up, you know, in my room and play them and carry on.

[3:46] Albert Evans: Officer Grumpy, we're down on our knees. Cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease. Officer Grumpy, what are we to do? Officer Grumpy, grump you!

[4:04] Albert Evans: So I'm pretty sure that's when I first heard of Stephen Sondheim. And I was dazzled by the lyrics, because, you know, I liked poetry when I was a kid, I was kind of a very geeky kid. And I was amazed at how clever they were, how much like light verse they were, and how they told the story. You could, you know, read the synopsis on the album and then just listen to the album and you would get the story. It was like having a movie in your mind. But the thing about the soundtrack album is that as I've grown older and gotten to know the original cast album from the Broadway production, I actually much prefer that one because it's so theatrical. It's so gripping. The voices are more raw. Everything just seems more intense and immediate. But the music of the movie is extremely well sung, extremely well produced. And the orchestrations are twice as big. Anyway, I loved the soundtrack recording. And then later I grew to love the original cast recording.

[5:00] David Armstrong: So that's your first awareness of the name Stephen Sondheim.

[5:03] Albert Evans: Exactly. And it's not like he was a public figure at that time. He wasn't on all the talk shows. He wasn't even mentioned in some of the reviews. And then probably the next Sondheim experience I had was Gypsy, the cast album of Gypsy. But I don't think I was one of the first to get that because I didn't have the one that had the white cover and the sort of cartoon. I had the one that had all the different color pictures. I guess they thought that would sell it more or something. So I didn't have the original pressing. But that album, of course, came out before the movie West Side Story, but you just didn't acquire that album until afterward.

[5:37] David Armstrong: I just think if I had, I would have had that original cover.

[5:41] Albert Evans: Right. And that's not the one that I had. And I loved that. I mean, talk about theatrical.

[5:45] Albert Evans: I had a dream, a dream about you, baby. It's gonna come true, baby. They think that we're through, but baby.

[6:00] Albert Evans: I thought that was so terrific. I love Julie Stein's music. And it really, to me, it was when Sondheim really blossomed as an extremely confident lyricist. I thought in West Side, I don't have quibbles about his lyrics. I'm fine with I Feel Pretty, but it doesn't all sound like he's sure about everything, to me. Maybe I'm just reading into it now from hindsight.

[6:23] David Armstrong: Well, and of course, some of the lyrics are actually Bernstein's lyrics that he inherited and tweaked and rewrote. Bernstein started writing the lyrics, and some of those lyrics are still in the show, from what I understand.

[6:33] Albert Evans: Yeah, they are. And the Gypsy album, of course, is one of the great, great cast albums of all time. And then presumably, you didn't see the movie of Gypsy, either, which would have been around that same time.

[6:43] Albert Evans: Yeah, I didn't see it till maybe the 70s. We weren't a movie-going family, and Columbus was not a big movie-going city. So these things weren't big events. The big event was in my bedroom, me playing these records.

[6:59] David Armstrong: That's another podcast.

[7:00] Albert Evans: Yeah, that's for another time.

[7:03] David Armstrong: So you're starting to put these names together. You know, Sondheim did that, and that same Sondheim did this. That's the kind of nerdy little boy you are.

[7:10] Albert Evans: Yeah, and that at least gave me two things to compare and go, oh, what he does is this and that. And the other thing, he's extremely clever. He tells the story. He can be really, really funny, which he didn't have much of a chance to do in West Side Story. And it sounded like he was just really writing in his own voice with Gypsy, that it was about show business. It was about entertainment, in addition to all the other things that it was about. So he could let himself loose.

[7:38] David Armstrong: The advice that comes so often is write what you know, as we see at the end of Tick, Tick, Boom, actually. And Sondheim knew show business much more than he knew gang warfare. So that's probably one of the reasons why it sounds so confident and so in his voice.

[7:52] David Armstrong: So then jumping forward, what's your next experience? We're going to talk about your first show on Broadway in just a couple of minutes, but did you see any productions of Sondheim prior to seeing one of his shows on Broadway?

[8:05] Albert Evans: In Columbus, we had a big summer theater organization. I think we've talked about this before.

[8:10] David Armstrong: Kenley Players.

[8:11] Albert Evans: Yeah, Kenley Players. And they would do fast, but often very, very good mountings of recent Broadway shows. And one of them was West Side Story. They did a really good West Side Story. I forget who directed it, but I think it was someone who was involved with the original production.

[8:26] David Armstrong: Was that your first experience seeing West Side Story on the stage?

[8:29] Albert Evans: Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure it was.

[8:31] David Armstrong: And what do you remember about that production?

[8:33] Albert Evans: I just remember thinking, wow, this is a really good show. It was powerful. It moved people in the audience and, you know, the Kenley Player audience didn't come to be moved. They came to see lots of spangles and...

[8:45] David Armstrong: Stars.

[8:46] Albert Evans: Yeah, stars and spangles and people sometimes doing their own material in the middle of a Broadway musical.

[8:52] David Armstrong: Albert and I both grew up going to see Kenley Players' star stock productions, which played in three cities in Ohio. I attended them in Dayton and Albert in Columbus. And what he is alluding to here is producer John Kenley's frequent habit of adding songs to shows that weren't originally written for those shows, or even by the same writers. For example, I saw a production of She Loves Me at Kenley Players, starring Jack Jones. And that year, his hit single of What I Did for Love was on the charts. So in the second act of She Loves Me, Jack Jones came out and sang What I Did for Love. And I also remember seeing Shirley Jones in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, and for some bizarre reason, she opened the second act singing the title song from Dear World.

I'll never understand why. I can only imagine that Lerner and Lane were happy to cash the royalty checks and that Jerry Herman never knew anything about it. But now let's go back to Albert's discovery of Sondheim.

[9:51] Albert Evans: The next album I was familiar with was Forum, and I loved it. It took me a while to get used to it because it's so brittle, and it's not tuneful in the way I had gotten used to My Fair Lady or even Lil' Abner, which you know has great tunes. But I quickly took to it. It's really funny. I like the sort of snarky, almost like Mad Magazine quality of anything is open for satire and a laugh, and some of it was naughty, and I loved it. And then I saw a very good production of Forum a few years later at Otterbein College in a suburb of Columbus, and they had a very good drama department there, and they put on really good productions of musicals. And I saw it and laughed myself silly. I still think it's one of the funniest books that's ever been written.

[10:39] David Armstrong: In episode 23, which is titled Everything Old is New Again, The Modern Era of Broadway Part 3, Albert and I discuss a trip that he took to New York while he was in college, and during which he had the unforgettable experience of seeing the original off-Broadway production of Dames at Sea, the show that made Bernadette Peters a star and coincidentally would eventually lead to her creating leading roles in two Sondheim shows, and she would also star in a revival of what was not just Albert's first Sondheim on Broadway, but also his very first experience of seeing a Broadway show.

[11:12] David Armstrong: Was that the same trip?

[11:13] Albert Evans: You know, I don't know, because we went on two or three different trips. A college group from the theater department would go sometimes to entertain at alumni banquets and sometimes just to take a well-deserved trip to New York City. And all together I saw, probably over the course of two trips, I saw Dames at Sea, Promenade, and A Little Night Music. And A Little Night Music was my first Broadway show.

[11:46] David Armstrong: The first show you see on Broadway.

[11:47] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[11:48] David Armstrong: That's a good way to start.

[11:49] Albert Evans: Well, I was dazzled, let's face it. And I got the very mistaken impression that this is what all Broadway shows were going to be like. Did you see the original cast? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw everyone. And it was perfect. And by this point, I even knew like Smiles of a Summer Night. I was in the Film Society at college. So I had much more perspective on just what this is. You had probably read a lot about Sondheim in the meantime. Yeah. And I assume that you had the album to Company and New Company. So when you went in to see A Little Night Music, you knew what you were going to see. Yeah. And I had read all about it. And by this point, Sondheim was actually becoming a big deal. Right. He was newsworthy.

Well, he'd already done Company and Follies. So that was a lot of articles in the New Yorker or wherever you were reading. He'd be on the cover of Time Magazine. Exactly. So what's your impression of being in that theater, seeing A Little Night Music? Well, I remember when those leader singers came out at the beginning, you know, and they did that sort of sung medley of night waltzes that we were going to hear. And that made me sit up and think, this is going to be adult. But I think that's probably what I thought to myself. This is an adult show. This isn't going to be ankles away. Not that I saw ankles away until much later. I remember the performances vividly, and I think you can see them in your mind's eye just by listening to that album.

But I loved the way it looked. It was beautiful. It was elegant. And yet there was a spareness to it. The sets weren't any more than they needed to be. And the trees on those plexiglass panels that would sort of move around, it was just enough. It didn't try to convince you that you were looking at any kind of reality. It was just giving you a framework to understand the story. And I thought that was very sophisticated because Kenley players would have just made it look like you were there and here's the sun going down. But no, it's not. Talk about the performances. I guess the one that stood out most for me was Glynnis Johns, because she just commanded the stage. I think more than anyone, even than Hermione Gingold, who was basically just doing her own show, but was incredibly entertaining.

But Glynnis Johns just seemed like such a pro. You knew exactly who her character was, but she never pushed it. She held things in reserve that made you lean forward in your chair, like, what's she up to now? And then her voice is just so fascinating. I probably only experienced her from Mary Poppins at that point, where I loved her too. And she has that funny voice. And then I remember the boy, because I think I had a crush on him, who was that Mark Lambert? Mark Lambert, playing Henrik. Yeah, playing the moody cello boy. And I just thought, oh, I want to meet the moody cello boy. Well, you were perfect for him at that point. Yeah, I was the right age. The older men were, as they're supposed to be, like a little doll.

But I realized they were very good actors, and they were doing a great job. And of course, you're seeing it through the eyes of a 20-year-old. Yeah, yeah. So I'm mostly interested in the younger people.

[15:19] Albert Evans: And the glamorous star.

[15:20] Albert Evans: Yeah, and the glamorous star. And Countess, she was fantastic.

[15:25] Albert Evans: Tell us about Hermione Gingold.

[15:27] Albert Evans: I probably knew her best of anyone in the cast, because of course—

[15:30] Albert Evans: The Music Man.

[15:31] Albert Evans: Yeah.

[15:32] Albert Evans: Gigi, or any of her great movie roles.

[15:34] Albert Evans: Yeah, or even her bad movie roles. She was in a lot of movies. She was like Terry Thomas.

[15:40] Albert Evans: She was always popping up.

[15:41] Albert Evans: That's true.

[15:42] Albert Evans: And I liked her, because she was a clown. And I remember being kind of impressed that she wasn't as clownish as I thought she would be.

[15:46] Albert Evans: You expected a much broader performance.

[15:51] Albert Evans: Yeah, and she dialed it back to 10, I would say, from her usual 12 or 15. And she was delightful.

[15:58] Albert Evans: Was there one particular number that stuck in your head?

[16:01] Albert Evans: Was there a musical moment that just was—

[16:04] Albert Evans: I think Weekend in the Country was just so dazzling. Everything about it.

[16:28] Albert Evans: It just builds and builds and builds, and then all of a sudden, Shallow Boy is going, A weekend in the country, the bees in their hives. The shallow world re-figures the frivolous lives.

[17:03] Albert Evans: The devil's companions know not whom they serve. It might be instructive to observe.

[17:10] Albert Evans: And then it goes back to being, Yay, a weekend in the country. It's just built beautifully.

[17:27] Albert Evans: And it tells the story. It's not just a celebration. It's not like it's today or something. It just takes over the story. And that's rare when an extended, complicated, contrapuntal number can actually register with the audience as strongly as that did.

[17:33] Albert Evans: It's a great, amazingly constructed musical sequence that also stops the show.

[17:42] Albert Evans: But that one does both things.

[17:44] Albert Evans: And it stops the first act.

[17:46] Albert Evans: It has to stop the show, but it has to earn that position.

[17:49] Albert Evans: But it totally does. It just leaves you with a bang.

[17:52] Albert Evans: And had you heard the album beforehand?

[17:54] Albert Evans: That's what I can't remember. I think I had. By then I was, well, I was a fan of anything Broadway, but especially Sondheim. I'd even heard Anyone Can Whistle.

[18:04] Albert Evans: And if a new album had come out, you probably would have gotten it the minute it came out.

[18:07] Albert Evans: Yeah, that would be the first thing that I would buy.

[18:10] Albert Evans: I would eat saltines for lunch so that I could buy a nice Columbia LP.

[18:16] Albert Evans: So by then I considered myself pretty darn sophisticated because I'd been to New York and seen the latest Stephen Sondheim show.

[18:28] Albert Evans: Don't go away. Albert's going to turn the tables on me right after this quick break.

[18:38] Albert Evans: Well, now that I've exposed my entire early life, what was the first time you remember Sondheim in big lights?

[18:47] David Armstrong: That's a good question. I was certainly singing Stephen Sondheim's lyrics from a very, very early age, but I don't think, I know I didn't have any awareness of the name Stephen Sondheim or him as a person until much later, but I'm 10 years younger than you are.

[19:02] David Armstrong: Yeah, you're in a different decade.

[19:04] David Armstrong: On another episode, I tell the story, which I won't repeat here, but I'll encourage you to go back and listen to it. It's on the final episode of the first season about being taken to see the movie of Gypsy when I'm four or five years old and becoming completely obsessed with that movie and then demanding to have the soundtrack album and spending hours and hours when I'm four and five and six and seven and eight, putting that album on and acting it out and doing all the parts. So I was singing the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim from as long as I can remember. I don't really remember when I became aware of West Side Story. When the movie came out, I would be too young. So probably I saw it for the first time on television, I assume, probably the first time it came on television.

But even then, I'm sure I didn't put together that the same person wrote those lyrics. I don't know how aware I was even then of songwriters or the different roles that people played. I was just a little too young for that. But I continued that connection to Gypsy, especially because when I was nine or ten or eleven, I was in a community theater production of Gypsy playing one of the newsboys. And, you know, of course, when you're a kid in a show, you memorize every single word that every person in the entire show says. I knew it backwards and forwards.

[20:21] Albert Evans: It's so easy.

[20:21] David Armstrong: Yeah. And then actually the year I got my equity card, jumping ahead quite a bit to the year I turned 18, actually, I was just barely old enough to work professionally, was at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera in the full season. And the first show was Gypsy. And in that production, I played the back end of the cow, which I was, you know, a little disappointed about at first. But then I actually got some acclaim because I made it pretty funny. I remember the choreographer coming and saying, that's pretty funny. That's good. So I added that little sense of humor to the cow's rear end. Here she is, boys. Here she is, world.

[21:01] David Armstrong: Here's Ro.

[21:06] David Armstrong: Dolores Gray was the star of that production, who had replaced Angela Lansbury in that first revival in London before it came to Broadway. And she was sensational.

[21:21] David Armstrong: Truly, amazingly sensational. So, of course, by then I knew who Stephen Sondheim was. One of the experiences I will never forget, so going back now about four years, the summer I turned 15, so I would be 14 at this point, early in the spring of that year, I went to audition to be an apprentice on the Showboat Majestic, which was the last of the original showboats, built in 1924, which by this point in the 70s was owned by the University of Cincinnati and was used as their college summer stock theater. It was a big deal in Cincinnati to go to the Showboat, and I was auditioning to be a high school intern. We called it apprentices in those days, which I like much better than intern, because it means that you're studying at the feet of other people who know what they're doing.

So I went to the Showboat to audition, and the first show of the season was in rehearsal. So I was told to just go sit in the theater and wait until the rehearsal was over, and then I would get my audition. This was April or May of 1973, and it's a little hard to imagine if you've never been there, but the balcony of the Showboat was not used to seat audience members, but instead was where the band was situated for all of the productions. And so as I took my seat to wait for my audition, which was going to happen during the dinner break, the entire cast was gathered in the balcony around the piano rehearsing what I would soon discover was the opening number from Company. But at that moment I had no idea what it was, and I will never forget just sitting there and hearing that incredible music and lyrics for the very first time.

[23:04] David Armstrong: I certainly was not very aware of Stephen Sondheim at that point. It's possible though that I knew his name. I recently read a report on a new study that shows that gay men in the United States are significantly more likely to have college degrees than straight men. 52% of gay men have bachelor degrees, which is 16% higher than the national average, and taken on their own, they have by far the highest percentage of college completion in the world. Now one of the theories as to why this might be is that gay boys spend an inordinate amount of time hanging out in school libraries so they can avoid research.

[23:38] Albert Evans: And the bullying that they would be subjected to on the playground. That certainly was true for me. I avoided recess and the playground as much as I could, and I spent hours and hours in school libraries reading every review and article about Broadway that I could get my hands on in the New Yorker magazine, the New York Times, and other publications. So it's possible that I knew Sondheim's name at this point, but I didn't know anything about it. I just remember being completely blown away by that sound, the incredible sound of that title song.

[24:09] Albert Evans: Bobby. Bobby. Bobby, baby. Bobby, bobby. Bobby. Bobby, darling. Bobby, we've been trying to call you. Bobby, baby. And you're not gonna take the job. Bobby love. Bobby, honey, we've been trying. Bobby, baby. Bobby, lovely. There was something we wanted to say. The cast for this production consisted of students from the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, and although they were at least 10 or more years too young for the roles they were playing, they were enormously talented, and many of them went on to vibrant professional careers. I got to hear the song rehearsed in pieces, and then a full run-through before they broke for dinner.

[24:51] Albert Evans: Home brings door chimes, in comes company. Ghost rings good times, just chimes company. And it made such an impression on me that I feel like I can still hear it. I'm happy to say that I got the job, and then got to see Company in performance while I was in rehearsal for Little Mary Sunshine. I even got to run the follow spot for it a few times. I can still see that opening number, and see how it worked, and see how it came together, and was completely mesmerized for the rest of my life. As if I hadn't been mesmerized already starting with Gypsy, now I was completely captivated by the world of Sondheim, and how does that world, the story, the plot, the world of Company, what does that have to do with a 15-year-old boy from Cincinnati? I don't know, but somehow it was me. I identified with those characters.

[25:45] Albert Evans: My first experience seeing a Sondheim show on Broadway was Merrily We Roll Along, was the final performance of Merrily We Roll Along. And this is a very weird story, but I'm going to tell it because for some reason it still haunts me. I still think about it. My mother was coming into town for a week with her friend, who I think she had worked with her at the phone company in Cincinnati when they were younger. A lot of working-class women worked at the phone company because that was a job you could get. And this woman had never been to New York, had never seen a Broadway show, really was completely unsophisticated, which we knew, and she was a great lady. We had a whole list of shows. We were planning to go see shows that whole week, but the first night that they were there was the final performance of Merrily We Roll Along.

And we told her, you really shouldn't come to this because we knew it was the closing night. We knew it was a big flop. We'd read the reviews. This is not the show for somebody who's never seen a Broadway show to come to. But she insisted on coming to it. And then why this still affects me, I don't know, but then she wouldn't come to any of the shows for the rest of the week. She wouldn't ever set foot in the theater again. I think the reason that affects me is because it's so representative of how fragile it is creating someone who will love the theater. That first experience, you have to go see something that somehow grabs you and speaks to you and doesn't turn you off. And there was a lot about Merrily We Roll Along to turn anybody off.

[27:13] Albert Evans: Well, that was like the opposite of me singing A Little Night Music and thinking, oh, this is what all Broadway shows are. She had the same response. She thought that's what all Broadway shows were as well. I saw a good one. She saw a baffling one. Yeah. And she closed the door on Broadway at that moment.

[27:30] Albert Evans: After seeing our first original productions of a Sondheim show on Broadway, you and I both had the opportunity to see all of the others that came after them. I unfortunately had missed both A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures, which you got to see. But there was one show that we both missed out on seeing.

[27:48] David Armstrong: I assume that of the shows you missed, Follies would be the one.

[27:53] Albert Evans: That's the time travel show for most anybody who didn't see it. Because when I moved to New York then in '74, '75, everyone had seen it. All the new people that I was meeting, everyone had seen Follies. And I came a few years later. But still to this day, the majority of the people who saw that original production of Follies will tell me and anyone else who asked them that it was the greatest theatrical experience of their life. And people like us who didn't get to experience that really want to go see what that is that they're talking about.

[28:23] David Armstrong: Yeah. And I know it was powerful because even these little fragments of home movies and bootlegs from like the tryout in Boston or wherever it was, they're still powerful. Even when you can barely see what's going on, you just get a sense of, oh, my God, this is never going to happen again.

[28:41] Albert Evans: And I've seen some really good productions of Follies. But there was something about that original in the way that they were all doing the same intent. They were all doing the director choreographer's version and the set designer's version of Follies. And there's nothing more I can say about it, except I treasure those things. I can piece those together in my minds, in my minds.

[29:04] David Armstrong: Your various minds.

[29:05] Albert Evans: I have several minds. And also, I think that to me, Dorothy Collins' version of Losing My Mind is the justification for the phonograph having been invented. I mean, I think it's possibly the greatest achievement.

[29:19] David Armstrong: In recorded sound?

[29:20] Albert Evans: In recorded sound. Not that it sounds that great, but as a piece of art.

[29:40] Albert Evans: Not going left. Not going right. I've dimmed the lights and think about you. Spend sleepless nights to think about you. You said you loved me. Or were you? Just being kind? Or am I losing my mind?

[30:41] Albert Evans: Her whole performance on that album.

[30:44] David Armstrong: Yeah. She's fantastic.

[30:45] David Armstrong: Well, as always, Albert, it's a delight to talk to you. Sondheim's death was just a few days ago, and it's still very fresh in everyone's mind. And it's great to sit down and actually laugh a little bit about, you know, some of the memories that we have. And I'm sure everyone has a different set of memories. And it's great to be able to talk about them and great to talk with you about them.

[31:07] Albert Evans: Wonderful.

[31:08] David Armstrong: We would love to hear about your first time experiencing the artistry of Stephen Sondheim and feature those memories on an upcoming episode. And we've made it extremely easy for you to share them with us. Just go to the Broadway Nation website at www.broadway-nation.com. Again, that's broadway-nation.com. And on the bottom right corner of the homepage, you'll find a microphone icon. Just click on that microphone icon and share with us your first Sondheim experiences.

[31:40] David Armstrong: Over the course of my career, I've had the incredible opportunity to direct and or choreograph three productions of Company, three of Sweeney Todd, two productions of A Little Night Music, and one production of Side by Side by Sondheim, and to produce productions of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods. Again, Follies is the one that got away, at least so far. It's been such a privilege to spend so much of my life producing, directing, performing, listening to, watching, thinking about, teaching, and generally immersing myself in the world of Stephen Sondheim. He lived a long and brilliantly productive life, so I don't think there's any reason to be sad, just countless reasons to celebrate his life, career, and immense legacy.

[32:30] David Armstrong: There's a photo of Stephen Sondheim that I posted on the Broadway Nation Facebook page, and it shows him seated on an empty stage, smiling and looking completely at home, with the rows of empty seats in the darkened auditorium behind him and a ghost lamp shining just over his shoulder. A ghost lamp or ghost light is, of course, that single light on a pole that stagehands place center stage on the lip of the orchestra pit overnight and between shows when the stage lights are turned off. And it occurred to me that that's why it's called a ghost light, because the spirits of Broadway's past are and will always be with us, and now Sondheim is one of them. One of the major themes of Broadway Nation is that every new show is built on those that came before it. Every theater artist is guided by the spirits of the artists that came before them. In the words of Stephen Sondheim, no one is alone.

[33:26] David Armstrong: Just remember someone is on your side. Someone else is not. While you're seeing your side, maybe you forgot. They are not alone. Truly, no one is alone.

[33:56] David Armstrong: Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. For more on the life and work of Stephen Sondheim, I recommend that you listen to Episodes 11 and 12, in which Albert and I explore the knowledge, understanding, and skills that were handed down directly from Otto Harbach to Oscar Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim to Lin-Manuel Miranda, the entire history of Broadway in four individuals. You may also want to check out Episodes 19 and 20, which deal with West Side Story and Gypsy, Episode 26, which is titled Harold Prince and the Concept Musical, which covers Prince and Sondheim's collaborations on Company and Follies, and Episode 28, which is subtitled Sondheim vs. the Paparetta and deals with his shows during the 1980s. His works also figure prominently in all three of the episodes that are dedicated to the major themes of the Broadway musical. Special thanks to KVSH 101.9, the voice of beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[34:59] David Armstrong: No one is alone. Truly, no one is alone. No one is alone. Truly, no one is alone. No one is alone.