Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim by D.T. Max
Finale, subtitled Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim (Harper) written by nonfiction author and The New Yorker staff writer D.T. Max is essential reading for every Sondheim fan and recommended for anyone studying or interested in American musical theater history. Stephen Sondheim, although loyal to friends and colleagues, was famously reclusive, choosing to remain out of the spotlight, more willing to speak about his work than his private life.
AN EXTENSION OF PUBLISHED INTERVIEWS
This revelatory book is an extension of an exclusive online issue of The New Yorker, February, 2022, which published excerpts from these unedited interviews conducted by D.T. Max over a roughly five-year period.
They had been intended to accompany a planned profile of Sondheim to coincide with the debut of a major new, non-linear musical derived from two movies by surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. This creative genius had been working with Broadway playwright and screenwriter David Ives for several years. Despite a short workshop production in 2016 involving several notable Broadway performers, the project was dropped in early 2021.
The man may have been chronologically in his twilight years but he remained vigorously active in musical theater, ever hopeful he would achieve a final hit. Not long before his death, he was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert touting the latest Broadway revival of Company and announced he was developing a new musical called Square One.
Stephen Sondheim’s work passionately fired his imagination and he was still composing and writing lyrics until the end. Death finally came to him, peacefully, on Black Friday, 2021, after he had celebrated Thanksgiving with his husband and their friends at home in Connecticut.
He spent most of those nine decades fascinated with and almost totally subsumed by his creative world of musical theater and is frequently credited with revitalizing this uniquely American art form. His parents divorced and he moved with his mother to Bucks County, Pennsylvania when he was 10. By many accounts, including his own, she was neglectful and psychologically abusive to her only child.
Fortunately, he quickly met their neighbors and became a lifelong friend of James (Jimmy) Hammerstein whose illustrious father Oscar Hammerstein II became a surrogate parent who not only encouraged his love of theater but also mentored him. The youthful Sondheim was introduced to Hal Prince, his future frequent collaborator and director, at the opening of South Pacific in 1949.
THE CAREER AND LIFE OF AN ICON
D.T. Max has provided an engrossing look behind the scenes through this series of lengthy late-in-life one-on-one, in-person conversations with this true cultural icon. Finale is not intended to be a comprehensive biography.
These relaxed, first-person chats provide a rare revelatory glimpse into the intensely private life of Stephen Sondheim. The author was given unusual access to this great composer and lyricist’s townhouse in New York and country home in Connecticut by gaining his trust and gradually establishing a relationship although not really a friendship. The author referred to it as a “pas de deux”. Through polite, well-timed and engaging emails and telephone calls, D.T. Max was granted a first interview.
His successful “audition” was a thousand-word “Talk of the Town” piece that met with Sondheim’s approval. The four subsequent interviews also required skillful diplomacy, intense preparation, and infinite patience as the composer, ever the puppet master in control, often canceled carefully planned appointments at the last moment.
He was able to delve into in-depth discussions of the composer’s unique working methods gently persuading Sondheim to talk about the development of West Side Story and Sweeney Todd.
Much of their conversation focused significantly on the ill-fated Buñuel as well as the composer’s own surprisingly limited preferences in music, books and movies. D.T. Max shared glasses of wine or other offered beverages as the two men convivially conversed. Two black standard poodles, Addie and Willie, named for the notorious Mizner brothers, wandered freely about the house.
One topic Sondheim refused to broach was any discussion of the oft-attempted and repeatedly failed musical Bounce about the lives of Wilson and Addison Mizner. His first attempt to capture the dubious charms of these hucksters and bon vivants began in 1953 with an unproduced show titled The Legendary Mizners. Set aside, it later morphed into various iterations called Wise Guys, Gold! and Road Show.
In 2003, the most ambitious and intended Broadway-bound version Bounce was staged in Chicago and later that same year in Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with Richard Kind and Howard McGillin performing the roles of the brothers and the inimitable Jane Powell cast as their mother. Critics savaged the show which closed at the end of its short run. (I enjoyed the show when I saw the DC production and thought the reviews were unduly harsh.)
SONDHEIM’S HONORS AND ADMIRERS
Occasionally, Stephen Sondheim’s husband might be spotted walking through a room or the caretaker would briefly interrupt their chat with a query but these were primarily intimate, relaxed talks.
The obvious highlight of their meetings came early. In 2017, Stephen Sondheim was presented by Meryl Streep with the PEN/Allen Literary Award at a gala dinner held at the American Museum of National History. He was the first composer to receive this honor. (PEN America is a literary human rights advocacy organization.) D.T.Max felt equally honored to accompany Stephen Sondheim to the event where they sat with Meryl Streep for dinner and the evening’s events.
The latter two had met at Yale University in 1974 while she was performing in his musical, The Frogs. Surprisingly, the great composer confided he read more book reviews than books as he was a “slow reader” and was therefore hesitant to meet the literary luminaries gathered to celebrate him.
D.T. Max wrote that he had wished to meet Stephen Sondheim since he was a teenager. His uncle, a playwright, involved with the Phoenix Theatre, had invited his mother to a benefit in 1977 which included a performance of Side by Side by Sondheim.
She returned home gifted the cast recording with the cover signed by both Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim. Passions for theater and writing may have come from early familial exposure to the New York stage for this journalist and author.
PORTRAIT OF A BROADWAY LEGEND
The venerated Stephen Sondheim wrote 18 musicals in his lifetime that continue to be revived and performed worldwide from Broadway and London West-end productions to countless touring company and school productions. There are likely an equal number of unproduced musical works in his archive. Send in the Clowns, a signature song for Judy Collins, has been recorded by over 900 singers.
His awards and honors include an Academy Award, 8 Tony Awards, 8 Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a myriad of others. One might ask, would we still have real musical theater (not the glitzy Disney staging of cartoons or frequently presented music biopics) if it were not for Stephen Sondheim’s contributions? It’s a thought too terrible to contemplate. D.T. Max has provided a fitting remembrance with Finale Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim and it, too, deserves to be read and celebrated.
About D.T. Max:
D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His book, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery, which the New York Times Book Review called “gripping, cleanly written, cannily plotted and elegantly educational.”
He has been the books editor of the Times Magazine, and a pseudonymous food reviewer for Paper. He contributed the afterword to the New York Review of Books Classics reissue of William McPherson’s 1984 novel, Testing the Current. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, their two children, and a rescued dachshund/cocker mix named Nemo.
