When she came back a few hours later, she found me much shaken by what I had just witnessed, and ready to rewind the VHS and watch the whole thing again and again and again until I understood it.Ī lot of people have similar Into the Woods stories. Then my sister left me to watch the rest of the show myself. Cinderella, Jack (of beanstalk fame), and Little Red Riding Hood were all going into the woods in search of their wish, and I was enchanted. When I was about 8 years old, my older sister sat me down in front of the PBS recording of the original Broadway cast performance, and together we bopped our way through the infectious nursery rhyme rhythms of the opening number. After all, if Stephen Sondheim could look past a person’s size, why couldn’t everyone else?
Because Sondheim, my lifelong hero, my own patron saint, had looked at Camryn Manheim and seen all her talent, I felt like he was looking at me, too, encouraging me to live my dreams without shame or fear. Manheim never did audition for Sondheim, but thanks to him, she got her career.Īs a fat person who’d been told all my life I was too fat to be onstage, having Sondheim show up in the middle of this book as the benevolent patron saint of fat women was a revelation to me.
When she confessed that she didn’t have an agent, he arranged for her to get one. As Manheim told it, Sondheim, after watching her work for a week, asked her to audition for him. Size discrimination was rampant, and Manheim was ignored despite her talent - until she got hired to do readings for Stephen Sondheim. In her 1999 autobiography, Wake Up, I’m Fat!, actress Camryn Manheim (who famously dedicated her 1998 Emmy win for The Practice to “all the fat girls!”) wrote about how impossible it had been for her to find an agent after Juilliard. Vox has gathered our thoughts on the impact of his work, but before we dig into some of our favorite shows, a quick personal note about the person he was. “Isn’t it lovely how artists can capture us?” he wrote in his Pulitzer-winning Sunday In the Park With George (1984), and it’s true: No artist captured people quite like Sondheim.
Now, Sondheim’s songs, many of them rapturous odes to ambiguity, ambivalence, and the mortifying ordeal of being known - have become the gold standard by which onstage emotions are judged. Sondheim musicals were once considered too cerebral for mainstream pop culture. For most people, it would be enough to be the lyricist and composer behind iconic individual songs like “Being Alive” and “Somewhere.” But Sondheim wasn’t just a clever and affecting songwriter he wasn’t even just a giant in the world of musical theater - he was the giant, a genius who remade the entire genre in his image. Stephen Sondheim died last week at the age of 91, and there’s too much to say.
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