Stephen Sondheim remembered by Imelda Staunton
If I close my eyes and think of Stephen Sondheim, I remember him sitting in my kitchen in north London. It wasn’t a showbiz fest. It was just talking about nothing, about life, about dogs. He was this amazing, mellow man, so personable and warm. Even at the time, I thought, blimey, here is this legend, having a beer in my kitchen. That’s one for the book!
He was so extraordinary, the last of the big boys, the final link with the great American songbook, a man with personal connections to Oscar Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein. He changed musicals, made unhappy musicals happen. He set down such a very good path that led in so many different directions.
We first met in 1990 in my dressing room at the Phoenix theatre when I was playing the Baker’s Wife in Richard Jones’s production of Into the Woods. He said he’d like to thank me for what I was doing with the character. And because I was nervous, I just sort of blurted out: “Well, you don’t write an easy tune, do you Stephen?”
There was a particular note I couldn’t get, and I told him. He said: “Change it. Just change it.” That was such a shock to me because I wasn’t really a Sondheim aficionado at that point, and people who were said you couldn’t touch anything in his work.
After that, of course, I decided I’d really try to do it as he’d written it. But that was Stephen all over. He never made you feel inadequate. He only ever wanted all of us to be our very best.
I didn’t see him again until I took on Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd in 2011. We were in Chichester, which is lovely because you can gather in the bar after the show, and all the younger actors were beside themselves with excitement. He knew that and sat with them; he was never someone who just wanted to sit with the director or the producer. He knew how much he meant to people.
What struck me was his joy at seeing a production of his work. He would never say, well you know, we did it like this at such and such a time, or imply that he wished we were doing it differently. I thought: gosh, this is a lesson, isn’t it? To be so present and so very encouraging about what was happening now. I am sure he gave the director and the music director loads of things to think about, but he created an atmosphere where it was easy to be creative, not to be stifled by someone else’s view. He was never locked into a vision of how something should be done.
A year later, when I knew I was going to be playing Momma Rose in Gypsy, my husband, Jim, and I went to Stephen’s house in New York for dinner. We went into this lovely room full of what I thought were awards, but they turned out to be the most extraordinary metal puzzles. There were also all these wonderful things to do with magic and circus. Jim is really into that as well, so the whole night I didn’t get a word in edgeways.
For me, his work is not about how the songs sound. It’s how they feel. In one respect, he’s done so much of the work for you. You don’t have to worry about how you are going to make the songs work; you just have to read them. He wrote monologues and then, in the music, he gave you the rhythm and the heartbeat of each one. They are challenging and intricate but that makes them more satisfying to do.
When I was singing Gypsy, we talked a lot about motherhood, and bad parenting. We discussed the lyrics and how much his own journey with his mother informed this particular mother. He writes so well about pain. And joy. He’s Shakespearean in that way. He’s like Shakespeare too because, like all the best writing, there’s no one way to do him. His work is just so rich.
I’d kept in touch with him, through emails, until he died. But the last time I actually saw him was at Follies at the National Theatre in 2017, when I played Sally. He gave me the only specific note I remember him giving me, about Losing My Mind. He said: “Don’t even try to make it sound anything other than a nervous breakdown. Don’t worry how it sounds. This is a woman just tumbling down.”
Anyhow, at the end of the first preview, I stepped forward and said: “Look ladies and gentlemen, Mr Sondheim is in the building, and we just have to recognise this man.” He was standing on the staircase, and we all clapped for what seemed like five hours. I thought: I don’t know when this will happen again. I wanted to do that for him. I am really glad I did.
He created an atmosphere where it was easy to be creative. He was never locked into a vision of how something should be done