Best Of: John Lithgow / Sondheim’s tumultuous life

Today, John Lithgo, veteran of hundreds of performances on stage, screen and television.

“To play Winston Churchill in the series of the Crown, he had an idea to help him nail the”

statesman's gravely voice. He spooned pieces of apple with a melon baller and stuck them in the

back of his cheeks for his first reading with the cast. "And stuck them in the back and spokes some

of iron mines and I would be by with one resting." And it was sensational, but my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider. Lithgo is currently starring in the play giant on Broadway. He plays the renowned children's author, Rold Dahl, caught in a public controversy after he wrote an article "Laced with Anti-Semitic Statements." Also, we'll talk about Stephen Sondheim's life in music with Daniel O'Crent, author of a new book, Stephen Sondheim art isn't easy. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Our first guest today, John Lithgo, is an actor you

“can probably recall from a half dozen roles off the top of your head. But the remarkable thing”

about his nearly 200 performances on stage, screen and television, is that at age 80, he's still going strong. You can see him playing an intelligence agent with Jeff Bridges in the FX Action series The Old Man. He plays the character Dumbledore, an a new HBO Harry Potter series that premieres in December, and he's starring now on Broadway, doing eight performance as a week in the play giant, about a troubling side to renowned children's author, Rold Dahl. Among Lithgo's

many career honors are Oscar nominations for his roles in the film The World According to Garb, in terms of Endurement, and six prime time Emmy Awards, for playing Winston Churchill in the Crown,

a serial killer in the series Dexter, and an alien visiting Earth in the sitcom third rock

“from the sun. He's been nominated for six Tony Awards and won twice, including once for his very”

first appearance on Broadway. Lithgo has also written several children's books, a memoir titled Drama and Actors Education, and The Dump Detrylogy, three books of satirical poems inspired by the current occupant of the White House. Lithgo's current play giant is set in 1983 when Rold Dahl ignited a controversy by writing an article with views that were widely seen as anti-Semitic. In the play, Dahl and his fiance are at home in discussion with the British and an American

representative of Dahl's publishers who want him to say something to soften his message and diffuse the controversy. It soon emerges that the American rep is a practicing Jewish woman,

and Dahl isn't backing down. The play was first performed in London with Lithgo starring as Rold Dahl,

he and the play won Lawrence Olivier Awards, the British Equivalent of the Tony. John Lithgo, welcome to fresh air. Thank you Dave, I feel welcome. You're playing Dahl who is kind of, it's over-simplistically calling him a villain here, but you know, he's a very problematic character. Did you feel empathy for him? How did you connect with him? Oh, man. Well, you look for ways you can empathize with every character and if you're

playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting. You try to figure out what made him that way. And Dahl is a man so famous for one thing and not known at all for this other thing. It is kind of overbearing and sometimes cruel nature. I just found it fascinating the different perceptions of him. And, curiously, I have a good friend, the actress Maria Tucci, who is the widow of the editor Robert Gottlieb, who is the man who fired Rold Dahl from Alfred

Knop because he was just so insufferable and cruel to everybody he worked with there. And I knew this about him before this even came up. This to me was fascinating. Anyone who is that successful, that much of an asset for a publisher to be fired because he was impossible to work with. I just thought, well, there's something there. Why don't you just tell us a bit about the action in this play? It's you as Rold Dahl and your fiance and two representatives from your

publishers to give us a sense of what the issue is and what happens. Yes, it's said in 1983, but it's about the events of 1982 when Israel was in deep conflict with Lebanon, mainly because they were trying to purge the PLO from Beirut and they invaded Beirut brutally

the Palestinians side. And in that review, he betrayed his own antisemitism between the lines and

“in a few lines quite explicitly. And it caused a minor controversy then which over the years”

grew into a bigger and bigger controversy about Rold Dahl because that was the time when he

basically admitted to being very antisemitic. And yes, the setup is that at the same time,

his publishers, for our Strauss and Geru in America and Jonathan Cape in London, they're about to release his new book, The Witches, which would be his fifth book and they've all been sensational successes and they were very worried that this one wouldn't sell because of the controversy her heat stirred. So that's the setup. They are there to get him to back down and apologize and explain and rationalize what he's written and he wants nothing to do with that.

There's a distinction to be made between criticizing the policies of the Israeli government and condemning Jewish people as a whole. But the lines can get fuzzy and assumptions can be made

“that antisemitism is at the heart of anybody criticizing Israel. And I think part of the brilliance”

of this plays that in the first act when we don't learn Dahl's exact words from the article

he wrote were other comments that would be made public later. We're kind of invited to explore our own feelings about this and think maybe Rold Dahl is just making a point about the conduct of war and not about the Jewish people. Yeah, it sort of throws an audience off balance, no matter what their political leanings and feelings are, you know, you back away from the phrase villain and I appreciate that. We don't want him just to be the villain of the piece, but he's a dark

character or he's a character with a very dark side. But the play becomes this

“ferocious debate between him and this young American Jewish woman from a New York publishing house.”

And that debate is extremely articulate. It's very passionate on both sides in the case of

Dahl's side of the argument, the argument is polluted by antisemitism. But he's right on occasion. He's like a broken clock. And the audience, I mean, up on the stage, you can almost hear their anxiety trying to grapple this. Right. And the debate gets increasingly personal. And in the end, Dahl says some things which, I mean, I was at one performance and there was one comment. I'm sure it's the one you know that the audience audibly gasped. It was something he said to

a reporter, right? Mm-hmm. I deliberately don't quote it in interviews because it has such power in performance. But it is something he literally said. It's an unspeakable turn of phrase. And it's it's like it is the moment at which people see the very darkest side of Dahl. And they see it very clearly. And it's right near the end of the play. So in a sense, the whole play has been building to that moment. My challenge in playing the role is to spend the

whole play motivating that moment. Almost explaining that moment, explaining it emotionally as much as politically. Right. And he did have a hard life in a lot of ways, right? Well, that was my way in it a very hard life. There's several elements. You know, when you ask yourself what makes him hate like that, the various clues I found had to do with his upbringing and his experiences. He was born an Norwegian of a Norwegian family, but that family lived in Wales. His father had been

brought to Cardiff to work in the shipping industry. But he often went to English boarding schools. Repton, he was an outsider from the get-go trying to get on the inside. And on and in his life, he just suffered these terrible losses. In the same year, he when he was very young, he lost both his father and his older sister. He went off to prep school where he was brutally beaten. He had a horrifying, plain accident in World War II when he was an RAF fighter pilot, a solo

him in terrible pain for his entire life. And he married Patricia Niel, who had three terrible

“strokes, even though he was a very troubled marriage, he obsessively nursed her. There are four”

month-old son, his plan was hit by a taxi in New York City, and he grew up with brain damage. And he lost his daughter at the age of seven from a variant of the measles. These were tragedies that absolutely haunted him. I'm convinced of that. And it was almost as if he was angry at life because his life was so desperately difficult. And you take all those things into account, and this is a highly intelligent, extremely clever witty and charming man who just has this dark

streak of crudies, like he can't resist, goding and tormenting people. You know, this play, you know, is being performed now and was performed in England at a time when there's very bitter division in controversy about actions of the Israeli military in Gaza. Not unlike in some ways this controversy about the invasion of Lebanon, which was launched in response to PLO rocket attacks in Israel. This, of course, the Gaza invasion response to that savage attack,

the October 7 attack by Hamas. I'm wondering what reaction you've heard to the play, what kind of conversations it's part? Well, everybody says it's just astounding how timely it is. It's a play about a moment, 40 years ago. And here we were rehearsing it once again for Broadway and the same thing has happened, not chasing after the PLO, chasing after Hezbollah and trying to trying to put an end to, you know, missiles and raids from Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

There are lines in the play that just, you just hear people gasped there so timely. It's it's almost describing what's happening now. Yeah. We should note that in 2020, Roldaus family posted an apology for his anti-Semitism on the family website. Yes, they apologized

and he never did, right? We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with

actor John Lithgow. He stars as Roldaus in the new Broadway play giant. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. I'm Dave Davies and this is Fresh Air Weekend. I wanted to talk about some of your other iconic roles, but there are a lot of them and one of them that I really

“remember it was you playing Winston Churchill in the series The Crown, which is creative I Peter Morgan.”

I love that series and you play this, I mean, he's, well, he's an iconic figure for the English in the 20th century. I wanted to play a clip here. This is one of many meetings that the Prime Minister had with the sovereign. The Queen here is a fairly young Elizabeth played by Claire Foie. And the Prime Minister would regularly meet with the Queen. This is one where an argument erupts when the Queen relates that her husband, Prince Philip, wants to become an aviator. It's

listen. He's learning to fly. Whatever for. Have we not enough qualified pilots to take him where

he needs to go? No, he wants to fly himself. It's a boy who dream. It's what he's always wanted.

Why was government not consulted? Because it's a private matter. And I am in favor. Nothing you or his royal highness do is a private matter. And the father of the future king of him and risking his life needlessly is quite unacceptable. Please do not curtail my husband's personal freedoms any further. You've taken away his home. You've taken away his name. There comes a time where one must draw a line in the sand. And the job of growing that line falls

to cabinet, not to you. Something your dear late papa would certainly have taught you. Had he been brought more time to complete your education. And that is John Lethal. Practically spitting as Winston Churchill. And the queen at the court, the queen. There are so many of these things. When you got this role, I mean, I imagine that Churchill is the kind of guy that everybody in England can do an

“impression of. Was it daunting to take this on? I'm enrolled and played by a lot of other people?”

It was extremely daunting and you're right. I mean, everybody imitates Churchill. Everybody quotes Churchill. And I was completely astonished when I was asked to do it by Peter Morgan, the writer,

I was amazed that they wanted me, but I was flattered and extremely excited to play the part.

“But you know, I was a young. When I sat down with Stephen Daldray for breakfast in a diner,”

after I'd said yes, I said, Stephen, why did you? Why did you cast me? And he said,

well, Churchill's mother was an American. And you know, she was. And that was the first little

gesture of liberation. The other thing that happened was I arrived in England and all the English actors were so enthusiastic about the idea. I mean, I've done a lot of acting in England playing English roles. Even listening to this clip that you've just played, I can hear my Americanism. But there's a certain excitement to mingling an American energy with an English character. I mean, I'm speaking as objectively as I can about this. I've read this in one or two reviews.

“It's sometimes it helps sort of enliven the drama or the comedy. This was particularly true”

of Churchill. And they somehow felt they wanted to shake things up as they did in every way on the crown. The crown is such a surprising show because these very familiar characters whom you know in the most public way possible, the queen, the king, the princesses, to actually go into their lives and see them in intimate settings and having very, very human problems and conflicts. That was what was arresting about the crown. Well, in a sense, that was true of portraying Churchill

this way. You know, I really love the series. And you know, when you came on and the first time

you were on screen is tried that, "Oh, god, yeah, they're shine. Let's go. Yeah, I recognize him." Pretty soon, it wasn't John Lethgall. I mean, you were a Churchill. I mean, and one of the things I read is that you placed little balls of some material in the jowls of your cheeks to give you that formula, right? That thing going? Yes, yes. I experimented with that when I was still in America before I went over there. I used a melon baller to create these little

balls of apple. And I put them in the back, the back one, my cheeks. And Churchill had this unique list. The gen was generated by the back of his tongue. And it worked wonderfully. I even took my melon baller

and an apple to one of the first rehearsals, which was nothing but sitting around the table and talking.

But I proposed this idea and in front of everybody, I carved out two little apple balls and stuck them in the back and spoke and spiced some of the irons and I would be by with one of those scenes. And it was sensational, but my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider. You know, I mean, and I was spitting all over the table. Well, we hired this great toothpasteer, the man named Christopher Lyons, who does all the great false teeth for till the Swinton and

Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher. Well, he made these little silicon pumpers. We call them that clicked onto my back teeth. It changed everything. I mean, it made me sit on to my like chest. So because he did have this, it's how he sounded. I could have marbles in the back of his mouth. But it also just made me feel so different from myself. Now, I mean, I've worked with the RSC, the Shakespeare Company and at the National and I've done about 10 roles of Englishman in England.

And I'm better at it. I must say listening to myself as Churchill, I still had a lot to learn.

“Really? You're better at an English accent now than you were when you play. Well, I think so. I'm doing”

Dumbledore and Harry Potter with a marvelous dialect coach watching me like a hawk. And she doesn't give me many new notes anymore. But she certainly did the first few months. Yeah, this is for the HBO series based on Harry Potter. Have you have you finished shooting that the first series? I have finished. They still have another month to go. But they squeezed all my stuff in to allow me to do giant on Broadway. And so my last month

the work was brutal. It aged me, but then that with Dumbledore that comes in handy.

And by my short term memory isn't what it used to be. And I am just amazed that you,

I mean, you're in practically every scene of this play on Broadway. You're doing eight

“shows a week. Is it hard to remember to learn lines that meant it's harder than it used to be”

to learn the lines. But once they're in there, I'm fine. Yeah. Yeah, my brain is a little bit tired. My body's tired. I mean, 80 is, it's it was no surprise. You're an old man at 80. Well, you got plenty left in you. You better because this HBO production is going to last how many years? Well, the handy thing is I'm playing all these broken down old men. So I get better cast every year. Well, John Lithko, it's been fun. Thank you so much for spending some time with us.

Great to talk to you, Dave. I had a wonderful time. John Lithko stars as writer Rould Dahl in the new Broadway play Giant. Terry has our next interview. Here she is. Steven Soundheim

once described himself as an austere revolutionary. His musicals, the music, the lyrics, the stories,

“were both more complex and more subtle than their predecessors. After Alan J. Lerner,”

who wrote the lyrics for My Fair Lady Brigadin and Camelot, saw a Sondheim's groundbreaking 1970 musical company, he broken to tears and told his wife, "My way of writing musicals is over." It's no exaggerations to say Sondheim was a genius. Geniuses are often complicated people with complicated personalities, and Sondheim was no exception. Perhaps the most difficult relationship in his life was with his mother, who could be cold and even verbally cruel.

That seems to have influenced Sondheim's personality in the themes of some of his shows. In the new books, Steven Soundheim art isn't easy. My guest Daniel Oakrend offers insights into Sondheim's life and music, based on access to his letters, archives, oral history,

“as well as the 36 hours of interviews that Merrill Seekrest did for her 1998 biography of him.”

And Oakrend's own interviews with many people who knew him. Steven Sondheim got a start on Broadway writing lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story. He went on to write music and lyrics for such shows as a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Follies, merrily we roll along, Sweeney taught Sunday in the park with George into the woods and passion. Daniel Oakrend welcome back to fresh air. It's great to have you back. I'm very happy to be here. I want to start

with you choosing a song, and I'd like it to be a song that you heard something new in as a result of all the research that you did for this new Sondheim book. Well, Epiphany, this horrifying and overwhelming song near the end of Sweeney taught, I had listened to and been impressed by, I don't know how many scores of times, but when I was doing the research and listening carefully, that's when I realized that everything we've heard before in that show comes back in very brief

snatches in that one song. It's all tied together in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why it's so effective. And this is a song where Sweeney taught who is seeking revenge against the judge that locked him up and then stole his wife and then is trying to marry Sweeney's daughter. Steels his wife, well, he steals his wife and discards her. And you know, who's her permanently? Yeah, yeah. And Sweeney ends up killing her

because now she's homeless and has gone mad. And she's just like in his way anyhow. So here's the song and it's one of my very very favorite of all Sondheim's pieces and this is my favorite show of his and his desire for revenge is just like overflowing. Everybody's unworthy and they all deserve to die. That's the refrain they all deserve to die. So here it is. There's a hole in the

world like a great backtip and it's filled with people who are filled with shit. I'm never going to

have a world in habit. It's a platform. They all deserve to die. Tell your wife, you're such proud and tell your wife, because in all of the whole human race, this is love it, there are two kinds of men and only two. There's one thing put in his power, put place and the one where this put in the other one's place. Look at me, Mrs. Love it, look at you. Oh, we all deserve to die. Tell your wife,

will be around if we all deserve to die. And I'll never see Joanna, no I'll land. So that's a

“pythony from Steven Sahnheim's Swiny Todd. I think Sahnheim had denied that Swiny Todd was about revenge”

or his own desire for revenge. And you found something in your research that relates to that, would you explain? Sure. In an interview that he gave to his first biographer, Marocie Christ back in 1996, Sahnheim described the day that Judy Prince came over to hear some of the songs, the beginning songs of Swiny Todd. She was his closest friend and she often would do this. He would play them for her before anybody else. So she came over. He had told her before that that it was a horror show.

It was going to be a, you know, a spine tingler. And so she comes over to his house and he plays a few of the first songs and she stops him, two songs into it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with

horror. This is the story of your life. And as Sahnheim reported it, he said, it never occurred to me,

but of course it is. But I was able to determine through a couple sources, but primarily Judy Prince who never gave interviews, that in fact it was about revenge. And you write that his psychiatrist Milton Horowitz wrote papers on revenge and on revenge and masochism. And Horowitz connects revenge to deep loneliness and the need to connect, which you can also relate to Sahnheim. Yeah, there are two major arcs to his life. One is from absolute alienation to finally near the

end of his life connection. The others from an ambivalence that could be crippling at times

to resolution, to knowing who he was and what he was capable of doing. But it took 50 years from

him to move from one of those polls to the next one. So in terms of Sweeney being about revenge and people thinking that's autobiographical in some way, not the murder property, just about revenge. Sahnheim said the difference between Sweeney and me is that I turned it into art.

“I think that's a sentence that says a great deal about his entire career and his entire life.”

The through his music and his lyrics, he was able to express things that he could not for various forms of inhibition express otherwise. It was where if it's not autobiographical, obviously he's not slitting throats. Obviously he's not sure Sirat, obviously he's not in the woods and into the woods. But the feelings expressed in those shows all come from inside of him. I think very, very clearly. And I think it's in a smaller way inside all of us that we get angry that we want to get back

at someone and we don't necessarily act on it. But it's just, I love that show so much and there's a part of me, you know, I'm fairly inhibited myself but there's a part of me that I suppress certain feelings and you just relate to all the feelings in that show. Absolutely and it's the inhibitions that keep us from expressing those feelings. And that's not a bad thing necessarily. No, and if socially it's a very good thing to do and sometimes when he was in a bad mood he would

let them out socially, but mostly he came through in his songs. And one of the things that's

“very important to know about Sound Time, that enabled him to bring them out in his songs, those”

feelings were the dis- inhibiting effects of alcohol and drugs. And alcohol particularly was something that he consumed in great quantities. His collaborators said, you know, didn't impair his ability to work, but he would drink all day long. Marijuana cocaine for a period, but mostly alcohol great, great quantities of alcohol. The cabaret performer Michael Feinstein reported about having his assistant call Sound Time when Sound Time was coming to dinner at Feinstein's house in Ask

if there was anything particularly that he would like it dinner and Sound Time replied according to Feinstein, vodka, vodka and more vodka. And there are dozens of other incidents where the alcohol is so visibly, a tool that he uses to make it through his work, and I think through his life.

Art isn't easy. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. This is fresh air weekend.

So I want to ask you about a letter, a letter that's very famous to Sound Time fans, that, you know, you learned more about. Describe the letter as Sound Time described it, and then describe the letter that was actually written. This was a letter from his mother, and they had a very complicated and very stressful relationship with each other, which will get into after we hear about the letter. In the late 1970s, his mother, known as Foxy,

that was her nickname, wrote him a letter, the content of which he revealed an interview with the

“New York Times in 1994, in which he said, "In the letter, my mother said the only thing I regret”

in life is giving birth to you." Now, that's a kind of a powerful statement, and that kind of

explains the or at least measures the intensity of his negative feelings about his mother, and it's a story that he from that point told over and over and over again. All of the songheads, as we sometimes are known as those people who really know everything about him or want to know everything about him. We all know this letter. He referred to it so frequently. I found, however, in the Mary Rogers paper, Mary Rogers was his lifelong friend, daughter Richard Rogers. He sent

her what he said was a copy of the letter he had written to his mother. When he received them,

“so letter in which he says, "I never want to have anything to do with you again." This is just”

the end of our relationship. But in that letter, which he represents to his oldest friend,

as the accurate version of a letter that he had sent in 1978, she doesn't say, "I regret giving birth to you." She says, "The only guilt I have is giving birth to you." And there's a mile of distance between guilt and regret. There's two ways I can interpret guilt. One is that she knew she wasn't meant to be a mother and she feels guilty that she was such a bad mother, but the more obvious interpretation is, she gave birth to a monster and she feels guilty about that,

that she unleashed this miserable person on the world. Oh, that's interesting. I go the opposite

“direction. I like the first, your first version better. I don't see any evidence that she felt that”

she had unleashed a monster on the world, even in her bitterest expressions to him. So there's a song in company that seems to be related to his mother, and it's ladies who lunch, sung by your lane stretch. What's the connection? Well, in fact, it is about his mother in a way. She was a social light. She liked to be around famous people, and she liked to eat nearly not every day, but certainly every week at the 21 club, where all the stylish people of the era would go, and she would go with

friends who were in show business or not, these were the ladies who lunched. They were the subject of that song, and they were the object of his distaste. I don't think that Sondheim was aiming at anybody else but his mother, but he was thinking of this group of women when he wrote that carascading acidic and hilarious song. So let's hear it. This is ladies who lunch from his musical company. Here's to the girls who stay smart, are at their guests, rushing to their classes in

office to go art, wishing it would last. Another long exhausting day, another thousand dollars, a matinee, a pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mars, I'll drink to that. And one for Moller. Here's to the girls who play white. There was ladies who lunch from the Steven Sondheim musical company. So let's continue talking about the relationship between Sondheim and his mother. Although they had a pretty toxic relationship, much of the time, his mother was friends with

Oscar Hammerstein's wife, and Sondheim was friends with the Hammerstein's son. So when the Hammerstein's moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, his mother and Steven Sondheim moved nearby, and Hammerstein became Sondheim's

self. He was direct with them. I think that Oscar, as he must be known, Oscar was the most important

“male figure in his life. Oscar dies when Sondheim is just about 30. But for those 30 years,”

there was no one he was closer with, and no one for whom he had more regard. And worth saying, he didn't have regard for Hammerstein's work as a lyricist, even though Hammerstein was at that point, the most prominent and successful lyricist on Broadway. But as a nurturing personality, he valued him immensely. And part of the nurturing that Oscar brought to the relationship was to be frank with him so that when the young Steve is trying to write music or write a play,

Oscar would be very direct with him and said, "Sorry, this is no good. You're trying to pretend you're somebody other than you are. Write what you know, write what you think." And those

were the lessons that Sondheim cherished for the rest of his life. And one of the first

things Sondheim showed Hammerstein once Sondheim was still pretty young. Hammerstein's response to it was, "This is really terrible. I'm not saying you're not talented, you are, but this is terrible." Right. And Sondheim's glad for that. The same thing shows up when he's at college at Williams, when he's studying music with the composer Milton Babet, he wants the criticism. He relishes the criticism. But that happened only in the intimacy of personal or professional relationships.

Criticism from the outside, most creative people, certainly most creative people in the theater that I know, are very wary of Larry of and this pleased by critics, but not to the degree that Sondheim was. He despised critics. So I'm getting back to talking about Sondheim's life. He knew he was gay, but you couldn't really come out then, not even on Broadway. We're like so many of the directors and writers and composers and lyricists were gay. And the audience as well,

“but you couldn't be out, because that's how it was. So it seems to me from your book that he really”

tried to be straight because he just couldn't be out then. I think he gave it a shot. I think it wasn't that he made a valiant effort to do it. But see, let's see if this is a possibility. And he did not come out publicly, really, for the middle to late 70s. Not that anybody was asking that much in those days. Certainly, all the people who knew him, they knew he was gay. He knew he was gay. He did not think it was a defining aspect of his life. He didn't want to be as it were

typecast. He wasn't a gay composer. He was a composer. And his private life was something completely separate. Did his attitude change when he found that person who became his spouse? Well, his attitude begins to change when he falls in love with a 21-year-old and Sondheim's at this point in his early 60s. Incipient or aspiring songwriter named Peter Jones, he meets this young man and it's head over heels. That's when he wrote passion.

That's when he wrote his only on ironic play. That's when he wrote his only on ironic musical.

That's the time that he wrote a show that was about exposing one's love. He had never done that before.

Now, the characters in passion are heterosexual. It's a man and a woman. But there's no question this came out of this changed experience of finding someone to fall in love with. He had had serial relationships with many, many men over the years, but this was the one that clicked. And then after that ran its course, although they remained friends. In the early 2000s, he met Jeff Romley, whom he fell deeply in love with, as Romley did with him. Romley moved into

his house, and they spent the last 17 years of Stephen Sondheim's life together. They got married four years before Sondheim died. And there was no effort of hiding that relationship. During that period, he wrote a song from, I think this was probably the final musical that was actually performed. In his lifetime, yeah. In his lifetime, yeah. And it had several titles,

“but I think it's mostly known as Roadshow. And the song I'm thinking of is the best thing that”

ever happened, which is I love this song. It's a duet. And I didn't realize until you wrote it that it had become a standard song at gay wedding. But let's hear the song. You might just be the best

I didn't much like love. I always thought it. I never thought it would happen like this.

“Give us a kiss. We may just be the best thing that has happened to us, kiddo and partner.”

Another movement like this may not happen to us, partner, love her. When all is said and done, I have to agree. You are the best thing that's happened to me. That was the best thing that ever happened from the Soundheim musical Roadshow. And my guest is Daniel O'Crant, author of the new book, Steven Soundheim Art isn't easy. You write in the book that Soundheim described his songwriting process, not the lyrics,

but the musical part. As being built around chords, that the first thing that comes to him

is the chords. And then he adds the melody around that. And some of his chords were so interesting. And I'm going to go back to Swiny Todd for this because at the beginning of the show, it opens with this really chilling organ solo. And it's one crazy chord after another. It like each chord has such a kind of demonic sound to it. And it just keeps building and building. So let's just hear a little bit of that.

So that's the opening music from Swiny Todd, his musical about revenge. That's inspired by sounds like it's inspired by horror films in part.

Yeah, it's an amazing piece of work. And of course, that theme returns throughout the show

behind other songs for different purposes, but it haunts the show. He said harmony was everything. If you don't have the harmony, forget about the rest of it. And so he would sit at the keyboard and he would just noodle around with his fingers. And he would find these harmonies that seem to fit, to fit the theme, the subject matter, and even most importantly, the character who is singing the song. So I want to end the musical part of our discussion with one of the two songs that we're

played at Sondheim's Memorial Service. And there were songs that he felt very deeply about. One of them was someone in a tree from Pacific overtures. I show that didn't do well, and I show that most people don't know as well as he shows that do do well. I don't know the score that well myself, but he had told me the one of the first times I interviewed him that someone in a tree from Pacific overtures was his favorite of all the songs he wrote. And you

write when listening back to that song, he'd frequently tear up. So I want to play that song, but I'd like you to set it up for us. Pacific overtures is set in the middle of the 19th century

“when I think of this as an idea for a Broadway musical, let's do a Broadway musical about the opening”

of Japan to Western commerce in the 1850s. I mean it sounds ridiculous for musical. I haven't to love the show deeply. It may be my favorite of all the Sondheim shows. And in this particular scene, the American Admiral has come ashore to negotiate with the Japanese authorities, negotiate with many ships and cannons right behind him. So it's not the easiest of negotiations. And in the song, a young boy is in a tree. He's the someone in the tree who is hearing little bits

and pieces of the conversation and wanting to know what's really going on and believing that things that he hears going on may not be the whole story. It is about an outsider trying to get in

“and I believe that that would be a very short version of much of Stephen Sondheim's life.”

Even though it is not necessarily a beloved song by Sondheim fans, I think they

who had never written a Broadway show before Pacific overtures and then collaborated with him

on two other shows. He said to me when I interviewed him that Steve cried at the time he wrote it.

“But he was still crying about it 40 years later. There's something in that that you need to”

pay attention to. And I think that what I pay attention to is the outsider trying to be in. Okay, let's hear it. Tell him what I see.

I am in the tree. I am ten. I am in a tree.

I was younger than. In between the ears I can see. Tell me what I see. I was only ten. I see men and 13. Some are old. Some chatting.

If it happened I was there. I saw everything. I was someone in the tree.

Tell him what I see. Some of them have gold on their coats. One of them has gold. That was someone in a tree from the Stevensonheim musical Pacific overtures. My guest Daniel O'Crant is the author of the new book. Stevensonheim art isn't easy.

“You know, I think your book could have been called genius isn't easy. Instead of art isn't easy.”

Art isn't easy is a quote from Sunday in the park with George. One of the lyrics. But there's so many geniuses in your book and they're all such complicated people. I guess they are. I may have overcomplicated them because I do so much research. I go so deep and I find things that inevitably lead to complication. But it is true that in the theater community that emotions are on the surface.

“And even if you're trying to hide the emotions, the fact that you're trying to hide them”

are on the surface. It's a very volatile world. And so the people I'm writing about in this book are not just sunshine, but also prints and burns down and so many others. Not a lot of easy personalities. Well, Daniel O'Crant has been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. You love soundhimes music as much as I do. So it's great to share this with you, Terry.

Daniel O'Crant is the author of the new book, Stevensonheim art isn't easy. He spoke with Terry Gross. (phone ringing) Fresh air weekend is produced by Teresa Madden, our executive producer is Sam Brigger, our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, which Harry Gross and Tanya Mosley. I'm Dave Davies.