BOOK REVIEW How Sondheim Can Change Your Life  Atria Books, 2024 I keep getting fooled by the titles of new Sondheim books. As I wrote for this publication, the title of James Lapine’s 2021 book — Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park with George” — promised a memoir by the book writer and director of the 1984 Broadway musical about George Seurat. But apart from a brief introduction, the book turned out to be an oral history featuring interviews with roughly 40 people involved in the show — valuable in its own right, but not a traditional memoir. Now I’ve fallen for another piece of marketing sleight of hand with How Sondheim Can Change Your Life, the new book by theater historian Richard Schoch. The title of Schoch’s book promises to impart shareable life lessons from Sondheim’s oeuvre (16 full-length musicals written over a 50-year period and lyrics for four more), but the author quickly abandons that premise in favor of a collection of backstage anecdotes, trivia, and critical close readings of Sondheim’s lyrics, organized neatly by show. Author photo of Richard Schoch by Peter Thomas Photography. Much of the arcana Schoch unearths should be familiar to Sondheim fans at this point, such as the fact that Sondheim wrote his most well-known tune, “Send in the Clowns” from the musical A Little Night Music, specifically for Mary Poppins actress Glynis Johns, who possessed a distinctively smoky singing voice but couldn’t sustain a note. More impressive than these bits of Sondheim trivia are the close readings of Sondheim’s lyrics, which are smart and perceptive, notably Schoch’s argument that the unresolved ambivalence of the song “Sorry-Grateful” from Company is the true emotional core of Sondheim’s 1970 acerbic dark-comedy musical, not the show’s climactic 11 o’clock number, “Being Alive.” Schoch’s thesis is all the more convincing when one considers that “Being Alive” wasn’t originally written as a paean to marriage. The original text of the song ended with the show’s perpetually single protagonist, Bobby, sneering that marriage leads to “happily ever after in hell.” (According to Sondheim scholar Sandor Goodhart, director Hal Prince convinced Sondheim to alter the song on the first night of the show’s Boston run, as he found it “too negative” and “too bitter.”) I was grateful for how Schoch helped me to read Company in a new way, but I found myself wishing that the author had taken a bigger stab at extracting replicable life lessons from Sondheim’s works, notwithstanding such ostensibly didactic chapter titles as “How to grow up.” I wanted to learn more about his personal relationship to Sondheim’s work — how a lifetime of studying Sondheim’s canon shaped his personality, his political worldview, and his progress as a writer. Perhaps Schoch felt that such sustained, personal engagement with his subject wouldn’t allow his book to be taken seriously, or that memoir as a literary genre has fallen out of fashion of late. Perhaps he would have been right. But consider that the best part of theater actress Alexandra Silber’s (no stranger to the DC stage) 2018 memoir, White Hot Grief Parade, is the chapter in which she explains how, as an 18-year-old mourning her father’s death from cancer, she identified strongly with the character of Little Red Riding Hood from Sondheim’s 1987 collaboration with James Lapine, Into the Woods, a postmodern take on Grimms’ Fairy Tales, written against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. Traumatized by the violent death of her entire family, Little Red Riding Hood is suddenly aware that she is “alone in the world — a child with nothing but a wolf-skin coat on her back.” But she is not truly alone, as Silber points out. Beside her is Cinderella, helping her to “face the world as a stronger and smarter woman than before.” Like Silber (and no doubt for many of you reading this), Sondheim changed my life. He’s still changing my life, even after he’s gone. His lyrics are so dense, and his characters are so universally relatable, that his musicals, like Shakespeare’s plays, continue to yield fresh insights and reveal new pleasures with each revisiting. And, like Silber, I owe a particular debt to Into the Woods. As a teenager coping with my father’s suicide, struggling to understand how a parent could suddenly vanish under a giant’s boot or by their own hand, Into the Woods taught me the blunt truth that “sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood.” But the musical also taught me how to forgive my father and showed me a path out of grief. People make mistakes. Fathers, Mothers, People make mistakes, Holding to their own, Thinking they’re alone. Honor their mistakes Everybody makes Fight for their mistakes One another’s terrible mistakes. Today, I honor my father’s memory as the vice president of communications for a national mental health nonprofit, using my words and my work to prevent suicide and increase equitable access to mental health care. My father’s tragedy, as a friend of his recently told me, was that he didn’t know how to reach out to others for help. He thought he was alone. But, as Sondheim reminds us, “no one is alone.”