(Sondheim himself was both Jewish and gay.) We see in his writing our deep longing to let go and belong, even while questioning the authenticity of the thing we want to belong to.
This Jewish predicament, this gay predicament, is reflected and refracted throughout Sondheim’s work. On the contrary, authorship meant having a burdensome awareness of the artifice of American culture. But the irony is that creating American culture did not necessarily allow Jews to relax into it. Jewish writers and artists and composers wielded tremendous influence, forging many elements of what Americans came to perceive as American. The gap between the desire to belong and actual belonging is itself the source of so much Jewish humor. American Ashkenazi Jews of the mid-20th century, the children or grandchildren of immigrants, struggled daily to assimilate into a culture that wasn’t ours. That sense of in it but not of it is not just a gay thing, but a Jewish thing.
There’s something clearly gay in it - or 20th-century gay in it - this vantage point of being an observer of the action, wanting to participate, but not knowing how to take that risky first step. It is Sondheim’s situation it pains him and interests him. But there is something so painful and (to me) familiar in his reserve that seems to speak to me directly. Sondheim’s urban, urbane remove leaves some people cold to them it reads as plain snobbiness. Complicated ideas are tied up in internal rhyme sitting atop what is often unsingable music that can break the best of singers.
A Sondheim play is like us - packed full of emotion, equivocation, uncertainty, hope, fear. Maybe because Sondheim captures something of our human complexity that composers and lyricists before him could not. People’s relationships with his work seem much more personal than anything ever articulated about Rodgers and Hammerstein. RELATED: The last and greatest gift Stephen Sondheim gave us (We don’t know if he ever did, and we largely considered ourselves lucky not to have gotten sued.) When my performing group, the Kinsey Sicks, or “America’s Favorite Beautyshop Quartet,” recorded a loving parody of a Sondheim tune in the mid-2000s, we hoped that he would hear it and enjoy it. Stopping in England as a 20-year-old backpacker returning from a year at Hebrew University, I had the good luck to see the original London production of “Sweeney Todd.” Many Sondheim moments followed. I sat at the piano for hours working through all the sheet music.Īnd from that point on, Sondheim was in my life. It was what made this excursion both thrilling and risky.Īfter the show I bought the cast album and listened incessantly until I knew every word, until I could sing the patter from “Not Getting Married” and “Another Hundred People” as fast as anyone. I’d heard Judy Collins singing “Send in the Clowns,” I’d seen “West Side Story.” But I already sensed that there was something in Sondheim’s outlook, something in his worldliness and wittiness, that was or was going to be important to me - that in some way was about me. Lampbchop stole the show, performing “Little Lamb” from “Gypsy” in a pinspot on an otherwise dark stage.īefore this I’d only caught bits and pieces of Sondheim’s work. Richard died soon after that performance and, on my second visit, had been replaced by Shari Lewis and Lambchop.
The lights dropped and suddenly there were three singers on stage, along with the evening’s host, Cyril Richard. A friend and I nervously got in the car and drove downtown to the Chicago Loop for a performance of “Side by Side by Sondheim,” the 1976 musical revue featuring songs from musicals by Stephen Sondheim, who died last week at the age of 91. Building upon studies of gay Christians that stress more fluid, dynamic and evolving approaches to identity construction, this paper underscores the complexity and variability of this phenomenon as it applies to gay Jews.If I had to identify my first self-actualizing gay experience, it would be back in high school in the mid-1970s. Recent research on other ethnic minority gays and lesbians tend to simplify this question by suggesting that the minority gay individual will simply choose to prioritize one of these identities while repressing the other. Based upon in-depth interviews of thirty gay Jewish men in Toronto, this work offers a case study to empirically and theoretically explore the varied experiences of these intersecting identities for this under-studied population. As a result, gay Jews often struggle to find ways to successfully negotiate their ethno-religious and sexual identities.
Due to the emphasis on "traditional" gender roles, the "nuclear family," procreation and conservative religious values, many gay and lesbian Jews feel a sense of alienation from the Jewish community and develop an ambivalent or conflicted relationship about their own Jewish identity.