‘Now you know’: On Sondheim and middle age

Abstract

This article examines how Stephen Sondheim persistently and profoundly probed the second act of life, especially the years of middle age. I didn’t know it when I began discovering Sondheim’s works as an adolescent, but his lyrical insights prepared me for ageing. He proffered a map and showed the risks of ‘the road you didn’t take’, while also evincing the profound ambivalence that accompanies the examined life. Time registers itself anew – through its disappearing act – in one’s sinew and memory alike. Ageing variously enables some things and disables others; it forces one to grapple with various kinds of deaths – material and metaphoric – from small to shattering. Sondheim’s musicals stage these forays into ageing, and in what follows I explore how his works offer a prismatic view of middle age and beyond. Sondheim evinces how part of ageing deals with consequences – it is less about the road you didn’t take than the one that you did. And while a character in Follies (1971) implores us to ‘never look back’, much of Sondheim’s canon is about the wisdom gleaned from looking back, usually from the gimlet-eyed perspective of age and experience.