Queer Sundays

Abstract

This article reflects on the allegorical queerness of one of Stephen Sondheim’s most popular and celebrated musicals, Sunday in the Park with George. The author recalls his first experience of the musical – the televised version of the original Broadway production in the mid-1980s – at a moment when his own adolescent queerness was beginning to find voice, and examines Sondheim’s subtle and typically unmarked incorporation of queerness into his work. Against popular commentaries that have criticized Sondheim’s lack of explicitly articulated queer content in his work (and in his public life), the author argues that Sondheim invites and invokes space within his musicals for queerness that can thrive without necessarily being named.