Stephen Sondheim was Jewish, but was his a ‘Jewish Life’?

When Daniel Okrent first proposed writing a biography of Stephen Sondheim for the Yale Jewish Lives collection, he had a warning for his writer.

“I’d love to put in writing about Sondheim when you’re , however I’ve to let you know that he was not in any manner, in any distant manner, a working towards Jew,” Okrent recalled saying.

The individuals at Jewish Lives have been unfazed — that’s, till he turned in his manuscript.  

“They stated, ‘Might we’ve a bit bit extra Jewish stuff in there?’”

I can sympathize. It may be difficult to put in writing about well-known, extremely assimilated Jews like Sondheim, for whom Jewishness didn’t appear to be a major a part of their personal identification or what made them well-known. In writing an obituary, for instance, there’s a danger of “claiming” somebody as Jewish in methods they may have rejected, or of forcing their life right into a Jewish narrative in a manner that appears synthetic or exaggerated. 

And but, Okrent argues, Sondheim was unmistakably Jewish.

“I have a look at it as a type of Americanized Yiddishkeit: his nature, his worldview, his humorousness,” stated Okrent in an interview final week. “To me, additionally having grown up as a fairly areligious Jew, that felt very Jewish.”

Okrent, a journalist and former public editor of The New York Occasions whose earlier books embrace histories of prohibition and U.S. immigration coverage,  wrote “Stephen Sondheim: Artwork Isn’t Simple” as an unabashed fan. 

“I wished to know the life by means of the work and the work by means of the life,” he instructed me. The ebook chronicles the friendships, rivalries and private demons that knowledgeable Sondheim’s unmatched contribution to the American musical, from the lyrics he wrote for “West Facet Story” and “Gypsy” to the scores and lyrics he composed for canonical reveals like “Firm,” “A Little Night time Music,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday within the Park with George.” 

And whereas Sondheim, who died in 2023 at age 91, spent a lifetime denying it, Okrent concluded that his life and artwork have been “intimately intertwined,” and that his reveals have been usually autobiographical.

Except a handful of musicals, “every part else displays his life, his emotions, his triumphs, his failures,” stated Okrent. 

That features “Sweeney Todd,” the ghoulish, operatic story of a deranged barber who kills his prospects and serves them up as meat pies. When Judy Prince, spouse of his longtime collaborator Hal Prince, instructed Sondheim that “Sweeney Todd” was the story of his life, Sondheim agreed.

“What did he see in that? Revenge,” stated Okrent. Sondheim understood what it was to carry a grudge — in opposition to critics, notably, and anybody else who instructed his reveals have been too elitist, too cool or (and this galled him to the diploma that he wrote a music about it) not “hummable.”  

What nearly by no means seems in his reveals or music, nevertheless, is a Jewish theme or character, a minimum of explicitly so. And once they do seem — notably as theatrical producers in reveals like “Gypsy” and “Merrily We Roll Alongside” — they replicate the primary manner Sondheim himself claimed his Jewishness. 

When requested about his Jewish identification by the journalist Abigail Pogrebin for her 2005 ebook “Stars of David,” Sondheim stated, “It’s very deep. It’s the truth that so most of the folks that I love within the arts are Jewish. And artwork is as near a faith as I’ve.”

The long run composer grew up on New York’s Higher West Facet; his dad and mom, Herbert and Etta, generally known as Cunning, have been distinguished within the dressmaking enterprise. They belonged to Temple Emanu-El, the socially distinguished Reform synagogue on the East Facet. After their divorce when Sondheim was 10, he moved together with his mom to a Pennsylvania exurb not removed from the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, who grew to become a surrogate father and musical mentor.  

Hammerstein was himself solely one-quarter Jewish by ancestry however is, as Okrent notes, now included within the pantheon of Jews who helped create the Broadway musical as we all know it.

Sondheim sought Hammerstein’s counsel till his mentor’s dying in 1960. When an up-and-coming Sondheim balked at a suggestion to put in writing the lyrics for “Gypsy,” saying he wished to compose in addition to write lyrics, Hammerstein satisfied him that it was an unmissable alternative to discover ways to write for a star — on this case, the Broadway legend Ethel Merman.  

Earlier than that, there was a stint in navy college, which Okrent writes that he liked, and math and music research on the WASP-y WIlliams School, the place the Jewish child was blackballed from a fraternity. Having had no spiritual education or bar mitzvah, Sondheim as soon as requested his Jewish roommate, “Am I even Jewish?” Okrent quotes musicologist Steven Swayne: Sondheim might have been “‘a Jew to the goyim,’ however to not himself.’”

And but, Sondheim’s skilled world would develop into saturated with Jewishness.

He teamed up with Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins, three different homosexual Jewish males, on “West Facet Story.” Along with Prince, he created reveals with Jule Styne, John Weidman, James Lapine and Larry Gelbart.

However Sondheim didn’t seem to strategy his work by in search of Jewish tales, even when others have been mining hits from the Jewish previous (“Fiddler on the Roof”), the beginning of Israel (“Milk and Honey”) and even the Holocaust (“Cabaret”).  

“He by no means would have stated, ‘I wish to discover a present that has, you already know, a Jewish theme,’ any greater than he stated, ‘I wish to discover a present that has a cowboy theme,’” Okrent stated. “It’s simply not the best way he went about his work.”

As a substitute, tales often got here to him by means of collaborators. “Sweeney Todd” and “Ardour,” certainly one of his final reveals, have been among the many exceptions. 

Others have tried to find Sondheim on the spectrum of Jewishness. Okrent mentions a course given in 2022 on the 92nd Avenue Y, “Sondheim and the Torah.” The theater scholar Gabrielle Hoyt, in a 2022 paper, additionally sees Jewish themes in lots of his reveals: “the road between vengeance and justice” in “Sweeney Todd”; the “boundaries of group” in “Firm”; the “isolation of the prophet” within the Sixties flop “Anybody Can Whistle.”

Hoyt additionally compares Sondheim’s eagerness to nurture younger expertise to that of a rabbi. Okrent writes concerning the younger composers and lyricists Sondheim mentored, together with Jonathan Larson, Adam Guettel, Lin-Manuel Miranda and “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, whom he inspired throughout their work on “The E-book of Mormon.”

“He supplied actually substantive criticism for many who got here to him for assist and with whom he constructed relationships,” stated Okrent. 

Okrent, who co-created the 2012 stage revue “Outdated Jews Telling Jokes,” chuckled after I in contrast Sondheim’s Jewishness to the metaphysical joke a couple of fish. “How’s the water?” an outdated fish asks a younger fish. “What the hell is water?” says the younger fish. 

Sondheim, agreed Okrent, might have been so deeply immersed in a Jewish milieu that he hardly ever considered it, or bothered to craft a fastidiously worked-out principle, like so many others, as to why Jews thrived on Broadway.

“I suppose if he interrogated himself about it, he in all probability would have. However I don’t know. I can’t say that with certainty,” Okrent acknowledged.

Generally, Sondheim did discover the water. Okrent remembers that he was happy with “A Little Night time Music,” his hit adaptation of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s movie “Smiles of a Summer time Night time.”

“However I don’t know if I actually prefer it,” Sondheim instructed the Jewish playwright Jules Feiffer. “It’s so rattling goyische.”