TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Stephen Sondheim once described himself as an austere revolutionary. His musicals - the music, the lyrics, the stories - were both more complex and more subtle than their predecessors. After Alan Jay Lerner - who wrote the lyrics for "My Fair Lady," "Brigadoon" and "Camelot" - saw Sondheim's groundbreaking 1970 musical "Company," he broke into tears and told his wife, my way of writing musicals is over. It's no exaggeration to say Sondheim was a genius. Geniuses are often complicated people with complicated personalities - and Sondheim was no exception. Perhaps the most difficult relationship in his life was with his mother who could be cold and even verbally cruel. That seems to have influenced Sondheim's personality and the themes of some of his shows.
In the new book "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy," my guest, Daniel Okrent, offers insights into Sondheim's life and music based on access to his letters, archives, oral history, as well as the 36 hours of interviews that Meryle Secrest did for her 1998 biography of him and Okrent's own interviews with many people who knew him.
Okrent has worked as a book and magazine editor and was the first public editor for The New York Times. He's the author of previous books about Prohibition, baseball and how eugenics and bigotry shaped anti-immigration law. Stephen Sondheim got his start on Broadway, writing lyrics for "Gypsy" and "West Side Story." He went on to write music and lyrics for such shows as "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum," "Follies," "Merrily We Roll Along," "Sweeney Todd," "Sunday In The Park With George," "Into The Woods" and "Passion." Daniel Okrent, welcome back to FRESH AIR. It's great to have you back.
DANIEL OKRENT: I'm very happy to be here.
GROSS: I want to start with you choosing a song, and I'd like it to be a song that you heard something new in as a result of all the research that you did for this new Sondheim book.
OKRENT: Oh, well, "Epiphany," this horrifying and overwhelming song near the end of "Sweeney Todd," I had listened to and been impressed by I don't know how many scores of times, but when I was doing the research and listening carefully, that's when I realized that everything we've heard before in that show comes back in very brief snatches in that one song. It's all tied together in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why it's so effective.
GROSS: And this is a song where Sweeney Todd, who is seeking revenge against the judge that locked him up and then stole his wife and then is trying to marry Sweeney's daughter.
OKRENT: Right.
GROSS: And...
OKRENT: Steals his wife - well, he steals his wife...
GROSS: And discards her.
OKRENT: And, you know, wounds her permanently.
GROSS: Yeah, yeah.
OKRENT: Yeah.
GROSS: And Sweeney ends up killing her because now she's homeless and has gone mad, and she's just, like, in his way. So, yeah, anyhow - so here's the song, and it's one of my very, very favorite of all Sondheim's pieces, and this is my favorite show of his. And it's a really - like, his desire for revenge is just, like, overflowing. And he wants to - everybody's unworthy, and they all deserve to die. That's the refrain. They all deserve to die. So here it is.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LEN CARIOU: (As Sweeney Todd, singing) There's a hole in the world like a great black pit, and it's filled with people who are filled with s***, and the vermin of the world inhabit it. But not for long. They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. There's the one staying put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one's face. Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you. No, we all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief. For the rest of us, death will be a relief. We all deserve to die. And I'll never see Johanna. No, I'll never…
GROSS: So that's "Epiphany" from Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd." And something I found really fascinating about your book is that there's this recurring chord in "Sweeney Todd" that's a real horror-movie kind of chord. Like, old horror movie. And he knew that chord from a Bernard Herrmann score from a 1945 film, "Hangover Square." And so I went to that movie, which I've never seen, but watched the scene where the concert pianist, who is having a breakdown and is murdering people, is at the piano playing this very dizzying piece and strikes that chord several times.
OKRENT: It was a chord that the very young Stephen Sondheim - he was a teenager - heard, and he just fell in love with that chord. And he went back to see the movie again because he wanted to be able to retain that chord and be able to use it for his own purposes. Now, he was not yet a composer at that point, but he was an incipient composer. And, in fact, that chord that he called the Herrmann chord shows up in his work and shows up particularly in "Sweeney Todd," I believe, three times.
GROSS: So let's just hear a little bit of the music from the concert piece that's being played. It's - you know, with that chord in the Bernard Herrmann score, because, you know, the pianist is performing when he's having the breakdown, and we hear that chord.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERNARD HERRMANN'S "CONCIERTO MACABRO")
GROSS: So that was an excerpt where what Stephen Sondheim called the Bernard Herrmann chord is heard in. It's from the movie "Hangover Square." I think Sondheim had denied that "Sweeney Todd" was about revenge or his own desire for revenge. And you found something in your research that relates to that. Would you explain?
OKRENT: Sure. In an interview that he gave to his first biographer, Meryle Secrest, back in 1996, Sondheim described the day that Judy Prince came over to hear some of the songs, the beginning songs of "Sweeney Todd." She was his closest friend, his self-acknowledged muse, and she often would do this. He would play them for her before anybody else. So she came over. He had told her before that that it was a horror show. It was going to be, you know, a spine-tingler. And so she comes over to his house and he plays a few of the first songs, and she stops him two songs into it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with horror. This is the story of your life. And as Sondheim reported it, he said, it never occurred to me, but of course it is. Now, in the Secrest book, we don't know what the story of his life is. But I was able to determine through a couple of sources, but primarily Judy Prince, who never gave interviews that, in fact, it was about revenge.
GROSS: And you write that his psychiatrist, Milton Horowitz wrote papers on revenge and on revenge and masochism. And Horowitz connects revenge to deep loneliness and the need to connect, which you can also relate to Sondheim.
OKRENT: Yeah. There are two major arcs to his life. One is from absolute alienation to, finally, near the end of his life, connection. The other is from an ambivalence that could be crippling at times to resolution, to knowing who he was and what he was capable of doing. But it took 50 years for him to move from one of those poles to the next one.
GROSS: So in terms of "Sweeney" being about revenge and people thinking it's autobiographical in some way, not the murder part, but just about revenge. Sondheim said, the difference between Sweeney and me is that I turned it into art.
OKRENT: I think that's a sentence that says a great deal about his entire career and his entire life, that through his music and his lyrics, he was able to express things that he could not, for various forms of inhibition, express otherwise. It was where, if it's not autobiographical - obviously, he's not slitting throats. Obviously, you know, he's not Georges Seurat. Obviously, he's not, you know, in the woods in "Into The Woods." But the feelings expressed in those shows all come from inside of him, I think, very, very clearly.
GROSS: And I think it's in a smaller way inside all of us, that we get angry, that we want to get back at someone, and we don't necessarily act on it, you know, 'cause - but it's just I love that show so much, and there's a part of me - you know, I'm fairly inhibited myself, but there's a part of me that, like - I suppress certain feelings, and you just, like, relate to all the feelings in that show.
OKRENT: Absolutely. And it's the inhibitions that keep us from expressing those feelings, was something that he attacked.
GROSS: And that's not a bad thing necessarily (laughter).
OKRENT: No. Socially, it's a very good thing...
GROSS: Yeah.
OKRENT: ...To do. And sometimes when he was in a bad mood, he would let them out socially, but mostly, it came through in his songs. And one of the things that's very important to know about Sondheim that enabled him to bring them out in his songs, those feelings, were the disinhibiting effects of alcohol and drugs. And alcohol particularly was something that he consumed in great quantities. His collaborators said, you know, it didn't impair his ability to work, but he would drink all day long - marijuana, cocaine for a period, but mostly alcohol, great, great quantities of alcohol.
The cabaret performer Michael Feinstein reported about having his assistant call Sondheim when Sondheim was coming to dinner at Feinstein's house and asked if there was anything particularly that he would like at dinner, and Sondheim replied, according to Feinstein, vodka, vodka and more vodka. And there are dozens of other incidents and moments where the alcohol is so visibly a tool that he uses to make it through his work and, I think, through his life.
GROSS: We need to take a short break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Daniel Okrent. His new book is called "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Daniel Okrent. His new book is about Stephen Sondheim, and it's called "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy."
So I want to ask you about a letter, a letter that's very famous to Sondheim fans that, you know, you learned more about. Describe the letter as Sondheim described it, and then describe the letter that was actually written. This was a letter from his mother. And they had a very complicated and very stressful relationship with each other, which we'll get into after we hear about the letter.
OKRENT: In the late 1970s, his mother, known as Foxy - that was her nickname - wrote him a letter, the content of which he revealed in an interview with The New York Times in 1994 in which he said, in the letter, my mother said, the only thing I regret in life is giving birth to you. Now, that's a kind of a powerful statement, and that kind of explains the - or at least measures the intensity of his negative feelings about his mother. And it's a story that he, from that point, told over and over and over again. All the Sondheads (ph), as we sometimes are known as those people who really know everything about him or want to know everything about him, we all know this letter. He referred to it so frequently. I found, however, in the Mary Rodgers papers - Mary Rodgers was his lifelong friend, daughter Richard Rodgers - he sent her what he said was a copy of the letter he had written to his mother when he received that. And so a letter in which he says, I never wanted anything to do with you again. This is just the end of our relationship. But in that letter, which he represents to his oldest friend as the accurate version of the letter that he had sent in 1978, she doesn't say I regret giving birth to you. She says the only guilt I have is giving birth to you, and there's a mile of distance between guilt and regret.
GROSS: There's two ways I can interpret guilt. One is that she knew she wasn't meant to be a mother and she feels guilty that she was such a bad mother. But the more obvious interpretation is, she gave birth to a monster and she feels guilty about that, that she unleashed this miserable person on the world.
OKRENT: Oh, that's interesting. I go the opposite direction. I liked the first - your first version better. I don't see any evidence that she felt that she had unleashed a monster on the world, even in her bitterest expressions to him.
GROSS: So there's a song in "Company" that seems to be related to his mother. And it's "Ladies Who Lunch," sung by Elaine Stritch. What's the connection?
OKRENT: Well, in fact, it is about his mother, in a way. She was a socialite. She liked to be around famous people. And she liked to eat nearly - not every day but certainly every week at the 21 Club, where all the stylish people of the era would go. And she would go with friends who were in show business or not. These were the ladies who lunched. They were the subject of that song, and they were the object of his distaste. I don't think that Sondheim was aiming at anybody else but his mother, but he was thinking of this group of women when he wrote that coruscating, acidic and hilarious song.
GROSS: So let's hear it. This is "Ladies Who Lunch" from his musical "Company."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE LADIES WHO LUNCH")
ELAINE STRITCH: (Singing) Here's to the girls who stay smart. Aren't they a gas? Rushing to their classes in optical art, wishing it would pass. Another long, exhausting day, another thousand dollars. A matinee, a Pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler's. I'll drink to that. And one for Mahler. Here's to the girls who play wife.
GROSS: That was "Ladies Who Lunch" from the Stephen Sondheim musical "Company." So let's continue talking about the relationship between Sondheim and his mother. Although they had a pretty toxic relationship much of the time, his mother was friends with Oscar Hammerstein's wife. And Sondheim was friends with the Hammersteins' son. So when the Hammersteins moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, his mother and Stephen Sondheim moved nearby. And Hammerstein became Sondheim's mentor. And Hammerstein wasn't mean to Sondheim, but he could be very blunt in his criticism.
OKRENT: Well, he was direct with him. I think that Oscar, as he must be known, Oscar was the most important male figure in his life. Oscar dies when Sondheim is just about 30. But for those 30 years, there was no one he was closer with and no one for whom he had more regard. And worth saying, he didn't have regard for Hammerstein's work as a lyricist, even though Hammerstein was at that point the most prominent and successful lyricist on Broadway.
But as a nurturing personality, he valued him immensely. And part of the nurturing that Oscar brought to the relationship was to be frank with him so that when the young Steve is trying to write music or write a play, Oscar would be very direct with him and say, sorry, this is no good. You're trying to pretend you're somebody other than you are. Write what you know. Write what you think. And those were the lessons that Sondheim cherished for the rest of his life.
GROSS: And one of the first things Sondheim showed Hammerstein when Sondheim was still pretty young, Hammerstein's response to it was, this is really terrible. I'm not saying you're not talented. You are, but this is terrible (laughter).
OKRENT: Right. And Sondheim is glad for that. The same thing shows up when he's at college at Williams, when he's studying music with the composer Milton Babbitt. He wants the criticism. He relishes the criticism. But that happened only in the intimacy of personal or professional relationships. Criticism from the outside, most creative people - certainly most creative people in the theater that I know - are very wary of, leery of and displeased by critics, but not to the degree that Stephen Sondheim was. He despised critics. There were exceptions, but mostly he demeaned critics.
You know, his first music and lyrics show was the enormous success "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum" in 1962, I believe it was. Recalling that experience of a show that was a gigantic hit, he wrote to a friend to say how it was the most bitter experience that he had ever had as a composer, as a writer or as a theater person. The critics took me out and they trounced me and dragged me through the mud. And they beat the hell out of me.
And in fact, if you go back and read the reviews of "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum," there was one pan. A critic for the World-Telegram and Sun, you know, really slashed it and demeaned it and said, you know, this would've been a lousy score in the 1930s. But other than that, it got good reviews. It got very positive respect for his music. And this was the first time his music had been performed on Broadway. But his memory of the experience just two years later was one of being horribly mistreated by critics.
GROSS: We need to take a short break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Daniel Okrent. His new book is called "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S "LAST MIDNIGHT (INSTRUMENTAL)")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Daniel Okrent. His new book is about Stephen Sondheim, and it's called "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy."
After Oscar Hammerstein died, Sondheim collaborated for one show called "Do I Hear A Waltz?" with Richard Rodgers, who was Hammerstein's, you know, long time songwriting partner, with Rodgers writing the music and Hammerstein writing the lyrics. So I want to play something from "Do I Hear A Waltz?" because just the whole idea of Sondheim and Richard Rodgers collaborating is interesting. We should hear an example of the music. The only song that caught on from there was "Do I Hear A Waltz?," which, as I recall, I heard people do on, like, "The Ed Sullivan Show" and on the radio. Do you want to choose one?
OKRENT: Yeah, I think your instinct is right. You know, we remember "Do I Hear A Waltz?" because that song became a very big hit. It was sung by many, many other popular singers of the era, and even since then. It was also very - this is not to demean Rodgers at all, he was a great composer, but it was very much easy listening. It was something - a kind of music that could be popular. Yeah, let's play it.
GROSS: OK, here it is. And the singer is Elizabeth Allen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DO I HEAR A WALZ?")
ELIZABETH ALLEN: (Singing) Do I hear a waltz? Very odd, but I hear a waltz. There isn't a band and I don't understand it at all. Oh, I can't hear a waltz. Oh, my Lord, there it goes again. Why is nobody dancing in the street? Can't they hear the beat? Magical, mystical miracle, can it be? Is it true? Things are impossibly lyrical. Is it me? No, it's you.
GROSS: That was Elizabeth Allen singing the title song from the original cast recording of "Do I Hear A Waltz?," a collaboration between composer Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics.
So getting back to talking about Sondheim's life. He knew he was gay, but you couldn't really come out then, not even on Broadway, where, like, so many of the directors and writers and composers and lyricists were gay, and the audience as well, but you couldn't be out 'cause that's how it was. So it seems to me from your book that he really tried to be straight because he just couldn't be out then.
OKRENT: I think he gave it a shot. I think it wasn't that he made a valiant effort to do it. But, see, let's see if this is a possibility. And he did not come out publicly, really, well, it's the middle to late '70s. Not that anybody was asking that much in those days. Certainly all the people who knew him, people in his social world, they knew he was gay. He knew he was gay. He did not think it was a defining aspect of his life. He didn't want to be, as it were, typecast. He wasn't a gay composer. He was a composer. And his private life was something completely separate.
GROSS: Did his attitude change when he found the person who became his spouse?
OKRENT: Well, his attitude begins to change when he falls in love with a 21 year old, and Sondheim is, at this point, in his early 60s, a incipient or aspiring songwriter named Peter Jones. He meets this young man, and it's head over heels. That's when he wrote "Passion." That's when he wrote his only unironic play. That's when he wrote his only unironic musical. That's the time that he wrote a show that was about exposing one's love. He had never done that before. Now, the characters in "Passion" are heterosexual. It's a man and a woman. But there's no question this came out of this changed experience of finding someone to fall in love with. He had had serial relationships with many, many men over the years. But this was the one that clicked.
And then after that ran its course, although they remained friends, in the early 2000s, he met Jeff Romley, whom he fell deeply in love with, as Romley did with him. Romley moved into his house, and they spent the last 17 years of Stephen Sondheim's life together. They got married four years before Sondheim died, and there was no effort of hiding that relationship.
GROSS: During that period, he wrote a song from - I think this was probably the final musical that was actually performed.
OKRENT: In his lifetime. Yeah.
GROSS: In his lifetime. Yeah. And it was - it had several titles, but I think it's mostly known as "Road Show." And the song I'm thinking of is "The Best Thing That Ever Happened (ph)," which is - I love this song. It's a duet. And I didn't realize until you wrote it that it had become a standard song at gay weddings. But let's hear the song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAS HAPPENED")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) You might just be the best thing that has happened to me so far. Of course, not much ever really has happened to me so far.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing) I didn't much like love. I always fought it I never thought it would happen like this.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) Give us a kiss.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1 AND UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing) We may just be the best thing that has happened to us...
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) Kiddo.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing) Partner.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1 AND UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing) Another moment like this may not happen to us.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing) Partner.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing) Lover.
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1 AND UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing) When all is said and done I have to agree. You are the best thing that's happened to me.
GROSS: That was "The Best Thing That Ever Happened" from the Sondheim musical "Road Show." And my guest is Daniel Okrent, author of the new book "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy."
So, Sondheim collaborated on several, like, key musicals with Hal Prince. They had a pretty complicated relationship, and he also had a very complicated relationship with Leonard Bernstein. So let's focus on one of them. You can choose.
OKRENT: Let's talk about Bernstein. When the two met, Sondheim was 25, and he came in to sort of audition as a lyricist for "West Side Story." And Bernstein, who was, at that time, the best known non-rock musician in America, by far, television star, music star, Bernstein immediately embraced him and hired him, along with his collaborators on the show to write the lyrics for this very unlikely show about street gangs in New York in the mid to late 1950s. And they were a great combination. And there are problems with the show they both would perceive in later years, but I think anybody who's familiar with the score of "West Side Story" would say that it was a success. And from that moment on, Sondheim became part of the Bernsteins' social world, which was the red-hot center of the creative world of New York - in fact, a world that Sondheim would later parody, or satirize, I should say - that he would satirize in "Merrily We Can Roll Along (ph)." But at that time, he was taken in. He was taken in by everybody who mattered in the world of music and theater and books and dance, and he became very close to the Bernstein family. But over the years, what was a wonderful collaboration and a loving friendship turned a little bit into rivalry, and then it soured toward the end of Bernstein's life.
My supposition - and it's only a supposition - is that at the time that Sondheim's reputation as a composer was rising and had reached - nearly reached its peak, Bernstein's reputation as a composer was plummeting. And the relationship changed. One was now a musical success. The other was now somebody who was having a very hard time holding things together musically and in many other aspects of his life.
GROSS: I think Bernstein didn't like "Sweeney Todd"?
OKRENT: It was "Sweeney Todd," of which he said about "Sweeney Todd," he said, the music made me want to throw up in my galoshes.
GROSS: See, I can't imagine that because it's such a brilliant musical - such a groundbreaking musical. And Sondheim didn't like Bernstein's "Mass," but...
OKRENT: No one did.
GROSS: That's what I was going to say.
OKRENT: (Laughter).
GROSS: He was joined by a lot of people (laughter)...
OKRENT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
GROSS: ...In not liking it.
OKRENT: Exactly. Yeah.
GROSS: Yeah.
OKRENT: With "Sweeney," I think, Terry, there's misperception. I don't think what he said - that, it makes me want to throw up in my galoshes - he was commenting on the music. I think he was commenting to some degree on the subject matter, but mostly on his envy for Steve's success. I think it was killing him that Steve was having success doing something that he could no longer do.
GROSS: You write in the book that Sondheim described his songwriting process - not the lyrics, but the musical part - as being built around chords - that the first thing that comes to him is the chords and then he adds the melody around that. And some of his chords were so interesting. And I'm going to go back to "Sweeney Todd" for this because at the beginning of the show, it opens with this, like, really chilling organ solo, and it's one crazy chord after another. Like, each chord has such a kind of demonic sound to it, and it just keeps building and building. So let's just hear a little bit of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM SONG, "PRELUDE: THE BALLAD OF SWEENEY TODD: 'ATTEND THE TALE OF SWEENEY TODD'")
GROSS: So that's the opening music from "Sweeney Todd," his musical about revenge that's inspired by - it sounds like it's inspired by horror films in part.
OKRENT: Yeah. It's an amazing piece of work. And of course, that theme returns throughout the show behind other songs and for different purposes, but it haunts the show. He said harmony was everything. If you don't have the harmony, forget about the rest of it. And so he would sit at the keyboard and he would just noodle around with his fingers and he would find these harmonies that seemed to fit the theme, the subject matter and even - and most importantly, the character who was singing the song.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Daniel Okrent. He's the author of the new book "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy." We have to take a short break here, and then we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S "WAITING FOR THE GIRL UPSTAIRS")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Daniel Okrent. His new book is called "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy."
So I want to end the musical part of our discussion with one of the two songs that were played at Sondheim's memorial service, and they were songs that he felt very deeply about. One of them was "Someone In A Tree" from "Pacific Overtures" - a show that didn't do well, and a show that most people don't know as well as his shows that do do well. I don't know the score that well myself. But he had told me that - one of the first times I interviewed him - that "Someone In A Tree" from "Pacific Overtures" was his favorite of all the songs he wrote. And you write, when listening back to that song, he'd frequently tear up. So I want to play that song, but I'd like you to set it up for us.
OKRENT: "Pacific Overtures" is set in the middle of the 19th century, when this - think of this as an idea for a Broadway musical - let's do a Broadway musical about the opening of Japan to Western commerce in the 1850s. I mean, it sounds ridiculous for a musical. I happen to love the show deeply. It may be my favorite of all the Sondheim shows. And in this particular scene, the American admiral has come ashore to negotiate with the Japanese authorities, negotiate with many ships and cannons right behind him. So it's not the easiest of negotiations. And in the song, a young boy is in a tree. He's the someone in a tree who is hearing little bits and pieces of the conversation and wanting to know what's really going on and believing that things he's - that he hears going on may not be the whole story.
It is about an outsider trying to get in, and I believe that that would be a very short version of much of Stephen Sondheim's life. Even though it is not necessarily a beloved song by Sondheim fans, I think they - we admire it and treasure it because it was so important to him. His collaborator, John Weidman, who had never written a Broadway show before "Pacific Overtures" and then collaborated with him on two other shows, he said to me when I interviewed him that, you know, Steve cried at the time he wrote it. But he was still crying about it 40 years later. There's something in that that you need to pay attention to. And I think that what I pay attention to is the outsider trying to be in.
GROSS: OK, let's hear it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOMEONE IN A TREE")
GEDDE WATANABE: Tell him what I see.
JAMES DYBAS: (Singing) I am in a tree. I am 10. I am in a tree.
WATANABE: (Singing) I was younger then.
DYBAS: (Singing) In between the eves, I can see. Tell me what I see. I was only 10.
WATANABE: (Singing) I see men and matting. Some are old, some chatting.
DYBAS: (Singing) If it happened, I was there. I saw everything.
WATANABE: (Singing) I see everything.
DYBAS: (Singing) I was someone in a tree.
WATANABE: Tell him what I see.
DYBAS: (Singing) Some of them have gold on their coats.
WATANABE: (Singing) One of them has gold.
GROSS: That was "Someone In A Tree" from the Stephen Sondheim musical "Pacific Overtures." My guest, Daniel Okrent, is the author of the new book "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy." You know, I think your book could've been called "Genius Isn't Easy" instead of "Art Isn't Easy." Art isn't easy is a quote from "Sunday In The Park With George," one of the lyrics. But there's so many geniuses in your book, and they're all such complicated people.
OKRENT: I guess they are. I may have overcomplicated them because I do so much research. I go so deep and I find things that, you know, inevitably lead to complication. I could - you could do it with my life very, very easily. But it is true that in the theater community, I think it goes without saying that emotions are on the surface. And even if you're trying to hide the emotions, the fact that you're trying to hide them are on the surface. It's a very volatile world. And so the people I'm writing about in this book, not just Sondheim but also Prince and Bernstein and so many others, not a lot of easy personalities.
GROSS: So you said that this Sondheim book is going to be your last book.
OKRENT: (Laughter).
GROSS: How does it feel to have Sondheim be the last book you're going to write?
OKRENT: What was great about the Sondheim project was I wasn't going to make any money from it. It's published by university press. It's on a relatively, you know, arcane subject. And, you know, it was something that I did because I was interested. And I had been interested in Sondheim for most of my adult life. And now here was the opportunity presented to me - go find out everything about somebody that you admire greatly. And that was a pleasure. And I'm pleased enough, as I hope you are, Terry - I'm pleased enough with this one to think, OK, I've done enough.
GROSS: Well, Daniel Okrent, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much.
OKRENT: You love Sondheim's music as much as I do, so it's great to share this with you, Terry.
GROSS: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Daniel Okrent is the author of the new book "Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn't Easy." After we take a short break, book critic Maureen Corrigan will review a new novel that reimagines an infamous clash of cultures. This is FRESH AIR.
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