To my personal delight, Stephen Sondheim finally won the lifetime achievement award at the Tonys. To my disappointment, however, Sondheim wasn't actually there to accept it, nor could he deliver his own acceptance speech. In his stead, Mandy Patinkin recited the written speech. Sondheim's absence only primed me for the emotions to come.
I felt that Patinkin delivered Sondheim's speech well. No matter how anyone delivered the speech, though, Sondheim's sheer eloquence was enough to distinguish the speech as his own. As a blogger and not a journalist, I can't remember Sondheim's speech word-for-word. But he wrote, in his usual dark humor, that winning a lifetime achievement award seemed to cue the recipient that they've fulfilled a lifetime, have outlived their usefulness, and could finally die. Sondheim's address of his own encounter with mortality and age strangely mirrored much of his work.
Sondheim's choice of words in his reflection of age sounded like a verse from "No More" in Into the Woods, or a second epiphany for Sweeney Todd, however hopefully Sondheim closed the speech. The realization that my favorite modern Broadway composer is getting very old struck me, and I felt heartbroken and old. I see Sondheim as a cutting-edge Broadway composer of the present. Stephen Sondheim has written music younger than I! However, Sondheim's been writing music since the 1950s. At the tender age of 18, I feel old because of an old composer's realization and fulfillment of his own foreboding lyrics. Such is the immersing power of Sondheim's writing, I suppose.
While I was busy sobbing over Sondheim's heart-wrenching speech, my mother felt it necessary to pity Patinkin, because after the speech the cast of the revival of Sunday in the Park with George performed "Moving On"--Patinkin played the original George Seurat, and was not re-cast in the revival. But my mother's and my difference in subject of disappointment is but a small insight in highly personal (and troubling) matters of my own. (I think my mom chose to focus on Patinkin's shortcomings to avoid feeling old.) Whether the Tony awards have helped me to grow up or have skewed my idea of "contemporary", they showcased Sondheim's eloquence and proved my mother's ill opinion of him wrong in my Sondheim-loving presence.
