Now my favorite color is gray (Ray Schultz)

Simply put, like Shakespeare, Sondheim embraces human character. His music and lyrics depict behavior not in sharply etched black and white moral certainties but in an ambiguity that is sometimes heart-breaking, often witty, but, above all, always astute. As one of his songs from his first musical, Saturday Night, attests, “Now my favorite color is gray.”

Raymond Schultz

That’s not to say, however, that Sondheim’s shades of gray are inherently drab. On the contrary, much of his work fairly vibrates with colorful bursts of chromatic and literate energy. Seurat obsesses with singular focus about the color and light in his quest to “finish the hat” but still cannot completely ignore the pull of his feelings for Dot. In “Send in the Clowns” Desiree’s feelings of rue and loss are mixed with a healthy dash of sardonic self-awareness. And in Follies, the decaying theatre where his disillusioned middle-aged couples confront the ghosts of their past explodes into a metaphoric therapy session in the show’s climatic Ziegfeld-like “Loveland” sequence. These are just three examples; I’ll leave you all to point to some of your personal favorites.

That’s not to say, however, that Sondheim’s shades of gray are inherently drab. On the contrary, much of his work fairly vibrates with colorful bursts of chromatic and literate energy.

I’ve been an unabashed Sondheim geek since high school when I saw the original production of Company, and I’ve been extremely fortunate to have seen almost all of his shows in their original New York runs and subsequent revivals—many of them multiple times. Although his death was hardly surprising, given his age, I feel the loss that we won’t be graced by another one of his peerless scores. Fortunately, we have a substantial body of work to cherish and that can continue to speak to us. In a world that increasingly offers so little to be sure of, “it was marvelous” to know Stephen Sondheim “and it’s never really through.” I feel pretty confident that, like Shakespeare, we’ll be seeing Sondheim performed on our stages a hundred or two years from now; gray never goes out of style.