Weekend self-care open thread: The music of Stephen Sondheim

Before All This™ began, the great and the good of the Great White Way were planning on celebrating the 90th birthday of the greatest living American musical theater composer, the inestimable Stephen Sondheim. Of course, once his birthday rolled around, All This™ was in full swing, so the celebration went virtual. 

We enter the second year of the plague battered and bruised, but still standing. Sondheim likewise survived  being battered and bruised by his upbringing, and turned that trauma into the greatest art that Broadway has seen. One can say that there was Broadway before Sondheim's breakout work, Company, and Broadway after it.

His work, at its best, is suffused with the pain and joy of being alive. His work is far from the happy endings of the Golden Age of Broadway. It deals with a world unmoored from the certainties which informed the work of his great predecessors. That's why it speaks so much to us raised after Vietnam and Watergate.

For our self-care, a bit of his work.

As always: Be bold, be beautiful, be good.