The week between November 26 and December 2, 2021, was catastrophic for the theater community. Stephen Sondheim died just after Thanksgiving, and Antony Sher followed six days later. In many ways these two figures stood at opposite boundaries of the theatrical universe. Sondheim dominated musicals as an innovator and stunning lyricist; Sher was a classical actor renowned for his Shakespearean roles and his occasional appearances in the movies and on television. They both performed at the peak of their profession. They both left hordes of admirers to recall their work. I am one of those admirers.
At first I didn’t get Sondheim. I was one of those people who complained that his tunes weren’t hummable. (Sondheim responded to those of us with tin ears in a song called “Opening Doors” in Merrily We Roll Along.) In those early days I thought he should have stuck to writing lyrics and left the music to the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne, his collaborators on West Side Story and Gypsy, respectively, and I considered his A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to be his best work. Then I started to develop some taste. One day in 1978 my friends Bud and Kathy and I went to what was then the Uris Theater to see Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury perform Sweeney Todd, and I emerged from the theater gobsmacked. The man had written a musical thriller, a piece that was both horrifying and shamefully funny. If he had given us nothing but “A Little Priest,” Sondheim would deserve canonization on Broadway, but of course he bequeathed us much, much more.
I got to the Kennedy Center in 2001 for three of the six shows in the Sondheim Celebration, and it was there, during Company, that I first witnessed what it meant to stop the show. At the end of one number—I can’t recall which—the audience clapped and cheered and wouldn’t cease; the applause just went on and on, and the show perforce had to stop until the house quieted. It was there that I first saw A Little Night Music and its intricate, dazzling series of tours de force, including “Now/Later/Soon,” three intertwining songs sung by three actors simultaneously, and “A Weekend in the Country,” which kept building from solo to duet to trio to quartet to quintet to chorus. Not everything he tried was commercially successful. I got to watch a few rehearsals for Road Show at the Public Theater in 2008, and I was put off by both the pretentiousness of the director and the thinness of the material. But I admired Sondheim for continuing to tinker with material that didn’t work, for always pushing himself, for never resting on those extensive laurels. Fifty years after Richard Wilbur published “The Death of a Toad,” the poet mused on whether he should change the word “steered” to “veered.” One single word, half a century later, was still on the writer’s mind. That was how Sondheim lived as well, forever looking forward, but never forgetting the blemishes that he wanted to correct.
Antony Sher was also a creator. He wrote journals, memoirs, and novels, and he brought the world’s most famous fictional personalities—I’m talking about the characters in Shakespeare’s plays—into startlingly fresh form on the stage. He was not a conventionally handsome actor; it would be hard to imagine him as Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific. But he was a ferociously intelligent one, and he gave every ounce of energy to every role he created. I saw him first in July of 1982 in Stratford, England, on one of the greatest days I’ve ever spent in a theater. That afternoon I watched Sinead Cusack and Derek Jacobi as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, a pleasant, conventional rendering of the play that turned out to be a nice warmup act for the headliner that evening: King Lear directed by Adrian Noble with Michael Gambon in the title role and Antony Sher as the Fool. It was an all-star cast in a jaw-dropping production: Jenny Agutter as a beautiful, sadistic Regan; Malcolm Storry as a tall, stoic Kent; Jonathan Hyde as a patrician Edgar; David Bradley as Albany. But Sher stole the show as a manic, raw-egg-eating music-hall clown who ended up dying onstage when a mad Lear accidentally stabbed him. Later, in 1985, I took my parents and sister to see Sher play Richard III at the Barbican in London. That was the role that made him a star, a spidery Richard on crutches with a grotesque prosthetic hump on his back that, at one point, was bare to the audience. Sher wrote his first book about the experience, Year of the King, which he followed with Year of the Fat Knight (about playing Falstaff) and Year of the Mad King, describing his return to Lear to play the king himself. He died too young at age 72, as did Sondheim at 91, But, damn, they left behind a huge pair of comet tails blazing across the boards.