In the two weeks since Stephen Sondheim’s death at the age of 91, one of the most touching tributes—and there have been many—of the musical-theater legend came from longtime collaborator and current Company star Patti LuPone.
The seven-minute video package for CBS News Sunday Morning (intended to air for Sondheim’s 90th birthday in March 2020) offers a career retrospective. An interview between Sondheim and one of his many musical muses, the exchange is all the more moving a year and a half later. In its final moments, an emotional LuPone gets the opportunity to say, simply, thank-you.
“I have to say thank-you for me, and I have to say thank-you for all of us,” she said, wiping away tears. “I mean it! This is not planned, this is just coming out of me, it just is—I can’t…”
Sondheim comfortingly interrupts: “You’ve said it by not saying it. Thank you. That makes me feel very good.”
Speaking with Vanity Fair at the Dec. 9 opening night of Company, LuPone remembered the exchange being spontaneous. “I can’t tell you the why. It just happened,” she said. “I wanted him to know how grateful I was to be able to be in any of his work and how much he has taught me. That was it. And basically, it translated to all of us that have ever performed in his work, and what he teaches us. He elevates us. I mean, he is the composer, the lyricist, that elevates us.”
Alight in the purple glow from the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre marquee, LuPone was certainly not alone in processing his absence, while unequivocally celebrating his work and life.
“Suffice it to say, we’ve all gone through something,” she said. “We are a unit, and we are processing grief, joy, pressure. I can’t say anything more than that.”
“He’s still here, and yet he’s not here—it’s a very Sondheim thing to have two very contradictory ideas existing in the same space,” co-star Katrina Lenk later added, a glimmer of admiration and grief in her eye. “If anything, the awareness of that paradox has been heightened.”
Lenk stars as Bobbi in the gender-swapped revival from director Marianne Elliott; LuPone is the magnificently martini-toting Joanne. While Company stands as one of Sondheim’s greatest musical comedies, it manages to tackle nothing less than, as Lenk put it, “the riddle of existence”—a query that’s all the more crystalized in the wake of a pandemic-induced shutdown.
“That sounds really large, but we’ve all been wrestling with: What are we doing? What is it to exist? What are our lives? What is its meaning? What is our purpose? This show touches on all of that,” Lenk said.
It’s evident, too, that in Sondheim’s passing, the themes of the show took on a new meaning for the cast. “It became about something else entirely,” Etai Benson said. “It became about honoring Steve and paying tribute, but also upholding the legacy.”
Tasked with going on to perform the very day they received the news, each cast member Vanity Fair spoke with emphasized the unity drawn from such an experience, the honor it is to be a small part of Sondheim’s legacy, and the responsibility they feel to, as actor Matt Doyle said, “celebrate him through not just our grief, but the entire community’s grief.”
“To be experiencing this loss in what feels like the center of it is humbling and deeply overwhelming at the same time,” added Greg Hildreth. “It feels like a living memorial.”
More, still, went back to gratitude—for Sondheim, and to be working at a time when so many performing artists are still struggling in the field