Best Of: John Lithgow / Sondheim’s tumultuous life

Summary

Podcast Summary: Fresh Air – “Best Of: John Lithgow / Sondheim’s Tumultuous Life”
April 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

This “Best Of” Fresh Air episode, hosted by Dave Davies and Terry Gross, is a two-part cultural exploration. The first half is an in-depth interview with acclaimed actor John Lithgow, focusing on his Broadway role as Roald Dahl in “Giant” and his celebrated career (including “The Crown” and his upcoming turn as Dumbledore). The second half features author Daniel Okrent, whose new biography, Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, examines Sondheim’s complex personal life and innovative musical legacy. Both segments delve into artistry, the moral ambiguities of celebrated figures, and how the past echoes into the present.

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Part I: John Lithgow on Portraying Roald Dahl and a Storied Career

1. The Challenge of Playing Roald Dahl

• Empathizing with a Complicated Figure
  Lithgow discusses his approach to Dahl, a beloved children's author with a well-documented dark side, particularly his antisemitic statements.

  • “You look for ways you can empathize with every character…if you’re playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting…figure out what made him that way.” (John Lithgow, 03:42)
  • Noted insight: Lithgow’s personal connection through Maria Tucci, widow of Dahl’s former editor, underscored how even publishers found Dahl “insufferable and cruel…impossible to work with.” (John Lithgow, 04:16)

• The Plot and Real-Life Roots of “Giant”
  The play dramatizes the fallout from Dahl’s 1983 book review on the Israel-Lebanon conflict, which exposed his antisemitism, sparking publisher concerns ahead of his next release.

  • “They are there to get him to back down, apologize, and explain…and he wants nothing to do with that.” (John Lithgow, 06:21)

2. Nuance in Moral Debate

• Audience Reactions and the Power of Dialogue
  The play resists painting Dahl as a simple villain, presenting a battle of ideas between Dahl and a young Jewish American publisher.

  • “It sort of throws an audience off balance, no matter what their political leanings and feelings are…The debate is extremely articulate, very passionate on both sides.” (John Lithgow, 07:27)
  • “On occasion, Dahl’s right. He’s like a broken clock. And the audience…you can almost hear their anxiety…” (John Lithgow, 07:54)

• The Climax: Unspeakable Words
  A late-play revelation: Dahl’s actual, shocking quote elicits audible gasps, a moment Lithgow leaves for the stage:

  • “I deliberately don’t quote it in interviews because it has such power in performance…it’s the moment at which people see the very darkest side of Dahl.” (John Lithgow, 08:41)

3. Dahl’s Traumatic Life and Its Effects

• Lithgow traces Dahl’s bitterness and cruelty to repeated traumas: an outsider childhood, early loss of family, a brutal accident, his wife’s stroke, and multiple family tragedies.
  • “These were tragedies that absolutely haunted him…I’m convinced of that. And…it was almost as if he was angry at life because his life was so desperately difficult.” (John Lithgow, 10:06)

4. The Play’s Timeliness & Reception

• The parallels between the play’s subject (Israel’s military actions in Lebanon) and today’s conflict in Gaza make the work “astoundingly timely.”

  • “There are lines in the play that…you hear people gasp. They’re so timely, it’s almost describing what’s happening now.” (John Lithgow, 12:46)

• Noted: While Dahl’s family apologized for his antisemitism in 2020, “he never did.” (13:05)

5. Signature Roles and Craft

• Becoming Churchill in “The Crown”
  Lithgow, an American, recounts the daunting task of portraying Winston Churchill and the liberating “American energy” he brought to the role.

  • “I experimented…using a melon baller to create little balls of apple…Churchill had this unique lisp…It worked wonderfully…my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider.” (John Lithgow, 18:16)
  • Eventually, a prosthetics expert created “silicon plumpers” for authenticity.

• On Aging, Memory, and Playing Old Men

  • “At age 80…it’s harder than it used to be to learn the lines. But once they’re in there, I’m fine…my brain is a little bit tired. My body’s tired…80…you’re an old man at 80.” (John Lithgow, 21:06)
  • Still, he relishes remaining active: “I’m playing all these broken down old men, so I get better cast every year.” (John Lithgow, 21:28)

• Upcoming Projects

  • Dumbledore in HBO’s “Harry Potter” series: already filmed his parts, noting the challenge but remarking it “aged me. But then with Dumbledore, that comes in handy.” (John Lithgow, 20:28)

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Part II: Daniel Okrent on Stephen Sondheim’s Tumultuous Life

1. Sondheim’s Genius and Complexity

• Redefining Musical Theater
  Okrent recounts how Sondheim’s innovations (“more complex…more subtle”) left contemporaries like Alan Jay Lerner in tears, recognizing a new era had begun. (Terry Gross Intro, 21:52–22:50)

  • “It’s no exaggeration to say Sondheim was a genius. Geniuses are often complicated people with complicated personalities…” (Terry Gross, 22:54)

• The Personal Behind the Art
  Sondheim’s troubled relationship with his mother shaped both his personality and his art.

  • “Perhaps the most difficult relationship in his life was with his mother, who could be cold and even verbally cruel. That seems to have influenced Sondheim’s personality and the themes of some of his shows.” (Terry Gross, 22:57)

2. Sondheim’s Songs As Emotional Biography

• Deeper Meanings in “Sweeney Todd”
  Okrent describes hearing new layers in “Epiphany” upon researching for the book:

  • “Everything we’ve heard before in that show comes back in very brief snatches in that one song. It’s all tied together in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why.” (Daniel Okrent, 23:39)

  • On revenge: “His psychiatrist…wrote papers on revenge and masochism…There are two major arcs to his life. One is from absolute alienation to finally…connection.” (Daniel Okrent, 27:44)

  • Sondheim’s own words: “The difference between Sweeney and me is that I turned it into art.” (Sondheim, quoted by Okrent, 28:06)

• On Inhibition, Alcohol, and Songwriting

  • “Those feelings were…the disinhibiting effects of alcohol and drugs…mostly alcohol. Great, great quantities of alcohol.” (Daniel Okrent, 29:32–30:36)
  • Michael Feinstein anecdote: Sondheim’s dinner request – “vodka, vodka and more vodka.” (Daniel Okrent, 30:30)

3. Sondheim’s Famous “Mother Letter” and Parental Influence

• Okrent examines Sondheim’s oft-told story of his mother’s letter: “The only thing I regret in life is giving birth to you.”

  • Okrent’s research: actual letter said “the only guilt I have is giving birth to you” – “and there’s a mile of distance between guilt and regret.” (Daniel Okrent, 31:30–33:04)
  • Analysis: “She was a socialite…these were the ladies who lunched…the object of his distaste.” (Daniel Okrent, 33:55)

• Influence of Oscar Hammerstein

  • Hammerstein, Sondheim’s most influential mentor, was nurturing but blunt: “Sorry, this is no good…Write what you know, write what you think.” (Daniel Okrent, 36:20)
  • Sondheim always welcomed direct criticism in personal relationships, not from critics: “He despised critics.” (Daniel Okrent, 37:54)

4. Sondheim and Sexuality

• Sondheim was privately gay but “did not think it was a defining aspect of his life…He was a composer and his private life was something completely separate.” (Daniel Okrent, 38:58)
• His songwriting grew bolder after falling in love late in life, most expressively in “Passion” and “Roadshow.”
  • “That’s the time that he wrote a show about exposing one’s love. He had never done that before.” (Daniel Okrent, 39:12)
  • “The Best Thing That Ever Happened” from “Roadshow” became a standard at gay weddings (40:54).

5. Sondheim’s Creative Process and Favorite Song

• Chords, Harmony, and Character

  • “He said harmony was everything. If you don’t have the harmony, forget about the rest of it.” (Daniel Okrent, 43:33)

• “Someone in a Tree” as Sondheim’s Favorite

  • The song embodies the outsider perspective Sondheim felt in life: “It is about an outsider trying to get in…I believe that would be a short version of much of Stephen Sondheim’s life.” (Daniel Okrent, 44:54–46:37)
  • Sondheim “cried at the time he wrote it…and 40 years later.” (John Weidman, via Okrent, 46:24)

6. Final Reflections

• On writing about complicated geniuses: “I may have over complicated them…But the fact that you’re trying to hide [your emotions] are on the surface…it’s a volatile world.” (Daniel Okrent, 48:05)
• Okrent and Gross end on a mutual note of deep admiration for Sondheim.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• John Lithgow on empathy as an actor:
  “You look for ways you can empathize with every character…if you’re playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting…” (03:42)

• Lithgow on “Giant”’s relevance:
  “There are lines in the play that…you hear people gasp. They’re so timely, it’s almost describing what’s happening now.” (12:46)

• Lithgow’s acting method for Churchill:
  “I used a melon baller to create these little balls of apple and put them in the back of my cheeks…my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider.” (18:16)

• Sondheim on “Sweeney Todd” and revenge:
  “The difference between Sweeney and me is that I turned it into art.” (28:06)

• On the infamous mother letter:
  “I found…he sent [Mary Rogers] what he said was a copy…she doesn’t say, I regret giving birth to you. She says, the only guilt I have is giving birth to you. And there’s a mile of distance between guilt and regret.” (Daniel Okrent, 32:40)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:27 - Lithgow introduces his approach to playing Dahl
• 07:27–08:41 - Discussing the play’s moral ambiguity and its most shocking moment
• 10:06 - Dahl's traumatic life experiences unpacked
• 14:10–15:23 - Clip and discussion of Lithgow as Churchill in “The Crown”
• 18:16 - Lithgow on his physical technique for Churchill’s voice
• 21:06 - On aging, memory, and working on Broadway at 80
• 23:25 - Okrent on Sondheim’s legacy and complex personality
• 26:25–28:06 - Sondheim’s art as channeled revenge
• 31:30–33:04 - Deconstructing the “mother letter” myth
• 33:55–34:35 - “Ladies Who Lunch” and Sondheim’s mother
• 39:04–41:57 - Sondheim’s later-life love and its influence on his work
• 44:54–47:37 - “Someone in a Tree,” Sondheim’s favorite song and its meaning

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Summary

An absorbing double-feature episode: Lithgow’s reflections on embodying a flawed literary icon highlight the actor’s quest for empathy and complexity, set against contemporary debates over Israel and antisemitism. Okrent’s nuanced portrait of Stephen Sondheim—artist, son, lover, and genius—peels back public legend to reveal the wounds, the sharp intelligence, and the emotional core that shaped some of the world’s most celebrated musicals. For listeners, the episode delivers both history and living relevance, with a bracing honesty about the contradictions in greatness.

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Transcript

[Dave Davies]

Do you love pop culture? Hate some of it, too.

[Daniel Okrent]

You're in good company.

[Dave Davies]

Pull up a metaphorical chair to Pop Culture Happy Hour, the podcast that breaks down the best and some of the

[Daniel Okrent]

most questionable moments in pop culture. We'll tell you what's great, what's interesting, and break it all down with debates that'll have you yelling at your speakers,

[Dave Davies]

but in a good way. Listen to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour

[Daniel Okrent]

by finding us wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dave Davies]

From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Today, John Lithgow, veteran of hundreds of performances on stage, screen and television, to play Winston Churchill in the series the Crown, he had an idea to help him nail the statesman's gravelly voice. He spooned pieces of apple with a melon baller and stuck them in the back of his cheeks for his first reading with the cast and stuck them

[John Lithgow]

in the back and spoke some of my lines. And I believe I read one of the things and it was sensational, but my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider.

[Dave Davies]

Lythgoe is currently starring in the play Giant. On Broadway. He plays the renowned children's author Roald Dahl, caught in a public controversy after he wrote an article laced with anti Semitic statements. Also, we'll talk about Stephen Sondheim's life in music with Daniel Okrent, author of a new book, Stephen Art Isn't Easy. That's coming up on FRESH AIR Weekend. This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Our first guest today, John Lithgow is an actor you can probably recall from a half dozen roles off the top of your head. But the remarkable thing about his nearly 200 performances on stage, screen and television is that at age 80, he's still going strong. You can see him playing an intelligence agent with Jeff Bridges in the FX action series the Old Man. He plays the character Dumbledore in a new HBO Harry Potter series that premieres in December. And he's starring now on Broadway, doing eight performances a week in the play Giant, about a troubling side to renowned children's author Roald Dahl. Among Lithgow's many career honors are Oscar nominations for his roles in the film the World According to Garp, In Terms of Endearment and six Primetime Emmy awards for playing Winston Churchill in the Crown, a serial killer in the series Dexter and an alien visiting Earth in the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. He's been nominated for six Tony Awards and won twice, including once for his very first appearance on Broadway. Lythgoe has also written several children's books, a memoir titled An Actor's Education and the Dumpty Trilogy, three books of satirical poems inspired by the current occupant of the White House. Lythgoe's current play, Giant, is set in 1983, when Roald Dahl ignited a controversy by writing an article with views that were widely seen as antisemitic. In the play, Dahl and his fiance are at home in discussion with the British and an American representative of Dahl's publishers, who want him to say something to soften his message and diffuse the controversy. It soon emerges that the American rep is a practicing Jewish woman, and Dahl isn't backing down. The play was first performed in London with Lithgow starring as Roald Dahl. He and the play won Laurence Olivier Awards, the British equivalent of the Tony John Lithgow. Welcome to FRESH air.

[John Lithgow]

Thank you, Dave. I feel welcome.

[Dave Davies]

You're playing Dahl, who is kind of it's over simplistic to call him a villain here, but, you know, he's a very problematic character. Did you feel empathy for him, and how did you connect with him?

[John Lithgow]

Oh, man. Well, you look for ways you can empathize with every character, and if you're playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting. You try to figure out what made him that way. And I mean, Dahl is a man so famous for one thing and not known at all for this other thing, his kind of overbearing and sometimes cruel nature. I just found it fascinating, the different perceptions of him. And curiously, I have a good friend, the actress Maria Tucci, who is the widow of the editor, Robert Gottlieb, who is the man who fired Roald Dahl from Alfred Knopf because he was just so insufferable and cruel to everybody he worked with there. And I knew this about him before this even came up. This, to me, was fascinating. Anyone who was that successful, that much of an asset for a publisher to be fired because he was impossible to work with, I just thought, well, there's something there.

[Dave Davies]

Why don't you just tell us a bit about the action in this play? It's you as Roald Dahl and your fiance and two representatives from your publishers. Give us a sense of what the issue is and what happens.

[John Lithgow]

Yes, it's set in 1983, but it's about about the events of 1982, when Israel was in deep conflict with Lebanon, mainly because they were trying to purge the PLO from Beirut and they invaded Beirut brutally. And Dahl wrote a book review, a year later of a book about that invasion, which very much took the Palestinians side. And in that review, he betrayed his own antisemitism between the lines, and in a few of the lines, quite explicitly. And it caused a minor controversy then, which over the years grew into a bigger and bigger controversy about Roald Dahl because that was the time when he basically admitted to being very anti Semitic. And, yes, the setup is that at the same time, his publishers, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in America and Jonathan Cape in London, they're about to release his new book, the Witches, which would be his fifth book. And they've all been sensational successes, and they were very worried that this one wouldn't sell because of the controversy he'd stirred. So that's the setup. They are there to get him to back down and apologize and explain and rationalize what he's written, and he wants nothing to do with that.

[Dave Davies]

You know, there's a distinction to be made between criticizing the policies of the Israeli government and condemning Jewish people as a whole. But, you know, the lines can get fuzzy and assumptions can be made that anti Semitism is at the heart of anybody criticizing Israel. And I think part of the brilliance of this play is that in the first act, when we don't learn Dall's exact words from the article he wrote or other comments that would be made public, we're kind of invited to explore our own feelings about this and think maybe Roald Dahl is just making a point about the conduct of war and not about the Jewish people.

[John Lithgow]

Yeah, it sort of throws an audience off balance, no matter what their political leanings and feelings are. You know, you back away from the phrase villain, and I appreciate that. We don't want him just to be the villain of the piece. But he's a dark character, or he's a character very dark side. But the play becomes this ferocious debate between him and this young American Jewish woman from a New York publishing house. And that debate is extremely articulate. It's very passionate on both sides. In the case of Dahl's side of the argument, the argument is polluted by antisemitism. But he's right. On occasion, he's like a broken clock. And the audience. I mean, up on the stage, you can almost hear their anxiety trying to grapple this right.

[Dave Davies]

And the debate gets increasingly personal. And in the end, Dahl says some things, which. I mean, I was at one performance and there was one comment. I'm sure it's the one, you know, that the audience audibly gasped. It was something he said To a reporter, Right?

[John Lithgow]

Mm. I deliberately don't quote it in interviews because it has such power in performance. But it is something he literally said. It's an unspeakable turn of phrase. And it's. It's like it is the moment at which people see the very darkest side of Dahl and they see it very clearly, and it's right near the end of the play. So, in a sense, the whole play has been building to that moment. My challenge in playing the role is to spend the whole play motivating that moment, almost explaining that moment, explaining it emotionally as much as politically.

[Dave Davies]

Right. And he did have a hard life in a lot of ways. Right?

[John Lithgow]

Well, that was my way in. He had a very hard life. There's several elements, you know, when you ask yourself what makes him hate like that. The various clues I found had to do with his upbringing and his experiences. He was born Norwegian, of a Norwegian family, but that family lived in Wales. His father had been brought to Cardiff to work in the shipping industry, but off he went to English boarding schools. Repton. He was an outsider from the get go, trying to get on the inside. And in his life he just suffered these terrible losses. In the same year, when he was very young, he lost both his father and his older sister. He went off to prep school where he was brutally beaten. He had a horrifying plane accident in World War II when he was an RAF fighter pilot, a solo accident in the Libyan desert, when by rights, it should have killed him, but instead it just left him in terrible pain for his entire life. And he married Patricia Neal, who had three terrible strokes, even though it was a very troubled marriage. He obsessively nursed her. Their four month old son, his pram was hit by a taxi in New York City and he grew up with brain damage. And he lost his daughter at the age of seven from a variant of the measles. These were tragedies that absolutely haunted him, I'm convinced of that. And it was almost as if he was angry at life because his life was so desperately difficult. And you take all those things into account, and this is a highly intelligent, extremely clever, witty and charming man who just has this dark streak of cruelty. It's like he can't resist goading and tormenting people.

[Dave Davies]

You know, this play is being performed now and was performed in England at a time when there's very bitter division and controversy about actions of the Israeli military in Gaza. Not unlike, in some ways, this controversy about the invasion of Lebanon, which was launched in response to PLO rocket attacks in Israel. This, of course, the Gaza invasion response to that Savage attack, the October 7th attack by Hamas. I'm wondering what reaction you've heard to the play, what kind of conversations it sparked.

[John Lithgow]

Well, everybody says it's just astounding how timely it is. It's a play about a moment 40 years ago, and here we were rehearsing it once again for Broadway, and the same thing has happened. Not chasing after the plo, chasing after Hezbollah and trying to trying to put an end to, you know, missiles and raids from Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. There are lines in the play that just, you just hear people gasp. They're so timely, it's almost describing what's happening now.

[Dave Davies]

Yeah. We should Note that in 2020, Roald Dahl's family posted an apology for his anti Semitism on the family website.

[John Lithgow]

Yes, they apologized and he never did.

[Dave Davies]

Right. We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with actor John Lithgow. He stars as Roald Dahl in the new Broadway play Giant. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR weekend. I wanted to talk about some of your other iconic roles. There are a lot of them, and one of them that I really remembered was you playing Winston Churchill in the series the Crown, which was created by Peter Morgan. I love that series. And you play this. I mean, he's, well, he's an iconic figure for the English in the 20th century. I wanted to play a clip here. This is one of many meetings that the prime minister had with the sovereign, the Queen. Here is a fairly young Elizabeth, played by Claire Foy, and the prime minister would regularly meet with the Queen. This is one where an argument erupts when the queen relates that her husband, Prince Philip, wants to become an aviator. Let's listen.

[Terry Gross]

He's learning to fly.

[Daniel Okrent]

Whatever for?

[John Lithgow]

Have we not enough qualified pilots to take him where he needs to go? No, he wants to fly himself.

[Terry Gross]

It's a boyhood dream. It's what he's always wanted.

[John Lithgow]

Why was government not consulted?

[Terry Gross]

Because it's a private matter and I am in favor.

[John Lithgow]

Nothing you or His Royal Highness do is a private matter. And the father of the future king of England risking his life needlessly is quite unacceptable.

[Terry Gross]

Please do not curtail my husband's personal freedoms any further. You've taken away his home. You've taken away his name. There comes a time where one must draw a line in the sand, and

[John Lithgow]

the job of drawing that line falls to Cabinet. Ma' Am not to you. Something your dear late papa would certainly have taught you had he been granted more time to complete your education.

[Dave Davies]

And that is John Lithgow practically spitting as Winston Churchill.

[John Lithgow]

And the Queen. And the Queen.

[Dave Davies]

Oh, there are so many of these things. When you got this role, I mean, I imagine that Churchill is the kind of guy that everybody in England can do an impression of. Was it daunting to take this on? I mean, a role had been played by a lot of other people.

[John Lithgow]

It was extremely daunting. And you're right. I mean, everybody imitates Churchill, everybody quotes Churchill. And I was completely astonished when I was asked to do it by Peter Morgan, the writer, and Stephen Daldry, the lead director. I wasn't about to say no. These were very impressive people, and I was amazed that they wanted me. But I was flattered and extremely excited to play the part. But, you know, I was a Yank. When I sat down with Stephen Daldrey for breakfast in a diner after I'd said yes, I said, stephen, why did you cast me? And he said, well, Church mother was an American, and, you know, she was. And that was the first little gesture of liberation. The other thing that happened was I arrived in England and all the English actors were so enthusiastic about the idea. I mean, I've done a lot of acting in England playing English roles. Even listening to this clip that you've just played, I can hear my Americanism. But there's a certain excitement to mingling an American energy with an English character. I mean, I'm speaking as objectively as I can about this. I've read this in one or two reviews. It sometimes it helps sort of enliven the drama or the comedy. This was particularly true of Churchill. And they somehow felt they wanted to shake things up, as they did in every way on the Crown. The Crown is such a surprising show because these very familiar characters whom you know in the most public way possible, the Queen, the King, the prince, the princesses, to actually go into their lives and see them in intimate settings and having very human problems and conflicts, that was what was arresting about the Crown. Well, in a sense, that was true of portraying Churchill this way.

[Dave Davies]

Right. You know, I really love the series. And, you know, when you came on and the first time you were on screen, as Charlie thought, oh, God, yeah, there's John Lithgow. Yeah, I recognize him. Pretty soon, it wasn't John Lithgow. I mean, you were Churchill. I mean. And one of the things I read is that you. You placed little balls of some material in the jowls of your cheeks to give you that rah, rah, rah, rah, that thing going.

[John Lithgow]

Yes, yes. I experimented with that when I was still in America. Before I went over there. I used a melon baller to create these little balls of apple and I put them in the back of my cheeks. And Churchill had this unique lisp that was generated by the back of his skull tongue. And it worked wonderfully. I even took my melon baller and an apple to one of the first rehearsals, which was nothing but sitting around the table and talking. But I proposed this idea in front of everybody. I carved out two little apple balls and stuck them in the back and spoke and spoke some of my lines. And I believe I read one of the things and it was sensational. But my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider, you know, I mean, and I was spitting all over the table. Well, we hired this great toothmeister, a man named Christopher Lyons, who does all the great false teeth for Tilda Swinton and Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher. Well, he made these little silicon plumpers, we called them, that clicked onto my back teeth. It changed everything. I mean, it made me sound like Chesel, because he did have this. He sounded like he had marbles of his mouth. But it also just made me feel so different from myself. I mean, I've worked with the rsc, the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the national, and I've done about 10 roles of Englishman in England. And I'm better at it. I must say, listening to myself as Churchill, I still had a lot to learn.

[Dave Davies]

Really. You're better at an English accent now than you were when you played church?

[John Lithgow]

Oh, I think so. I'm doing Dumbledore and Harry Potter with a marvelous dialect coach watching me like a hawk. And she doesn't give me many notes anymore, but she certainly did the first few months.

[Dave Davies]

Yeah. This is for the HBO series based on Harry Potter. Have you finished shooting the first series?

[John Lithgow]

I have finished. They still have another month to go. But they squeezed all my stuff in to allow me to do Giant on Broadway. So my last month of work was brutal. It aged me. But then that with Dumbledore, that comes in handy.

[Dave Davies]

You know, I have to ask, at age 80, you know, I'm. I'm not 80, but I'm older. I'm an older person now and boy, my short term memory isn't what it used to be. And I'm. I am just amazed that you. I mean, you're in practically every scene of this play on Broadway, you're doing eight shows a week. Is it hard to remember to learn lines that that many lines?

[John Lithgow]

It's harder than it used to be to learn the lines. But once they're in there, I'm fine. Yeah, my brain is a little bit tired. My body's tired. I mean, 80 is. It was no surprise you're an old man at 80.

[Dave Davies]

Well, you got plenty left in you. You better because this HBO production is going to last how many years?

[John Lithgow]

Well, the handy thing is I'm playing all these broken down old men, so I get better cast every year.

[Dave Davies]

Well, John Lithgow, it's been fun. Thank you so much for spending some time with us.

[John Lithgow]

Great to talk to you, Dave. I had a wonderful time.

[Dave Davies]

John Lithgow stars as writer Roald Dahl in the new Broadway play Giant. Terry has our next interview. Here she is.

[Terry Gross]

Stephen Sondheim once described himself as an austere revolutionary. His musicals, the music, the lyrics, the stories were both more complex and more subtle than their predecessors. After Alan J. Lerner, who wrote the lyrics for My Fair Lady, Brigadoon and Camelot, saw Sondheim's groundbreaking 1970 musical company, he broke into tears and told his wife, my way of writing musicals is over. It's no exaggeration to say Sondheim was a genius. Geniuses are often complicated people with complicated personalities, and Sondheim was no exception. Perhaps the most difficult relationship in his life was with his mother, who could be cold and even verbally cruel. That seems to have influenced Sondheim's personality in the themes of some of his shows. In the new book, Stephen Art Isn't Easy, my guest Daniel Okrent offers insights into Sondheim's life and music based on access to his letters, archives, oral history, as well as the 36 hours of interviews that Meryl Seacrest did for her 1998 biography of him and Okran's own interviews with many people who knew him. Stephen Sondheim got his start on Broadway writing lyrics for Gypsy and West side Story. He went on to write music and lyrics for such shows as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, into the woods and Passion. Daniel Okrent, welcome back to FRESH air. It's great to have you back.

[Daniel Okrent]

I'm very happy to be here.

[Terry Gross]

I wanna start with you choosing a song, and I'd like it to be a song that you heard something new in. As a result of all the research that you did for this new Sondheim book.

[Daniel Okrent]

Well, Epiphany, this horrifying and overwhelming song. Near the end of Sweeney Todd, I had listened to and been impressed by I don't know how many scores of times, but when I was doing the research and listening carefully, that's when I realized that everything we've heard before in that show comes back in very brief snatches in that one song. It's all tied together in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why it's so effective.

[Terry Gross]

And this is a song where Sweeney Todd, who is seeking revenge against the judge that locked him up and then stole his wife, and then is trying to marry Sweeney's daughter.

[Daniel Okrent]

Right? He steals his wife. Well, he steals his wife and discards her and wounds her permanently.

[Terry Gross]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Sweeney ends up killing her because now she's homeless and has gone mad, and she's just, like, in his way. Anyhow. So here's the song, and it's one of my very, very favorite of all Sondheim's pieces. And this is my favorite show of his. And his desire for revenge is just, like, overflowing. Everybody's unworthy and they all deserve to die that's the refrain they all deserve to die so here it is.

[Dave Davies]

There's a hole in the world Like

[Daniel Okrent]

a great black pit and it's filled with people who are filled with and

[Dave Davies]

the vermin of the world inhabit it

[Terry Gross]

but not for long.

[Daniel Okrent]

They all deserve to die tell your

[Dave Davies]

cry, Mrs. Lovett tell you why because

[Daniel Okrent]

in all of the whole human race,

[Dave Davies]

Mrs. Lovett There are two kinds of

[Daniel Okrent]

men and only two there's the one staying put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one's face look at me, Mrs.

[Dave Davies]

Lovett look at you Though we all

[Daniel Okrent]

deserve to die tell you why, Mrs. Lovett tell you why because the lives of the wicked should be made brief for the rest of us, death will be a relief we all deserve to die and I'll never see Joanna?

[Dave Davies]

No, I'll pass.

[Terry Gross]

So that's Epiphany from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. I think Sondheim had denied that Sweeney Todd was about revenge or his own desire for revenge. And you found something in your research that relates to that? Would you explain?

[Daniel Okrent]

Sure. In an interview that he gave to his first biographer, Meryl SEACREST, Back in 1996, Sondheim described the day that Judy Prince came over to hear some of the songs, the beginning songs of Sweeney Todd. She was his closest friend, and she often would do this. He would play them for her before anybody else. So she came over. He had told her before that that it was a horror show. It was going to be a, you know, spined tingler. And so she comes over to his house and he plays a few of the first songs. And she stops him two songs into it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with horror. This is the story of your life. And as Sondheim reported it, he said, it never occurred to me, but of course it is. But I was able to determine through a couple sources, but primarily Judy Prince, who never gave interviews, that in fact, it was about revenge.

[Terry Gross]

And you write that his psychiatrist, Milton Horowitz, wrote papers on revenge and on revenge and masochism. And Horowitz connects revenge to deep loneliness and the need to connect, which you can also relate to Sondheim.

[Daniel Okrent]

Yeah, there are two major arcs to his life. One is from absolute alienation to finally, near the end of his life connection. The other is from an ambivalence that could be crippling at times to resolution, to knowing who he was and what he was capable of doing. But it took 50 years from him to move from one of those poles to the next one.

[Terry Gross]

So in terms of Sweeney being about revenge and people thinking it's autobiographical in some way, not the murder part, but just about revenge, Sondheim said, the difference between Sweeney and me is that I turned it into art.

[Daniel Okrent]

I think that's a sentence that says a great deal about his entire career and his entire life. That through his music and his lyrics, he was able to express things that he could not, for various forms of inhibition express. Otherwise, it was where, if it's not autobiographical, obviously he's not slitting throats, obviously, you know, he's not Georges Seurat, obviously, he's not in the woods and into the woods. But the feelings expressed in those shows all come from inside, inside of him. I think very, very clearly.

[Terry Gross]

And I think it's in a smaller way inside all of us that we get angry, that we want to get back at someone, and we don't necessarily act on it. But it's just. I love that show so much. And there's a part of me, you know, I'm fairly inhibited myself, but there's a part of me that, like, I suppress certain feelings. And you just, like, relate to all the feelings in that show?

[Daniel Okrent]

Absolutely. And it's the inhibitions that keep us from expressing those feelings.

[Terry Gross]

And that's not a bad thing, necessarily.

[Daniel Okrent]

No. Socially, it's a very good thing to do. And sometimes when he was in a bad mood, he would let them out socially, but mostly it came through in his songs. And one of the things that's very important to know about Sondheim that enabled him to bring them out in his songs, those feelings were the disinhibiting effects of alcohol and drugs. And alcohol particularly was something that he consumed in great quantities. His collaborators said, you know, it didn't impair his ability to work, but he would drink all day long, marijuana, cocaine for a period, but mostly alcohol. Great, great quantities of alcohol. The cabaret performer Michael Feinstein reported about having his assistant call Sondheim when Sondheim was coming to dinner at Feinstein's house and asked if there was anything particularly that he would like at dinner. And Sondheim replied, according to Feinstein, vodka, vodka and more vodka. And there are dozens of other incidents where the alcohol is so visibly a tool that he uses to make it through his work and I think through his life.

[Dave Davies]

We're listening to Terry's interview with Daniel Okrent. His new book is called Stephen Sondheim Art Isn't Easy. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR weekend.

[Terry Gross]

So I want to ask you about a letter, a letter that's very famous to Sondheim fans that you learned more about. Describe the letter as Sondheim described it and then described the letter that was actually written. This was a letter from his mother, and they had a very complicated and very stressful relationship with each other, which we'll get into after we hear about the letter.

[Daniel Okrent]

In the late 1970s, his mother, known as Foxy, that was her nickname, wrote him a letter, the content of which he revealed in an interview with the New York Times in 1994, in which he said in the letter, my mother said the only thing I regret in life is giving birth to you. Now that's a kind of a powerful statement, and that kind of explains the or at least measures the intensity of his negative feelings about his mother. And it's a story that he, from that point told over and over and over again all the Sondheads, as we sometimes are known as those people who really know everything about him or want to know everything about him. We all know this letter. He referred to it so frequently. I found, however, in the Mary Rogers papers. Mary Rogers was his lifelong friend, daughter of Richard Rogers. He sent her what he said was a copy of the letter he had written to his mother when he received that. And it's a letter in which he says, I never want anything to do with you again. This is just the end of our relationship. But in that letter, which he represents to his oldest friend as the accurate version of the letter that he had sent in 1978, she doesn't say, I regret giving birth to you. She says, the only guilt I have is giving birth to you. And there's a mile of distance between guilt and regret.

[Terry Gross]

There's two ways I can interpret guilt. One is that she knew she wasn't meant to be a mother, and she feels guilty that she was such a bad mother. But the more obvious interpretation is she gave birth to a monster and she feels guilty about that, that she unleashed this miserable person on the world.

[Daniel Okrent]

Oh, that's interesting. I go the opposite direction. I like your first version better. I don't see any evidence that she felt that she had unleashed a monster on the world, even in her bitterest expressions to him.

[Terry Gross]

So there's a song in Company that seems to be related to his mother, and it's Ladies who Lunch, sung by Elaine Stritch. What's the connection?

[Daniel Okrent]

Well, in fact, it is about his mother, in a way. She was a socialite. She liked to be around famous people, and she liked to eat nearly. Not every day, but certainly every week at the 21 Club, where all the stylish people of the era would go and she would go with friends who were in show business or not. These were the ladies who lunched. They were the subject of that song, and they were the object of his distaste. I don't think that Sondheim was aiming at anybody else but his mother, but he was thinking of this group of women when he wrote that coruscating, acidic and hilarious song.

[Terry Gross]

So let's hear it. This is Ladies who Lunch from his musical company. Here's to the girls who stay smart. Aren't they a guess? Rushing to their classes in optical art, wishing it would pass. Another long, exhausting day, another thousand dollars. A matinee, a pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler's. I'll drink to that. And one for Mahler. Here's to the girls who play wife. There was Ladies who Lunch from the Stephen Sondheim Musical Company. So let's continue talking about the relationship between Sondheim and his mother. Although they had a pretty toxic relationship much of the time, his mother was friends with Oscar Hammerstein's wife, and Sondheim was friends with the Hammerstein son. So when the Hammersteins moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, his mother and Stephen Sondheim moved nearby, and Hammerstein became Sondheim's mentor. And Hammerstein wasn't mean to Sondheim, but he could be very blunt in his.

[Daniel Okrent]

Well, he was direct with them. I think that Oscar Wilde, as he must be known Oskar, was the most important male figure in his life. Oskar dies when Sondheim is just about 30. But for those 30 years, there was no one he was closer with and no one for whom he had more regard. And worth saying he didn't have regard for Hammerstein's work as a lyricist, even though Hammerstein was at that point the most prominent and successful lyricist on Broadway. But as a. As a nurturing personality, he valued him immensely. And part of the nurturing that Oscar brought to the relationship was to be frank with him, so that when the young Steve is trying to write music or write a play, Oscar would be very direct with him and said, sorry, this is no good. You're trying to pretend you're somebody other than you are. Write what you know, write what you think. And those were the lessons that Sondheim cherished for the rest of his life.

[Terry Gross]

And one of the first things Sondheim showed Hammerstein when Sondheim was still pretty young, Hammerstein's response to it was, this is really terrible. I'm not saying you're not talented. You are, but this is terrible, right?

[Daniel Okrent]

And Sondheim's glad for that. The same thing shows up when he's at college, at Williams, when he's studying music with the composer Milton. Milton Babbitt. He wants the criticism. He relishes the criticism. But that happened only in the intimacy of personal or professional relationships. Criticism from the outside. Most creative people, certainly most creative people in the theater that I know are very wary of, leery of, and displeased by critics, but not to the degree that Stephen Sondheim was. He despised critics.

[Terry Gross]

So in getting back to talking about Sondheim's life, he knew he was gay, but you couldn't really come out then, not even on Broadway, where, like so many of the directors and writers and composers and lyricists were gay and the audience as well, but you couldn't be out, because that's how it was. So it seems to me from your book that he really tried to be straight because you just couldn't be out then.

[Daniel Okrent]

I think he gave it a shot. I think it wasn't that he made a valiant effort to do it. But, see, let's see if this is a possibility. And he did not come out publicly, really, for the middle to late 70s. Not that anybody was asking that much in those days. Certainly all the people who knew him, they knew he was gay. He knew he was gay. He did not think it was a defining aspect of his life. He didn't want to be, as it were, typecast. He wasn't a gay composer. He was a composer and his private life was something completely separate.

[Terry Gross]

Did his attitude change when he found the person who became his spouse?

[Daniel Okrent]

Well, his attitude begins to change when he falls in love with a 21 year old. And Sondheim is at this point in his early 60s. A incipient or aspiring songwriter named Peter Jones. He meets this young man and it's head over heels. That's when he wrote Passion. That's when he wrote his only unironic play. That's when he wrote his only unironic musical. That's the time that he wrote a show that was about exposing one's love. He had never done that before. Now the characters in Passion are heterosexual. It's a man and a woman. But there's no question this came out of this changed experience of finding someone to fall in love with. He had had serial relationships with many, many men over the years, but this was the one that clicked. And then after that, ran its course, although they remained friends. In the early 2000s, he met Jeff Romley, whom he fell deeply in love with, as Romley did with him. Romley moved into his house and they spent the last 17 years of Stephen Sondheim's life together. They got married four years before Sondheim died. And there was no effort of hiding

[Terry Gross]

that relationship during that period. He wrote a song from. I think this was probably the final musical that was actually performed in his lifetime. Yeah, in his lifetime, yeah. And it had several titles, but I think it's mostly known as Roadshow. And the song I'm thinking of is the Best Thing that Ever Happened, which is. I love this song. It's a duet. And I didn't realize until you wrote it that it had become a standard song at gay weddings. But let's hear the song.

[Daniel Okrent]

You might just be the best thing

[Dave Davies]

that has happened to me so far

[Daniel Okrent]

of course, not much ever really has happened to me so far. I didn't much like love I always fought it I never thought it would happen like this.

[Dave Davies]

Give us a kiss we may just

[Daniel Okrent]

be the best thing that happens happened to us Kiddo.

[Dave Davies]

Partner. Another moment like this may not happen to us Partner. Lover.

[Daniel Okrent]

When all is said and done I have to agree you are the best thing that's happened to me,

[Terry Gross]

that was the best thing that ever happened from the Sondheim musical Roadshow. And my guest is Daniel Okrant, author of the new book Stephen Art Isn't Easy. You write in the book that Sondheim described his songwriting process, not the lyrics, but the musical part, as being built around chords. That the first thing that comes to him is the chords, and then he adds the melody around that. And some of his chords were so interesting. And I'm gonna go back to Sweeney Todd for this, because at the beginning of the show, it opens with this really chilling organ solo, and it's one crazy chord after another. Like, each chord has such a kind of demonic sound to it, and it just keeps building and building. So let's just hear a little bit of that.

[John Lithgow]

It.

[Terry Gross]

So that's the opening music from Sweeney Todd, his musical about revenge that's inspired by. It sounds like it's inspired by horror films. In part.

[Daniel Okrent]

Yeah. It's an amazing piece of work. And, of course, that theme returns throughout the show behind other songs for different purposes, but it haunts the show. He said harmony was everything. If you don't have the harmony, forget about the rest of it. And so he would sit at the keyboard, and he would just noodle around with his fingers, and he would find these harmonies that seemed to fit the theme, the subject matter, and, most importantly, the character who was singing the song.

[Terry Gross]

So I want to end the musical part of our discussion with one of the two songs that were played at Sondheim's memorial service, and there were songs that he felt very deeply about. One of them was Someone in a Tree from Pacific Overtures, a show that didn't do well and a show that most people don't know as well as his shows that do do well. I don't know the score that well myself, but he had told me that one of the first times I interviewed him that someone in a Tree from Pacific Overtures was his favorite of all the songs he wrote. And you write, when listening back to that song, he'd frequently tear up. So I want to play that song, but I'd like you to set it up for us.

[Daniel Okrent]

Pacific Overtures is set in the middle of the 19th century, when. Think of this as an idea for a Broadway musical. Let's do a Broadway musical about the opening of Japan to Western Commerce in the 1850s. I mean, it sounds ridiculous for a musical. I happen to love the show. It may be my favorite of all the Sondheim shows. And in this particular scene, the American Admiral has come ashore to negotiate with the Japanese authorities. Negotiate with many ships and cannons right behind him. So it's not the easiest of negotiations. And in the song, a young boy is in a tree. He's the someone in the tree who is hearing little bits and pieces of the conversation and wanting to know what's really going on and believing that things that he hears going on may not be the whole story. It is about an outsider trying to get in. And I believe that that would be a very short version of much of Stephen Sondheim's life. Even though it is not necessarily a beloved song by Sondheim fans, I think they. We admire it and treasure it because it was so important to him. His collaborator, John Weidman, who had never written a Broadway show before Pacific Overtures and then collaborated with him on two other shows, he said to me when I interviewed him that Steve cried at the time he wrote it, but he was still crying about it 40 years later. There's something in that that you need to pay attention to. And I think that what I pay attention to is the outsider trying to be in.

[Terry Gross]

Okay, let's hear it.

[Daniel Okrent]

Tell him what I see.

[John Lithgow]

I am in the tree. I am 10. I am in a tree. I was younger than. In between the eaves. I can see. Tell me what I see.

[Daniel Okrent]

I was only 10. I see men and matting. Some are old, some chatting. If it happened, I would there. I saw everything.

[John Lithgow]

I was someone in the tree.

[Terry Gross]

Tell him what I see.

[Daniel Okrent]

Some of them have gold on their coats. One of them has gold.

[Terry Gross]

That was someone in a tree from the Stephen Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures. My guest, Daniel Okrent, is the author of the new book Stephen Art Isn't Easy. You know, I think your book could have been called Genius Isn't Easy instead of Art Isn't Easy. Art Isn't Easy is a quote from Sunday in the park with George, one of the lyrics. But there's so many geniuses in your book and they're all such complicated people.

[Daniel Okrent]

I guess they are. I may have over complicated them because I do so much research. I go so deep and I find things that, you know, inevitably lead to complication. But it is true that in the theater community that emotions are on the surface. And even if you're trying to hide the emotions, the fact that you're trying to hide them are on the surface. It's a very volatile world. And so the people I'm writing about in this book, not just Sondheim, but also Prince and Bernstein and so many others, not a lot of easy personalities.

[Terry Gross]

Well, Daniel Okrent, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much.

[Daniel Okrent]

You love Sondheim's music as much as I do, so it's great to share this with you, Terry.

[Dave Davies]

Daniel Okrent is the author of the new book Stephen Sondheim, Art Isn't Easy. He spoke with Terry Gross. FRESH AIR WEEKEND is produced by Teresa Madden. Our executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley, I'm Dave dav.