Being an actor is a hard life, and a strange life. But those of us who are musical theater actors cannot imagine our lives, cannot imagine the experience of being an actor at all, without the influence of Stephen Sondheim. I’m blessed to have just completed the passion project of my life—made more passionate by my having once appeared in his great musical play Passion—and that’s a recording of Sondheim’s sublime songs.

Why “sublime”? Well, by sublime I mean what the poet Wordsworth meant by it:

Sublime.
That blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.

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