I learned that Stephen Sondheim had died while we were going up the escalator after seeing “House of Gucci.” I looked at my phone and there was a text from my mom:

Stephen Sondheim died today.

I gasped. I turned to Matt. “What? What is it?” he said. I showed him the text. “Oh no!” he said.

I came late to Sondheim. And it was Matt who finally made me a Sondheim devotee.

I don’t know why it took me so long. I grew up with musical theater. My mom has loved it her whole life (the first Broadway show she ever saw was Carnival in the early 1960s), and she instilled that love in me. She took me to my first Broadway show, Peter Pan starring Sandy Duncan, when I was a little kid. (Clap for Tinkerbell!) I started performing in shows in elementary school, and I continued doing it all through high school and into my first year of college.

But Sondheim was never really on my radar.

I do remember that one night in 1987 or 1988 my parents went into the city to see the original production of Into the Woods. I remember them telling me that the first act was amazing, and that they wondered, what is there even left to happen in the second act? And then that second act was something crazy.

In high school I listened to the cast album of West Side Story all the time. As a teenager I saw Tyne Daly perform in Gypsy, and that album joined the rotation. But I associated West Side with Leonard Bernstein, and Gypsy I didn’t really associate with anyone. I wasn’t a deep thinker about musical theater. I just enjoyed the music.

I did listen to my parents’ copy of Into the Woods every so often and thought it was brilliant.

And in high school I got to see another high school’s theater group do a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – with all the music taken out. I didn’t know the show, but it made for a hilarious one-act play. And it was obviously a blatant rights violation, but this was Japan before the World Wide Web so it was easier to get away with things like that.

And then I went to college and tried out for a production of Sweeney Todd. It was produced by a group called First-Year Players, which put on shows cast entirely with first-year students as a way to ease them into the UVA drama program. I knew nothing about Sweeney Todd. In high school we’d done Annie Get Your Gun, Anything Goes, and The Music Man. Good old-fashioned musicals.

I had never heard anything like the music in Sweeney Todd. I don’t think many of us had. (I remember two different women auditioned using the same song from Les Miz.) I got cast in the chorus and I remember thinking, what the fuck even is this show and how the hell am I going to learn any of this music? But I did. And I came to love it. It was brilliant. The following summer I bought the original cast recording and was so happy to have the music.

And yet despite loving Sweeney, I still didn’t know anything about Stephen Sondheim. I guess I knew that he’d written the show, but I wasn’t interested in learning anything about him or exploring any of his other musicals. After my first year of college, after not getting cast in any university-wide shows, I mostly turned away from theater and toward choral music and a cappella groups. My big thing for the rest of college became singing. From that point on, theater remained an interest, but only an occasional one.

I saw Nathan Lane perform in Forum on Broadway. But again – I had no interest in exploring further.

In 1996 or 1997 I got really into Rent. I bought the cast album and became obsessed.

In “La Vie Bohème” there’s that line:

to Sontag, to Sondheim, to anything taboo

Again – despite having performed in a Sondheim show – I didn’t really know who Sondheim was. When I heard that lyric I associated his name vaguely with opera or ballet or some highbrow New York City art form. Someone sort of like Leonard Bernstein maybe? Leonard Bernstein, whose biography I had read and whom, as a classical music fan, I was genuinely fascinated by?

I look back at myself now and think, come on, Jeff!

I saw the 2002 revival of Into the Woods with my mom.

That was about the extent of my Sondheim knowledge.

But then eventually I met Matt, and we started dating. I was almost 30. (“I was younger then…”)

Matt was a walking musical theater encyclopedia, and his enthusiasm was infectious. After we’d been dating for a couple of months, he was about to go visit his parents for the holidays, but before he left, he burned three data CDs’ worth of his favorite cast albums and gave them to me. There were several dozen albums there – well-known and obscure.

And from Matt I learned how great Sondheim was. I decided to read Meryle Secrest’s Sondheim biography. I started to get to know Sondheim’s shows.

Eventually I was lucky enough to see productions of all of them – even Saturday Night (and in the case of some shows, multiple productions) – except for one: A Little Night Music. I know some of the songs, but I’ve never seen a production and I’m not too familiar with the plot. Somehow I never got around to seeing the Broadway revival that ran for more than a year in 2010. Why why why?

Matt and I used lyrics from “Being Alive” in our wedding vows.

We got to see him in person a couple of times over the years. The best was when we saw a preview of his musical Road Show at the Public Theater about a decade ago and he sat right behind us. After the show, he started to walk out through a side entrance that led backstage and an usher yelled at him. “Excuse me! Sir! You can’t go that way!” Someone told the usher who he was and a bunch of people around us laughed.

We also got to see him near us in the audience at Symphony Space watching Anthony de Mare perform reinterpretations of his music for piano.

I knew that someday Sondheim would die. Many times over the years I’ve imagined what Twitter would be like on that day. (It turned out to basically be like what I expected.) When it finally happened it felt inevitable but still shocking, perhaps for its suddenness. He’d given an interview just a few days before.

I don’t have anything profound to say about his music or his work. Others more insightful than me have said it much better than I could.

But I’m sad he’s gone. Never again will I be able to sit in a theater watching a new musical and think “I wonder what Sondheim will think of this?”

I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe he’s looking down at us watching us. But it’s hard to believe in someone not existing, so instead I think of it like this: when someone dies, their soul loses interest in anything or anyone earthly. Their soul forgets who they are and instead is in some inaccessible place, eternally pondering things that are inaccessible to us.

It’s such a gift that we were able to be alive at a time when Stephen Sondheim lived too. It’s hard to imagine, for the first time in our lives, a world without him. But his children – his art – will always be with us.