NO ONE IS ALONE

Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood
Others may decieve you
You decide what's good
You decide alone
But no one is alone

Since the announcement of Composer/Lyricist Stephen Sondheim's death back in November 26th, 2021, I've been reflecting and happily re-acquainting myself with some of my favourite songs by the grand master of American music theatre.

There are so many masterpieces to choose from Sondheim's profilic career, but I won't be attempting a compehrensive analysis of his discography (which is quite beyond my pay grade anyway) so I'll try and keep it brief and attempt to distill his unique genius by focusing on one song in particular.

No pressure.

No One Is Alone from Into The Woods stands out for me as an especially important moment in Sondheim's highly competitive catalogue of songs.

My reason for this choice requires some brief exposition.

Mother cannot guide you
Now you're on your own
Only me beside you
Still, you're not alone
No one is alone, truly
No one is alone

Learning that Sondheim's own relationship with his mother Janet was so manifestly toxic and dysfunctional (imagine a cross between Rose from Gypsy and Norman Bates's Mother from Psycho) that for him to write a song of such profound emotional wisdom as No One Is Alone makes it an even more remarkable achievement to my mind.

"She tried to make me pay for the sins of my father," Sondheim had said in an interview from his later years, explaining that when his father left his mother for another woman, she pinned the blame on her young son which as a consequence destroyed any remaining chance of a functioning mother/son relationship between them both.

As destiny would have it, the young Sondheim would soon find surrogate parents in the form of Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein (some kind of fairytale itself) which would compensate to some degree for the lack of his mother's love.  

Hammerstein subsequently became not just a father figure but a mentor who passed on all of his experience and wisdom as a founding pioneer and giant of American music theatre, having written the lyrics for such masterpieces as Showboat, Oklahoma and Carousel to name just a few.

And thus, the young Sondheim became both the lineage protector of American music theatre and the next evolutionary chapter in the development of the form itself moving into the second half of the twentieth century.

The spectre of his mother continued to haunt Sondheim as his career progressed. Shadowy reflections of Janet can be found in such works as Company, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. But as his artistry developed to new heights, so did Sondheim's ability to examine matters of the heart, including the frailties of the human condition.

Decades later, in a letter Janet wrote to her son (now in his 40's), she tells him bluntly before going under the knife for her heart surgery ...

" The only regret I have in life is giving you birth."

That level of spiteful meanness is typically reserved for witches in fairytales and it was from the inspiration of fairytales that Sondheim would resolve some of the crucial issues of his personal life through his work.

For I can only imagine that Sondheim could absorb the cruelty of this wounding statement from his mother by immersing himself ever deeper into his art.

Into The Woods, inspired by the book The Uses Of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim, found a way to examine the psychology of the world's most famous fairytales and bridge both the child and adult's relationship with them into an altogether deeper exploration than had previously been presented before.

The transparency of the subsconscious themes previously hidden in fairytales is conveyed by putting the deeper meanings of the stories up front so they're no longer hidden from view, rather in plain sight. Once the aspirations of Cinderella, The Baker and his Wife, Little Red Riding hood to name just a few are happily resolved by the end of Act 1, the consequences of their desires and ambitions in fulfilling their happy endings are ultimately explored in Act 2 where uncertainty and ambiguity start to add an extra existential dimension to these familar universal archetypes.

People make mistakes
Holding to their own
Thinking they're alone

No One Is Alone is the penultimate song in Into The Woods and it provides a crystallising shared realisation for the four remaining characters of the piece. In it they come to realise that life is far more uncertain than fairytales will tell you, that the binary good and evil of the stories is only one half of it and that there is a huge, grey area of desire, lost dreams and disappointments in life which is something most of us will have to reconcile with long after the fleeting happily ever afters leave us.

Sondheim and his collaborator James Lapine both inherently undertsand that we need to forgive our parents for their mistakes as much as their successes, learning some of our most significant lessons from their fallible moments. For it can be our mothers' and fathers' fear of being alone and acting in a singular fashion that creates the neuroses and occasionally destructive pathology that drives their actions, which directly, or indirectly, may affect our own life's course.

No one was more fearful than Janet, which was demonstrated in her bitter resentments and it was because of these she drove her son far away out of her arms, never to return.

Somehow, and this may be wildly speculative on my part, I sense No One Is Alone is Sondheim forgiving his mother through his art.

People make mistakes.
Fathers,
Mothers,

Honor their mistakes
Fight for their mistakes
Everybody makes

One another's
Terrible mistakes.
Witches can be right,
Giants can be good.
You decide what's right,
You decide what's good.