Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Sondheim

Sondheim is doing that very Sondheim thing: taking a form people casually call “corny” and insisting it’s actually rigorous. His chain of definitions - theatrical, therefore poetic, therefore imagination-dependent - isn’t pedantry; it’s a manifesto. He’s arguing that musicals don’t succeed by approximating realism. They succeed by making a clean break from it, then earning the audience’s consent to play along.

The key move is his reframing of “theatrical” as “poetic.” In Sondheim’s world, poetry isn’t pretty language; it’s concentrated meaning delivered through artifice. Songs halt naturalistic time, characters externalize thought, and emotion becomes architecture. That only works if the audience is actively collaborating, not passively observing. “Suspension of disbelief” here isn’t a trick pulled on a gullible crowd, it’s a contract: we’ll accept that people sing their secrets out loud if the show gives us emotional truth and formal coherence in return.

When he says “there’s no fourth wall,” he’s not claiming every musical is literally winking at the audience. He’s pointing to a structural openness: musical theater announces itself as made. Even the most plot-heavy book musical is, by definition, a stylized argument for feeling. Coming from the composer who wrote Company, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George, this is also a quiet defense against the demand that musicals be “relatable” in a film-and-TV sense. Sondheim’s subtext: stop asking the form to be less itself; ask it to be more precise.