Education Quote by Bernadette Peters

Sondheim isn’t just being praised here; he’s being positioned as a lifelong syllabus. Bernadette Peters frames his work as a rare double threat - music and lyrics fused by the same mind - then immediately shifts to what that fusion buys you: density. “So smart” nods to his reputation for structural brilliance, internal rhyme, and musical puzzles, but Peters doesn’t let the compliment stay cerebral. She pairs intelligence with “goes so deep with his feelings,” insisting the craft isn’t antiseptic. The subtext is a corrective to the lazy take that Sondheim is only for theater nerds who like cleverness: the point is emotional complexity that survives (and is sharpened by) technique.

Her phrasing does something quietly radical: it treats an audience’s job as active. “Explore, get involved with and learn about” reads like an invitation and a challenge. Sondheim isn’t background music; he asks you to show up, to listen twice, to catch the moral ambiguity and the psychological hairline fractures. Coming from Peters - one of his most iconic interpreters, the voice of “Being Alive,” “Not a Day Goes By,” “Send in the Clowns” - it also doubles as actor testimony. She’s talking about what it feels like inside the material: the way a Sondheim song teaches you how to act it, how to think it, how to inhabit contradictions without sanding them down.

Context matters: Sondheim’s late-20th-century dominance helped move Broadway away from simple uplift toward messy interiority. Peters’ quote is less fan gush than a cultural defense of difficulty as intimacy.