Wealth & Money Quote by Stephen Sondheim

Sondheim’s line lands like a rueful stage aside: not a romantic lament about “the arts,” but a blunt budget note that doubles as a cultural diagnosis. He’s talking about Broadway economics, where the old mythology of a few devoted backers writing checks for the love of the form has been priced out by ballooning production costs, marketing arms races, and the brutal math of weekly running expenses. “Personal investors” sounds intimate, almost civic. By the time you get to “corporate investment,” the air goes flat. That contrast is the point.

The intent isn’t to scold audiences for bad taste; it’s to explain why the ecosystem tilts toward safer bets. When funding comes from corporations or syndicates of high-net-worth individuals, risk stops being an artistic gamble and becomes a brand problem. Sondheim doesn’t need to name the consequence: shows get built to protect capital, not to provoke. You can hear the quiet cynicism in “anymore,” the sense that a certain kind of patronage - messy, idiosyncratic, occasionally irrational - has been replaced by investment logic that demands predictability.

The subtext is also about who gets to decide what “culture” is. Corporate money and concentrated wealth don’t just bankroll theater; they shape its boundaries, nudging experimentation into the margins and rewarding work that can be packaged, toured, and replicated. Coming from Sondheim - a composer who made discomfort sing - the line reads less like resignation than like a warning: when the gatekeepers change, the art changes with them, even before anyone touches a note.