Starting with the 1993 off-Broadway production of Putting It Together, Sondheim’s opening night gifts were deviously designed and personalized jigsaws commissioned from Stave Puzzles based on the show’s poster and the recipient’s initials. This continued through to the opening night of Company in 2021, just a few weeks after he died.
Excerpt from the book Matching Minds with Sondheim, describing the experience of actor Etai Benson:
When Etai and his wife finished the puzzle, they left it right there, on the dining room table, where it sits to this day, all these years later. When Etai looks at the puzzle, perhaps during breakfast or over lunch, it fills him with emotion. “My entire experience of Company was painted by both COVID and by the loss of Stephen Sondheim,” he recalled, “and in some ways a loss of childhood.” As a teenager, he discovered what he wanted to do in life through the work of Stephen Sondheim. He was interested in acting, perhaps for movies. But then one day the older drama kids introduced him to Into The Woods, Assassins, and Sweeney Todd. “When I discovered THAT, I mean, truly, my life was changed. I said, ‘This is not only what I want to do, but I have to do.’” Yet in the year and a half from Company not opening in April 2020 until it returned in November 2021, Etai had lost both his dad and his greatest artistic inspiration. “I look at that Company puzzle, and it’s the loss of innocence for me. I can sort of measure my life before Company and after Company. So, it comes with a lot of emotion.”
Not that the memories are all negative. It reminds him of the beautiful production they put together, and what an honor it was to work with Sondheim and to finally be in a room with him. He recalls that sitzprobe, when he first sang with the orchestra. “I remember the joy, and also the disbelief, that I’m in a room with the master. I’m in a room with the greatest of all time: Stephen Sondheim. And he’s smiling and beaming with joy at my delivery of his work. It is something I’ll never forget.”
(go back to view more items)