She said, “Stephen Sondheim’s coming to the show tonight.” We all froze.

Back in the late ‘90s, I wrote a show called Tell-Tale, a riff on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with my troupe Theatre Couture. A noir-tinged comedy, it had a sold-out run at New York’s PS 122 and soon moved Off Broadway to the Cherry Lane Theater. Though it wasn’t technically a musical, the piece did include a few songs, including one by Stephen Sondheim. You may have heard of him.

This particular musical moment came after the leading lady (drag legend Sherry Vine) chopped up a pizza delivery guy in a lustful frenzy and hid his body parts under the floor of her luxury high-rise apartment. She wonders how she could have done something so unhinged and, as the body parts begin to creep out of their hiding places (courtesy of SFX puppet master Basil Twist), she sings “Losing My Mind,” Sondheim’s masterful psychological aria from Follies. It was a moment that blended comic absurdity and deep pathos to create something wonderful and strange, especially as delivered by the incomparable Vine in Theatre Couture’s signature style of heartfelt camp.

One afternoon when we arrived at the theater early in the show’s Off Broadway run, the box office manager stopped us with an enigmatic grin and said, “Stephen Sondheim’s coming to the show tonight.” Two tickets had been booked in his name. The most brilliant songwriter of the modern musical theater was bothering to see our work. It was amazing. And terrifying. What would he make of our bastardization of one of his best-known masterpieces?

We all waited with trepidation, taking peeks at the audience as folks filtered into the house that evening, searching for Sondheim’s familiar face.

We never spotted him.

Afterward the box office manager let us know that he hadn’t shown to collect the tickets. We were crushed—and a little bit relieved. At least we wouldn’t get an angry note demanding that we cut the number.

But since Sondheim’s death in December 2021, I’ve read so much about his frequent embrace of unorthodox approaches to his work, including a revival of Company with a gender-swapped protagonist that at the time of this writing is playing on Broadway.

It’s very possible that Sondheim did in fact come to see Tell-Tale at another performance or under a different name. It’s very possible that he totally delighted in us weirdos having our way with his song. Because, especially later in his life, that’s the kind of openness and generosity he often espoused. “What keeps theater alive is the chance always to do it differently,” he told the New York Times shortly before his death.

Even when the art form’s most revered practitioners pass away, their work and their spirt live on. So indulge me as I take this opportunity to say a posthumous thank you to Mr. Sondheim for letting us interpret him in new ways, and for writing work that’s so strong it can thrive in a multitude of interpretations, even out of the mouth of a mad, murderous drag queen.

An illustration of Tell-Tale featured in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section.