Daniel Okrent

And in this particular scene, the American admiral has come ashore to negotiate with the Japanese authorities, negotiate with many ships and cannons right behind him.

So it's not the easiest of negotiations.

And in the song, a young boy is in a tree.

He's the someone in a tree who is hearing little bits and pieces of the conversation and wanting to know what's really going on and believing that things he hears going on may not be the whole story.

It is about an outsider trying to get in.

And I believe that that would be a very short version of much of Stephen Sondheim's life.

Even though it is not necessarily a beloved song by Sondheim fans, I think we admire it and treasure it because it was so important to him.

His collaborator, John Weidman, who had never written a Broadway show before Pacific Overtures and then collaborated with him on two other shows, he said to me when I interviewed him that, you know, Steve cried at the time he wrote it.

But he was still crying about it 40 years later.

There's something in that that you need to pay attention to.

And I think that what I pay attention to is the outsider trying to be in.

I guess they are.

I may have overcomplicated them because I do so much research.

I go so deep and I find things that inevitably lead to complication.

You could do it with my life very, very easily.

But it is true that in the theater community, I think it goes without saying, that emotions are on the surface.

And even if you're trying to hide the emotions, the fact that you're trying to hide them are on the surface.

It's a very volatile world.

And so the people I'm writing about in this book, not just Sondheim, but also Prince and Bernstein and so many others, not a lot of easy personalities.

What was great about the Sondheim project was