I don’t think my hesitancy around show tunes and musicals is unique. For a long time, I associated musical theater with Disney movies and classics like Annie and The Wizard of Oz. I found their treacly optimism sickening, their themes — redemption through romantic love, the centrality of family, the importance of virtue, the final victory of the good guy over the bad — tired. I wasn’t interested in what felt like pure artifice with no tether to reality. I thought the sparkly perfection of the singing-and-dancing performances was too much a product of the practical need for musicals to succeed commercially, to become hits. I’d lose patience when I felt songs didn’t push the plot forward, and half the time I didn’t care what happened to the characters. I didn’t want a hero, and I didn’t want to feel righteous along with him, and I didn’t want to learn a neat little lesson at the end.

Luckily for me, neither did Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim pushed musical theater into a new era, breaking it out of peddling old-fashioned family values and fantasies about romantic love to instead explore darker, realer themes, to introduce characters who don’t get a happy ending, who learn their lesson but only after two acts of struggle, who maybe don’t learn their lesson at all.

One of his more well-known works, Company, reaches its resolution not when Robert, the central character who laments that he’s turning thirty-five and still has never been in love, finally finds The One, but when he fully realizes exactly what it is that he wants: not the just-right-glass-slipper love of fairy tales, but the often excessive, demanding, mortifying love of real life. “Somebody need me too much / Somebody know me too well,” he pleads in the show’s climactic tune, “Being Alive.”