Lyrics Take Me Here Theater Broken Heart Take a Chance Again to Find Your Part
Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91
He was the theater's nigh revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century and the driving force behind some of Broadway'southward most beloved and historic shows.
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The Last Word: Stephen Sondheim
In a never-before-seen interview, Stephen Sondheim sat down with The New York Times in June 2008 to talk near his life, career and accomplishments.
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"I of the kickoff things you have to determine on with a musical is, why should in that location be songs? You can put songs in any story, but what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it's unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to be not very proficient." Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the most important figure in American musical theater of the last half-century. [singing] "Will information technology exist? Yes, it will." In shows like "West Side Story," "Gypsy," "A Funny Matter Happened on the Way to the Forum," "Company," "Follies," "Sweeney Todd" and "Sunday in the Park With George," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, he created songs essential to the stories and changed the nature of the Broadway musical. "I like to modify styles. That's ane of the things that appeals to me nearly stories, is if I've never washed anything similar it before. It has to be some unknown territory. Information technology's got to make you nervous. If it doesn't make you nervous, then you're going to write the same affair y'all wrote before." We sabbatum downwards with him in June 2008 to talk near his own story and his accomplishments. "What is it about the theater that attracted yous and so, that made you want to spend your career, your life working in it?" "It was very simple. It was when I was 11 years old, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a surrogate father, and I just wanted to do what he did. And he was a songwriter for the theater, so I became a songwriter for the theater. If he was a geologist, I would have become a geologist. Which is, I'yard sure, an exaggeration, but not much." [music playing] Sondheim wasn't known for Top 40 hits, but ane of his songs, "Transport in the Clowns," from "A Piffling Night Music," rose to the tiptop of the charts. [singing] "Only where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns." He wrote it specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the show'south stars, and it remains without a doubt his most pop and financially successful piece of work. "Wrote it during rehearsals, brought information technology essentially overnight. Glynis Johns could not sustain notes, then I thought, I got to write a song with short phrases. And if they're going to be short phrases, what are better short phrases than questions? Then the whole thought of, 'Isn't it rich? Are nosotros a pair?' Question, which ordinarily would not occur to me, came into my head. And one time I've gotten that, one time you go the thought of questions, then it'southward quite easy to write." [SINGING] "Isn't it elation? Don't yous corroborate?" "Once you go the notion of, 'Isn't it rich? Aren't we schmucks not to exist together?' I mean, you get that tone, that takes a very short period of time." [singing] "Send in the clowns." Stephen Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, to upper-heart-class parents on the Upper Due west Side of Manhattan. His father manufactured dresses, and his mother designed them. Only his childhood wasn't all privilege. His family life was difficult, with a distant and remote female parent and parents who didn't go forth. "When I was 10 years old, my parents divorced. My mother got custody of me, and she bought a place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, equally a sort of summertime residence. And I was an simply child. And considering she was a working adult female and also a glory hunter, she knew the Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my historic period, a twelvemonth younger, Jimmy. And and then we became friends and companions. And Oscar obviously realized that I had some gift for songwriting, so he encouraged me during my teen years, and in fact, taught me. And I brought him a bear witness when I was 15 years old that I idea he would want to produce. It was a show near the schoolhouse I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed to find out that he wouldn't produce information technology. Simply I wanted to be the kickoff 15-year-onetime on Broadway with a show. But he said, if you want to know what's incorrect with the show, I'll tell yous. And he went over it folio by folio, starting from the first sentence. He treated me like an adult instead of like a kid. By the time the afternoon was over, I actually knew more than about the nuts and bolts of writing a musical than most people learn in a lifetime." Hammerstein and his partner Richard Rodgers were fresh from the success of 'Oklahoma!' and 'Carousel' when they hired the teenage Sondheim to work on their next musical, 'Allegro,' in 1947. [singing] "His hair is fuzzy, his eyes are blueish." Unusual for its day, it followed the life of an everyman from nativity to age 35. It was their showtime failure, but it would influence Sondheim tremendously. "It was experimental, and so that incurred in me the whole notion of doing experimental stuff, which I've done, one way or some other, about of the shows I've done." Hammerstein laid out a course of education for his teenage protégé, suggesting he write iv musicals, each in a different fashion. "The first one being an accommodation of a play that I idea was good. The second beingness an adaptation of a play that I liked only was flawed, that maybe I could experience I could improve. The 3rd, something that was a non-theatrical story, but suit it and make it theatrical. And so the fourth was to write an original. And that'due south exactly what I did over a menstruation of years." In the mid-1950s, when Sondheim was in his early 20s, he wrote his first professional show, 'Saturday Night.' [singing] "The moon's like a million-watt electric light. It shines on the city —" It was headed to Broadway when its lead producer suddenly died, forcing the show to close out of boondocks. The ambitious young composer was still without a credit, but then came an opportunity to work on Broadway, admitting as a lyricist but and not as a composer likewise. It all began when he bumped into renowned playwright and librettist Arthur Laurents at a party. "And we fell to talking, and I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I'grand about to first on a musical version of "Romeo and Juliet."' And I said, 'And who's doing the score?' He said, 'Leonard Bernstein.' I said, 'Who'due south doing the lyrics?' And he said, 'Oh, my god. Well, I never thought of you.' And he literally smote his forehead. And he said, in his typical Arthur Laurents way, he said, 'I didn't much similar your music, only I thought your lyrics were kind of good.' I said, 'All right.' He said, 'Would yous like to come and play for Lenny?' Now, I had no intention of simply writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. Only I thought, chance to play for Leonard Bernstein? Why not? So the adjacent forenoon, I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, 'I will know within a calendar week, and I'll permit you know.' And I said, 'Thanks and so much, Mr. Bernstein.' Sure enough, a week after, the phone rang, and he said, 'Would yous similar to practice it?' And I said, 'Let me call you lot dorsum.' Considering I didn't want to practice just lyrics. And I called Oscar, who'due south my adviser on everything. And I said, 'You know, I don't want to do this.' But Oscar said, 'Look, you have a chance to work with very gifted professionals on a show that sounds interesting, and you could always write your own music somewhen.' He said, 'My advice would be to take the job.' That'south why I took it. And I learned a neat deal." [singing] "Maria. I just met a girl named Maria." Sondheim didn't always agree with Bernstein on how the lyrics should be written. "I knew that in that location were great dangers of pretension with this whole show, and the just way to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and brand them very simple." "You've said over the years that yous're not really happy with the lyrics you wrote, even though they're and so pop. You lot are?" "No, no, no, they're very cocky-conscious. Lenny wanted everything, the lyrics to be very poetic. But his thought of poetry and my idea of verse are just non the same. I hateful, yous know, I was 25 years old, and he was a big, big force, and Lenny kept pushing me to exist very fruity. 'Today, the earth was just an address.' That's a perfectly fine line on newspaper, but the boy from the streets is singing that?" [singing] "Today, the world was just an accost, a place for me to live in." "And I've often quoted, you know, 'I Experience Pretty': 'It's alarming how charming I feel,' says this girl from the streets, and she sounds like Noel Coward." [singing] "Information technology's alarming how charming I experience." "I do like 'Something's Coming.' That'due south my idea of a poetic lyric, in the sense that information technology uses imagery." [singing] "Something'southward coming. I don't know what it is, but information technology is going to be bang-up." "And I similar the 'Jet Song,' too." [singing] "When you lot're a Jet, yous're a Jet all the fashion, from your first cigarette to your last dying mean solar day." "But you know, songs like 'Somewhere,' I mean, that's deeply embarrassing. Then —" "West Side Story" got mixed reviews when it opened in 1957, and didn't win the Tony Award equally Best Musical, only it was revolutionary in its combination of music and dance, and in its searing plot. Sondheim had made his first mark. He all the same longed to write both music and lyrics on Broadway, and information technology looked as if he was going to get the take a chance with a new musical based on the early life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] "Y'all'll be slap-up! Going to take the whole world on a plate!" But the bear witness's star objected. "Ethel Merman was already signed to play Rose, the female parent, and then it was all set up. So Ethel Merman said she would not have me as a composer, because she had only done a show called 'Happy Hunting,' with two immature writers, and it was a flop. And she didn't want to accept a chance on an unknown composer. And she'southward perfectly happy to have me do the lyrics. So I said no, and Arthur tried to persuade me, and I said, 'No, I really want to write music, this is nonsense.' Once more, Oscar stepped into the breach, and he said, 'Do it.' He said, 'There are ii advantages. Start of all,' he said, 'you take the experience of writing for a star, which is different than just writing a show. I mean, you're tailoring material not simply for the character, for the character equally played by that specific actor or actress.' That's i thing. He said, 'Secondly, it's six months out of your life. Do it.' And that's exactly what happened. We wrote that evidence in near four months. We wrote very quickly. That'south probably the quickest I've always heard of a major Broadway musical beingness written. But information technology wrote, as Barbra Streisand would say, like butter." [singing] "Honey, everything'due south coming up roses and daffodils!" "It'due south considered one of the best, if non the best, Broadway musicals of all time." "Yeah, admittedly, information technology is. I think it's probably information technology'southward the culmination of that era, that told musicals in chronological guild, in a linear style. I'd certainly say it was the best." In 1970, Sondheim teamed upward with managing director Harold Prince to write his quantum musical, 'Company.' Just as 'Gypsy' had been the culmination of the era of the narrative musical, 'Company' broke new ground. Information technology fractured the narrative, told the story in a nonlinear way, and opened the way for similar musicals, like 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago.' Sondheim and Prince followed visitor with more breakthroughs: 'Follies,' 'A Little Night Music,' 'Pacific Overtures.' They were revolutionary, but mostly, they weren't fiscal hits. "It takes an audience a while to get used to new ways of storytelling. There are exceptional plays that break with the tradition, similar 'Expiry of a Salesman,' and are hits at the same time. But unremarkably, if you bring a new style of storytelling to the stage — 'Oklahoma!' is the perfect case of taking a take chances and is a gigantic striking, just that is not the usual case." [singing] "These are probably the worst pies in London!" 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street' is considered by many to exist Sondheim'south best and most powerful work. A gruesome tale of death and revenge, it shows the composer at the peak of his talent. [singing] "Is that just icky —" "It was total of blood and gore and controversy. And though information technology, too, didn't make money in its original run, it has often been revived, has been performed by opera companies, and in 2007 was turned into a picture show starring Johnny Depp." [singing] "I volition have vengeance!" "Y'all want to talk most dark?" "Well, it'south not so dark. It's really kind of funny, that show, y'all know? I mean, nobody takes it seriously. Information technology's not dark the way — information technology'southward a melodrama. I don't recall melodramas are dark. Anyway, just I get it. The point is, yep, in that location's a lot of claret." "And in that location's a lot of comic relief, in that location's no doubt about it." "It's not about comic relief. It'south the fact the mental attitude is not a real mental attitude. They're all drawing figures. I hateful, it's an operetta. These are not existent people, and they're not supposed to be. They're supposed to be big, larger than life." "But isn't there a real sense in it virtually injustice and evil?" "If in that location is for you, then there is for you lot. I know Hal always thinks, always thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I thought it was about scaring people." "You lot all know Steve is a great dramatist and our greatest living composer and lyricist." In 2010, Sondheim received an ultimate stage accolade. "I cry easy." A Broadway theater was renamed in his honor. "This is and then much more than moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim every bit opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —" "What practice you think — if y'all think well-nigh this, what would you like your legacy to exist?" "Oh, goodness. Oh, I just would like the shows to keep getting washed. Whether on Broadway, or in regional theaters, or schools or communities, I would just like the stuff to be done. But washed and washed and done and done and done. You lot know, that would exist the fun."
Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history'due south songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the creative standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91.
His lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas, announced the death. He said he did not know the cause just added that Mr. Sondheim had not been known to be ill and that the expiry was sudden. The day before, Mr. Sondheim had celebrated Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury, Mr. Pappas said. [His death certificate, obtained past The Times on December. 2, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.]
An intellectually rigorous artist who perpetually sought new artistic paths, Mr. Sondheim was the theater's near revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, if not its most popular.
His work melded words and music in a way that enhanced them both. From his earliest successes in the late 1950s, when he wrote the lyrics for "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," through the 1990s, when he wrote the music and lyrics for two audacious musicals, "Assassins," giving voice to the men and women who killed or tried to kill American presidents, and "Passion," an operatic probe into the nature of true dear, he was a relentlessly innovative theatrical force.
The first Broadway show for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 comedy "A Funny Thing Happened on the Manner to the Forum," won a Tony Award for best musical and went on to run for more than two years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his almost productive period, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including "Visitor" (1970), "Follies" (1971), "A Piffling Night Music" (1973), "Pacific Overtures" (1976), "Sweeney Todd" (1979), "Merrily We Roll Along" (1981), "Sunday in the Park With George" (1984) and "Into the Woods" (1987).
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In the history of the theater, but a scattering could telephone call Mr. Sondheim peer. The list of major theater composers who wrote words to back-trail their own scores (and vice versa) is a short one — it includes Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman and Noël Coward.
Though Mr. Sondheim spent long hours in lone labor, usually late at nighttime, when he was composing or writing, he ofttimes spoke lovingly of the collaborative nature of the theater. After the offset decade of his career, he was never once more a author for hire, and his contribution to a show was always integral to its conception and execution. He chose collaborators — notably the producer and director Hal Prince, the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and later the writer and director James Lapine — who shared his appetite to stretch the musical form beyond the premises of just entertainment.
Mr. Sondheim'due south music was always recognizable as his ain, and still he was dazzlingly versatile. His melodies could be deceptively, disarmingly simple — like the title song of the unsuccessful 1964 musical "Anyone Can Whistle," "Our Time," from "Merrily," and the nearly famous of his individual songs, "Send In the Clowns," from "Night Music" — or jaunty and whimsical, similar "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid," from "Forum."
They could also be brassy and bitter, like "The Ladies Who Tiffin," from "Company," or sweeping, like the grandly macabre waltz "A Little Priest," from "Sweeney Todd." And they could exist desperately yearning, like the plaintive "I Read," from "Passion."
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Tonys and a Pulitzer
He wrote speechifying soliloquies, conversational duets and chattery trios and quartets. He exploited time signatures and forms; for "Nighttime Music," he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — nearly an unabridged score written in permutations of triple time.
Over all, he wrote both the music and the lyrics for a dozen Broadway shows — not including compendium revues like "Side by Side by Sondheim," "Putting Information technology Together" and the autobiographical "Sondheim on Sondheim." 5 of them won Tony Awards for best musical, and half dozen won for best original score. A show that won neither of those, "Sunday in the Park," took the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Of the many revivals of his shows, three won Tonys, including "Assassins" in 2004, even though it had not previously been on Broadway. (It was presented Off Broadway in 1990.)
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In 1993, Mr. Sondheim received the Kennedy Middle Honors for lifetime achievement, and in 2022 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2008, he was given a Tony Laurels for lifetime accomplishment, and in 2010, in maybe the ultimate show business laurels, a Broadway business firm on West 43rd Street, Henry Miller's Theater, was renamed in his honor.
For his 90th altogether in March 2020, a Broadway revival of "Company" was planned, with a woman (played past Katrina Lenk) in the key function of Bobby, but it was postponed considering of the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times published a special section devoted to him, and a virtual concert, "Accept Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Altogether Celebration," was streamed on the Broadway.com YouTube channel, featuring Broadway performers singing his songs.
Mr. Sondheim, who besides maintained a home in Manhattan, a townhouse on East 49th Street, had been spending most of his time during the pandemic in Roxbury, in western Connecticut.
But he returned to New York this month to nourish revivals of two of his musicals: on Nov. fourteen, for the opening night of "Assassins," at the Archetype Phase Company in Lower Manhattan, and the next night for the long-delayed first preview, since Broadway reopened, of "Company," besides starring Patti LuPone, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was "extremely" pleased past both productions, Mr. Pappas, his lawyer, said.
In addition to his theater work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for "Stavisky," Alain Resnais'south 1974 movie about a French financier and embezzler, and his song "Sooner or Later (I Ever Get My Man)" for Warren Beatty'south "Dick Tracy" won an Academy Award in 1991. Six cast albums from his shows won Grammy Awards, and "Send In the Clowns" won the Grammy for vocal of the year in 1975.
With the exception perhaps of "Forum," Mr. Sondheim's shows had hefty ambitions in subject matter, form or both. "Company," which was built from vignettes featuring several couples and their mutual unmarried male friend, was a bittersweet reflection on marriage. "Pacific Overtures" aimed to tell the story of the modernization of Japan from the Japanese perspective. "Sweeney Todd," a bloody tale about a vengeful barber in 19th-century London, approached 1000 Guignol in tone and opera in staging and scoring. "The Frogs," which was showtime performed in the Yale University swimming pool in 1974 (with Meryl Streep in the cast) earlier it was revised for Broadway in 2004, composite the Greek comedy of Aristophanes with present-day political commentary.
Paradigm
Mr. Sondheim liked to retrieve of himself less equally a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit one who wrote very short plays and prepare them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambiguity, were oft impossibly clever just rarely just clever; his language was sometimes erudite but seldom purple. He was a world-class rhyming gymnast, not just at the ends of lines but inside them — one of the baked dishes on the ghoulish carte in "Sweeney Todd" was "shepherd's pie peppered with actual shepherd" — and he upheld the highest standards for adequate wordplay, or at least tried to.
Rhymes and Beats
His 2010 artistic memoir, "Finishing the Hat" (the name was taken from a song title in "Lord's day in the Park"; a follow-up, "Look, I Fabricated a Hat," came out in 2011), was in many ways a primer on the arts and crafts of lyric writing. In information technology, he took himself to task for numerous sins, including things like adding unnecessary adjectives to fill up out lines rhythmically and paying bereft attention to a melodic line. In the song "Somewhere" from "Westward Side Story," for instance, the highest note in the opening phrase is on the 2nd beat out, which ways that in the well-known lyric — "In that location's a place for us" — the accent is on the word "a."
"The nearly unimportant word in the opening line is the one that gets the nigh important note," he wrote.
In some other example from "Due west Side Story," he complained about a stanza from "America," which was sung past a chorus of immature Puerto Rican women.
"Words must sit on music in order to become clear to the audience," he said to his biographer Meryle Secrest for her 1998 volume, "Stephen Sondheim: A Life." "You don't get a chance to hear the lyric twice, and if it doesn't sit and bounce when the music bounces and rise when the music rises, the audience becomes confused."
In "America," he added, "I had this wonderful quatrain that went: 'I like to be in America/OK past me in America/Everything gratuitous in America/For a small fee in America.' The piddling 'for a pocket-size fee' was my zinger — except that the 'for' is absolute and 'small-scale fee' is incommunicable to say that fast, so it went 'For a smafee in America.' Nobody knew what it meant!"
What most distinguished Mr. Sondheim's lyrics, however, was that they were by and large grapheme-driven, oft probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, anguish or deeply felt disharmonize. In "Send In the Clowns," for example, he couched the famous plaint about missed romantic chances largely in the linguistic communication of the theater, considering the character singing it is an aging actress:
Simply when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance over again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No i is there.
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In the title vocal for "Anyone Can Whistle," he wrote from the point of view of a woman who establish information technology hard to love:
Anyone can whistle,
That'southward what they say —
Easy.
Anyone can whistle,
Whatsoever old day —
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
It's all so simple:
Relax, let get, let wing.
So someone tell me why
Can't I?
I can trip the light fantastic toe a tango
I can read Greek —
Easy.
I can slay a dragon
Any old week —
Easy.
What's hard is unproblematic,
What's natural comes difficult.
Maybe you could prove me
How to let go
Lower my guard.
Learn to be complimentary.
Maybe if y'all whistle,
Whistle for me.
Over the years, many people theorized that "Anyone Can Whistle" was a cri de coeur by the author, though Mr. Sondheim denied it. "To believe that 'Anyone Can Whistle' is my credo is to believe that I'm the prototypical Repressed Intellectual and that explains everything well-nigh me," he wrote in "Finishing the Hat."
Withal, it's true that he lived a largely solitary romantic life for many years.
"I ever thought that song would exist Steve'southward epitaph," the playwright and managing director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for "Anyone Can Whistle," as well equally "West Side Story," "Gypsy" and "Do I Hear a Flit?," told Ms. Secrest.
For a fourth dimension in his 60s, Mr. Sondheim shared his Manhattan townhouse with a young songwriter, Peter Jones, and in 2022 he married Jeffrey Romley, who survives him, along with a half brother, Walter Sondheim.
Prototype
Box Office Struggles
For all these reasons — the high-minded ambition, the seriousness of field of study matter, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim's shows, though more often than not received with critical accolades, were nearly never popular hits. He suffered from a reputation that he didn't write hummable tunes and that his outlook was ascetic, if not grim. For some of the same reasons, non all performers were suited to his shows, though over the years several well-known singers became his stalwart interpreters, amongst them Elaine Stritch, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Cook and Bernadette Peters.
Mr. Sondheim rarely gave audiences the fizzy, feel-good musical feel or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to look. He also didn't give them the opulent spectacle, the anthemic score or the melodramatic storytelling that became the ascendant musical theater style of the 1980s and '90s with the arrival from Britain of Andrew Lloyd Webber'south megahits "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera," and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg'south "Les Misérables" and "Miss Saigon," followed by the corporate productions of Disney.
Of the shows for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, his beginning, "Forum," had the longest Broadway run at 964 performances; his 2d, "Anyone Tin Whistle," lasted nine. "Merrily Nosotros Curl Forth," a famously problematic adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart reverse-chronology play almost how idealistic young artists grow contemptuous every bit they age, closed afterward just 16. Merely fifty-fifty his successes were barely successful. Near of his Broadway shows, in their initial runs, failed to earn back the money it cost to put them on.
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"I have e'er conscientiously tried not to do the aforementioned thing twice," Mr. Sondheim said, reflecting on his career in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2000, when he turned seventy. "If you're broken-field running, they tin't hit you with so many tomatoes. I certainly experience out of the mainstream because what'southward happened in musicals is corporate and cookie-cutter stuff. And if I'thousand out of fashion, I'm out of way. Being a bohemian isn't just about being dissimilar. It'southward about having your vision of the way a bear witness might be."
Lonely With Female parent
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived first on the Upper Westward Side. Herbert Sondheim, his begetter, was the owner of a dressmaking company; his mother, the one-time Etta Janet Fox, known every bit Foxy, worked for her husband equally a designer until he left her, when Stephen was 10. He was sent for a time to military school, and later to the George School in Pennsylvania, merely until he was 16 Stephen, her only child, lived mostly with his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship throughout his life. (His father remarried and had 2 more sons.)
In the years post-obit his parents' separation, Mr. Sondheim recalled for his biography, his mother treated him precisely as she had her husband: flirting with him sexually on the one hand, analytical him on the other. As an adult, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the dark before she was to have middle surgery, she wrote a letter to her son and had information technology manus delivered. Information technology read, in part, "The only regret I have in life is giving you nativity."
His mother was, even so, responsible for the nigh formative human relationship of her son's life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose husband was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein Two; their son Jamie became friends with young Steve, and when the Hammersteins moved to a Pennsylvania farm, Stephen, who had begun playing the pianoforte at 7, went for a visit and stayed for the summer.
His mother subsequently bought a habitation nearby, and Stephen was so often at the Hammersteins' that he was thought of as a family member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor — "It was because of my teenage admiration for him that I became a songwriter," Mr. Sondheim wrote in "Finishing the Hat," although he later assessed Hammerstein as a lyricist of soaring ability just often flawed piece of work. Hammerstein brutally criticized the boy's get-go musical, written at the George School, as "the worst thing I've ever read," calculation: "I didn't say that information technology was untalented, I said it was terrible. And if you want to know why it's terrible, I'll tell you lot."
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An afternoon-long tutorial followed, teaching him, past Mr. Sondheim'southward account, more about the craft than virtually songwriters learn in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Conform a skilful play into a musical; accommodate a flawed play into a musical; adapt a story from another medium into a musical; and, finally, write a musical from your ain original story. This the immature Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater work with serious composition study under Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, as he put it, "that art is work and not inspiration, that invention comes with craft." Mr. Sondheim would later study independently with Milton Babbitt, the advanced composer.
Mr. Sondheim's first professional show business job was non in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s tv set comedy, "Topper," about a fussbudget banker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts. (Much later, Mr. Sondheim wrote a whodunit moving picture script, "The Last of Sheila," with the role player Anthony Perkins; it was produced in 1973 and directed by Herbert Ross.) Past the '50s he had become a connoisseur of word games and puzzles, and an inventor of elaborate games. From 1968 to 1969, he created ambiguous crosswords for New York mag.
His affinity for theatrical misdirection and mystery was acknowledged by his friend, the playwright Anthony Shaffer, who based the cunningly vengeful cuckold in his play "Sleuth" partly on Mr. Sondheim. (The play was once tentatively titled "Who's Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?")
Breaking Into Broadway
Mr. Sondheim was in his early 20s when he wrote his showtime professional person show, a musical called "Saturday Dark," which was an adaptation of "Front end Porch in Flatbush," a play by Philip Thousand. and Julius J. Epstein. He got the job, to write both words and music, afterward the composer Frank Loesser turned it down. The testify was scheduled to be presented in 1955, only the producer, Lemuel Ayers, died earlier he had completed raising the money for it, and the production came to a halt. The show was not presented until 1997, by a small company in London; it later on appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the 2nd Phase Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was loath to have either of his get-go Broadway gigs, "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," considering he felt he was a composer, not only a lyricist — "I relish writing music much more than than lyrics," he confessed in "Finishing the Lid." Simply he agreed to both on the advice of Hammerstein, who told him that he would benefit from working with the likes of Bernstein; Laurents (who wrote the volume), and the director Jerome Robbins, in the beginning instance, and from writing for a star similar Ethel Merman in the second, fifty-fifty though it was she who had wanted a more experienced Broadway hand, Jule Styne, every bit the composer.
Only in one case after "Gypsy" would Mr. Sondheim write lyrics for another composer: an unhappy collaboration with Richard Rodgers, "Do I Hear a Flit?," based on Laurents's play "The Time of the Cuckoo."
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Mr. Sondheim was asked to take the task past Laurents and by Mary Rodgers, Richard's elderberry daughter, whom he had met as a teenager at the Hammersteins' and for whom he had complicated feelings over many years. However, the two men proved antagonistic equally writing partners — years later on Mr. Sondheim was quoted as proverb that Hammerstein was "a human being of express talent and infinite soul" and Rodgers the contrary — and though the show ran for 220 performances in 1965, it never had a Broadway revival, and neither man considered it a success.
The period of Mr. Sondheim's greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director. They were old friends, having been introduced by Ms. Rodgers in the belatedly 1940s or early '50s, and Mr. Prince had been the producer of "West Side Story." He had proved his chops every bit a managing director also, with musical successes like "She Loves Me" (1963) and "Cabaret" (1966).
Mr. Prince would direct 5 Sondheim musicals in the 1970s — "Company," "Follies," "A Little Night Music," "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd'' — and though non all were commercially successful, they were all innovative, the production of two supremely talented artists whose individually authoritative visions were, for the most office, complementary. As Mr. Prince naturally saw a show's big picture, its expect and its pace, Mr. Sondheim, who had inherited the Rodgers and Hammerstein conventionalities that the songs are critical elements of the play, pushed the thought further — not merely integrating the words and music but imbuing the songs with the concerns of a playwright; that is, providing singers with the material to deepen their character portrayals, and in rehearsals concentrating on their commitment and wording.
The partnership foundered on "Merrily We Roll Along," a evidence that was hampered in part by the youth of its cast members, who had to play not only young characters but also the disillusioned adults they get, and by Mr. Prince's acknowledged failure to detect an advisable look for the show as a whole.
"I never knew how to direct it because I work so much from 'What is it going to look similar?' " Mr. Prince told Ms. Secrest for her Sondheim biography. "That becomes the motor of the prove. I never could figure it out."
"Merrily" has had several lives since so, Off Broadway, in regional theater and overseas, as producers and directors take tried to solve its bug and showcase what is generally acknowledged to be a bright and poignant score.
A Younger Collaborator
In any case, the two men parted creative company for more than two decades, not working together again until they hammered out a version of a much-revised musical nearly a pair of entrepreneurial American brothers in the early 20th century that in other incarnations, before and after, was variously titled "Gold," "Wise Guys" and "Route Testify." Under Mr. Prince, information technology was called "Bounciness," and it was produced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Eye in Washington.
During Mr. Prince'southward absence from his creative life, Mr. Sondheim teamed upwardly with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the most cerebral works of Mr. Sondheim's career. These included "Into the Woods," which reimagined familiar children's fairy tales into darker adult fables; "Passion," a nearly operatic meditation on the nature of love; and "Sun in the Park With George," a work whose first act ingeniously creates the artistic process of the painter Georges Seurat equally he produces his masterpiece, "A Dominicus Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte," and whose second act jumps ahead a century to illustrate how a contemporary artist makes fine art in a more consumer-conscious age.
With no dancing and a slim plot, in that location was little of musical theater convention in the show, but, as Frank Rich wrote in The Times, information technology was startlingly original and deeply satisfying. "It's anyone's guess whether the public will exist shocked or delighted by 'Sunday in the Park,' " Mr. Rich wrote. "What I do know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine have created an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching work."
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It was one of Mr. Sondheim's most critically admired shows, running for 604 performances. And many critics and other Sondheim-ophiles constitute in it his most personal argument, as if he had used Seurat's view of the artist's life equally a surrogate for his own. In the show's signature song, "Finishing the Chapeau," faced with the loss of the woman he loves considering his devotion to painting has superseded his devotion to her, Seurat offers a sad but forceful paean to the joy of bringing original beauty into the world. It ends:
And when the adult female that yous wanted goes,
Yous can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
Simply the adult female who won't wait for you knows
That, however yous live,
At that place'due south a part of you always continuing past,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat
Starting on a hat
Finishing a chapeau
Expect, I fabricated a hat
Where in that location never was a hat.
William McDonald and Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html
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