And if I Had One Chance Just to Try It All Again Then I Know Youd Be Looking at the Old Me
Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91
He was the theater's about revered and influential composer-lyricist of the final half of the 20th century and the driving forcefulness behind some of Broadway's near honey and celebrated shows.
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The Last Give-and-take: Stephen Sondheim
In a never-before-seen interview, Stephen Sondheim sat down with The New York Times in June 2008 to talk about his life, career and accomplishments.
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"1 of the offset things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should there be songs? You can put songs in any story, just what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it's unnecessary, and then the show generally turns out to exist non very good." Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the most important figure in American musical theater of the last half-century. [singing] "Will it be? Yes, it will." In shows similar "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 change styles. That's one of the things that appeals to me about stories, is if I've never done annihilation like it before. It has to exist some unknown territory. Information technology's got to make you nervous. If it doesn't brand you lot nervous, then you lot're going to write the aforementioned thing you wrote before." We sat down with him in June 2008 to talk near his ain story and his accomplishments. "What is it about the theater that attracted yous so, that made you want to spend your career, your life working in it?" "It was very unproblematic. It was when I was xi years old, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a surrogate male parent, and I just wanted to do what he did. And he was a songwriter for the theater, and then I became a songwriter for the theater. If he was a geologist, I would have become a geologist. Which is, I'm sure, an exaggeration, merely not much." [music playing] Sondheim wasn't known for Elevation 40 hits, but one of his songs, "Ship in the Clowns," from "A Little Night Music," rose to the peak of the charts. [singing] "Just where are the clowns? Quick, transport in the clowns." He wrote information technology specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the prove'southward stars, and it remains without a doubt his most pop and financially successful work. "Wrote information technology during rehearsals, brought it essentially overnight. Glynis Johns could non sustain notes, so I thought, I got to write a song with short phrases. And if they're going to exist brusque phrases, what are better short phrases than questions? And so the whole idea of, 'Isn't information technology rich? Are we a pair?' Question, which ordinarily would non occur to me, came into my head. And once I've gotten that, once y'all get the idea of questions, then information technology'due south quite easy to write." [SINGING] "Isn't it bliss? Don't yous approve?" "One time you get the notion of, 'Isn't it rich? Aren't nosotros schmucks not to be together?' I mean, yous go 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-middle-course parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father manufactured dresses, and his female parent designed them. But his babyhood wasn't all privilege. His family unit life was difficult, with a afar and remote female parent and parents who didn't become along. "When I was 10 years old, my parents divorced. My mother got custody of me, and she bought a place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, every bit a sort of summer residence. And I was an merely kid. And considering she was a working woman and also a celebrity hunter, she knew the Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my age, a year younger, Jimmy. And then nosotros 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 testify when I was 15 years old that I idea he would desire to produce. It was a testify most the schoolhouse I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed to observe out that he wouldn't produce it. But I wanted to exist the kickoff 15-year-old on Broadway with a show. But he said, if you want to know what's wrong with the show, I'll tell you. And he went over it folio by page, starting from the first sentence. He treated me like an adult instead of similar a kid. By the time the afternoon was over, I really knew more about the nuts and bolts of writing a musical than near 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 piece of work on their next musical, 'Allegro,' in 1947. [singing] "His pilus is fuzzy, his eyes are blue." Unusual for its twenty-four hours, it followed the life of an lowest from nascency to age 35. Information technology was their start failure, merely it would influence Sondheim tremendously. "Information technology was experimental, then that incurred in me the whole notion of doing experimental stuff, which I've done, one way or another, most of the shows I've washed." Hammerstein laid out a course of education for his teenage protégé, suggesting he write four musicals, each in a different style. "The first one existence an adaptation of a play that I thought was adept. The second existence an adaptation of a play that I liked but was flawed, that maybe I could experience I could improve. The third, something that was a non-theatrical story, but adapt it and make information technology theatrical. And then the fourth was to write an original. And that'due south exactly what I did over a flow of years." In the mid-1950s, when Sondheim was in his early 20s, he wrote his beginning professional show, 'Saturday Nighttime.' [singing] "The moon's like a million-watt electric light. It shines on the city —" Information technology was headed to Broadway when its lead producer suddenly died, forcing the show to close out of town. The aggressive young composer was still without a credit, simply then came an opportunity to work on Broadway, albeit as a lyricist only and not as a composer equally well. 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'k nigh to start on a musical version of "Romeo and Juliet."' And I said, 'And who's doing the score?' He said, 'Leonard Bernstein.' I said, 'Who's doing the lyrics?' And he said, 'Oh, my god. Well, I never thought of you lot.' And he literally smote his forehead. And he said, in his typical Arthur Laurents fashion, he said, 'I didn't much like your music, but I idea your lyrics were kind of good.' I said, 'All right.' He said, 'Would you similar to come and play for Lenny?' Now, I had no intention of simply writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. But I idea, chance to play for Leonard Bernstein? Why not? Then the next forenoon, I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, 'I will know within a week, and I'll allow you know.' And I said, 'Thanks and then much, Mr. Bernstein.' Sure enough, a calendar week later, the phone rang, and he said, 'Would you similar to do it?' And I said, 'Let me phone call you back.' Considering I didn't want to do simply lyrics. And I called Oscar, who'south my adviser on everything. And I said, 'Y'all know, I don't want to do this.' But Oscar said, 'Wait, you have a run a risk to work with very gifted professionals on a show that sounds interesting, and you could always write your own music eventually.' He said, 'My communication would be to take the job.' That'south why I took it. And I learned a cracking bargain." [singing] "Maria. I just met a girl named Maria." Sondheim didn't e'er hold with Bernstein on how the lyrics should be written. "I knew that there were corking dangers of pretension with this whole show, and the merely way to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and brand them very simple." "You've said over the years that you're not really happy with the lyrics you wrote, even though they're and so popular. You are?" "No, no, no, they're very cocky-conscious. Lenny wanted everything, the lyrics to exist very poetic. But his idea of poetry and my thought of poetry are only not the same. I hateful, yous know, I was 25 years old, and he was a large, large force, and Lenny kept pushing me to be very fruity. 'Today, the world was only an accost.' That'south a perfectly fine line on newspaper, but the male child from the streets is singing that?" [singing] "Today, the world was just an accost, a identify for me to live in." "And I've often quoted, you know, 'I Feel Pretty': 'It'south alarming how charming I feel,' says this girl from the streets, and she sounds like Noel Coward." [singing] "It's alarming how charming I feel." "I do similar 'Something'southward Coming.' That'south my idea of a poetic lyric, in the sense that it uses imagery." [singing] "Something's coming. I don't know what it is, but it is going to be neat." "And I like the 'Jet Song,' too." [singing] "When you're a Jet, you lot're a Jet all the manner, from your showtime cigarette to your terminal dying day." "Just you know, songs like 'Somewhere,' I hateful, that's deeply embarrassing. And so —" "West Side Story" got mixed reviews when it opened in 1957, and didn't win the Tony Accolade every bit Best Musical, but information technology was revolutionary in its combination of music and dance, and in its searing plot. Sondheim had made his first mark. He yet longed to write both music and lyrics on Broadway, and information technology looked as if he was going to get the run a risk with a new musical based on the early on life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] "Y'all'll exist great! Going to have the whole world on a plate!" But the show's star objected. "Ethel Merman was already signed to play Rose, the mother, so information technology was all set. And then Ethel Merman said she would not have me as a composer, considering she had but done a show called 'Happy Hunting,' with ii young writers, and information technology was a flop. And she didn't desire to take a hazard on an unknown composer. And she's perfectly happy to accept me do the lyrics. So I said no, and Arthur tried to persuade me, and I said, 'No, I actually want to write music, this is nonsense.' Over again, Oscar stepped into the alienation, and he said, 'Exercise information technology.' He said, 'There are two advantages. First of all,' he said, 'you lot take the experience of writing for a star, which is different than but writing a show. I hateful, you're tailoring material not only for the character, for the graphic symbol every bit played past that specific player or actress.' That'south ane matter. He said, 'Secondly, it's six months out of your life. Do it.' And that's exactly what happened. We wrote that show in about iv months. Nosotros wrote very quickly. That's probably the quickest I've ever heard of a major Broadway musical beingness written. But it wrote, as Barbra Streisand would say, like butter." [singing] "Dear, everything'due south coming upward roses and daffodils!" "It's considered ane of the best, if not the best, Broadway musicals of all time." "Yep, absolutely, it is. I think information technology's probably it's the culmination of that era, that told musicals in chronological social club, in a linear style. I'd certainly say it was the best." In 1970, Sondheim teamed upwardly with director Harold Prince to write his quantum musical, 'Company.' Just every bit '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 mode, and opened the way for like musicals, like 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago.' Sondheim and Prince followed company with more than breakthroughs: 'Follies,' 'A Picayune Nighttime Music,' 'Pacific Overtures.' They were revolutionary, just mostly, they weren't financial hits. "It takes an audition a while to get used to new ways of storytelling. There are exceptional plays that break with the tradition, like 'Death of a Salesman,' and are hits at the same time. Merely usually, if yous bring a new way of storytelling to the stage — 'Oklahoma!' is the perfect example of taking a chance and is a gigantic hit, but that is not the usual case." [singing] "These are probably the worst pies in London!" 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Hairdresser of Fleet Street' is considered by many to be Sondheim's best and nigh powerful work. A gruesome tale of decease and revenge, it shows the composer at the peak of his talent. [singing] "Is that just disgusting —" "It was full of blood and gore and controversy. And though it, too, didn't make money in its original run, it has oftentimes been revived, has been performed by opera companies, and in 2007 was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp." [singing] "I will have vengeance!" "You want to talk near dark?" "Well, it's not and then dark. It's really kind of funny, that show, you know? I mean, nobody takes information technology seriously. It's not dark the mode — it'due south a melodrama. I don't remember melodramas are dark. Anyway, but I get it. The betoken is, yes, there'south a lot of blood." "And at that place's a lot of comic relief, there'south no doubtfulness about it." "It'south not about comic relief. It'southward the fact the attitude is not a real mental attitude. They're all drawing figures. I mean, it'due south an operetta. These are not real people, and they're not supposed to exist. They're supposed to be big, larger than life." "But isn't in that location a real sense in information technology about injustice and evil?" "If there is for you, then there is for you lot. I know Hal always thinks, e'er thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I thought it was near scaring people." "You all know Steve is a great dramatist and our greatest living composer and lyricist." In 2010, Sondheim received an ultimate stage award. "I cry piece of cake." A Broadway theater was renamed in his accolade. "This is and then much more moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim as opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —" "What do y'all call up — if you call back nigh this, what would you like your legacy to be?" "Oh, goodness. Oh, I merely would like the shows to go on getting done. Whether on Broadway, or in regional theaters, or schools or communities, I would just like the stuff to be done. Just done and done and done and done and washed. You know, that would exist the fun."
Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history'due south songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic 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, appear the death. He said he did not know the crusade only added that Mr. Sondheim had not been known to be ill and that the death was sudden. The mean solar day before, Mr. Sondheim had celebrated Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury, Mr. Pappas said. [His decease document, obtained past The Times on December. 2, said the cause was cardiovascular illness.]
An intellectually rigorous artist who perpetually sought new artistic paths, Mr. Sondheim was the theater's most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the final one-half of the 20th century, if not its virtually popular.
His piece of work melded words and music in a way that enhanced them both. From his earliest successes in the belatedly 1950s, when he wrote the lyrics for "Due 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 love, he was a relentlessly innovative theatrical force.
The offset Broadway show for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 comedy "A Funny Matter Happened on the Manner to the Forum," won a Tony Honor for best musical and went on to run for more than than two years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his most productive menses, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including "Company" (1970), "Follies" (1971), "A Little Dark Music" (1973), "Pacific Overtures" (1976), "Sweeney Todd" (1979), "Merrily We Roll Along" (1981), "Dominicus in the Park With George" (1984) and "Into the Forest" (1987).
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In the history of the theater, only a handful could call Mr. Sondheim peer. The list of major theater composers who wrote words to accompany their own scores (and vice versa) is a short one — information technology includes Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman and Noël Coward.
Though Mr. Sondheim spent long hours in solitary labor, commonly late at night, when he was composing or writing, he oft spoke lovingly of the collaborative nature of the theater. After the beginning decade of his career, he was never again a writer for hire, and his contribution to a bear witness was e'er integral to its formulation and execution. He chose collaborators — notably the producer and managing director Hal Prince, the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and later the writer and managing director James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical form across the bounds of only entertainment.
Mr. Sondheim'southward music was e'er recognizable equally his ain, and yet he was dazzlingly versatile. His melodies could be deceptively, disarmingly simple — like the title song of the unsuccessful 1964 musical "Anyone Can Whistle," "Our Fourth dimension," from "Merrily," and the near famous of his private songs, "Send In the Clowns," from "Night Music" — or jaunty and whimsical, like "Everybody Ought to Accept a Maid," from "Forum."
They could besides be brassy and bitter, like "The Ladies Who Lunch," from "Company," or sweeping, like the grandly macabre waltz "A Fiddling Priest," from "Sweeney Todd." And they could exist badly yearning, similar the plaintive "I Read," from "Passion."
Paradigm
Tonys and a Pulitzer
He wrote speechifying soliloquies, conversational duets and chattery trios and quartets. He exploited time signatures and forms; for "Dark Music," he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — nearly an entire score written in permutations of triple fourth dimension.
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 It Together" and the autobiographical "Sondheim on Sondheim." V of them won Tony Awards for best musical, and 6 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, fifty-fifty though it had not previously been on Broadway. (It was presented Off Broadway in 1990.)
Prototype
In 1993, Mr. Sondheim received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement, and in 2022 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Liberty by President Barack Obama. In 2008, he was given a Tony Award for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, in perchance the ultimate show business honour, a Broadway house 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 by Katrina Lenk) in the central role of Bobby, only it was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times published a special section devoted to him, and a virtual concert, "Take Me to the Globe: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Commemoration," was streamed on the Broadway.com YouTube channel, featuring Broadway performers singing his songs.
Mr. Sondheim, who also maintained a home in Manhattan, a townhouse on East 49th Street, had been spending most of his fourth dimension during the pandemic in Roxbury, in western Connecticut.
Simply he returned to New York this month to attend revivals of two of his musicals: on November. 14, for the opening night of "Assassins," at the Classic Stage Visitor in Lower Manhattan, and the next night for the long-delayed first preview, since Broadway reopened, of "Visitor," also starring Patti LuPone, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was "extremely" pleased by both productions, Mr. Pappas, his lawyer, said.
In addition to his theater piece of work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for "Stavisky," Alain Resnais'due south 1974 film about a French financier and embezzler, and his song "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Human)" for Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" won an Academy Award in 1991. Six cast albums from his shows won Grammy Awards, and "Transport In the Clowns" won the Grammy for song of the year in 1975.
With the exception peradventure of "Forum," Mr. Sondheim's shows had hefty ambitions in subject matter, course or both. "Company," which was built from vignettes featuring several couples and their common single male person 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 Grand Guignol in tone and opera in staging and scoring. "The Frogs," which was first performed in the Yale Academy swimming pool in 1974 (with Meryl Streep in the cast) before it was revised for Broadway in 2004, blended the Greek comedy of Aristophanes with nowadays-day political commentary.
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Mr. Sondheim liked to think of himself less as a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit one who wrote very short plays and set them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambivalence, were oftentimes impossibly clever simply rarely only clever; his language was sometimes erudite simply seldom purple. He was a earth-class rhyming gymnast, not but at the ends of lines simply inside them — i 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 acceptable wordplay, or at least tried to.
Rhymes and Beats
His 2010 artistic memoir, "Finishing the Chapeau" (the name was taken from a song championship in "Sunday in the Park"; a follow-upwardly, "Look, I Fabricated a Lid," came out in 2011), was in many ways a primer on the arts and crafts of lyric writing. In it, he took himself to task for numerous sins, including things like adding unnecessary adjectives to fill out lines rhythmically and paying insufficient attention to a melodic line. In the song "Somewhere" from "West Side Story," for instance, the highest note in the opening phrase is on the second beat, which means that in the well-known lyric — "There'southward a place for us" — the emphasis is on the word "a."
"The well-nigh unimportant word in the opening line is the one that gets the near important note," he wrote.
In another example from "West Side Story," he complained about a stanza from "America," which was sung by a chorus of young Puerto Rican women.
"Words must sit on music in society to get clear to the audience," he said to his biographer Meryle Secrest for her 1998 book, "Stephen Sondheim: A Life." "You lot don't get a gamble to hear the lyric twice, and if it doesn't sit down and bounciness 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 similar to be in America/OK by me in America/Everything gratuitous in America/For a pocket-size fee in America.' The little 'for a small fee' was my zinger — except that the 'for' is absolute and 'small fee' is impossible to say that fast, so it went 'For a smafee in America.' Nobody knew what it meant!"
What most distinguished Mr. Sondheim's lyrics, yet, was that they were mostly character-driven, ofttimes probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, anguish or deeply felt conflict. In "Send In the Clowns," for case, he couched the famous plaint about missed romantic chances largely in the linguistic communication of the theater, considering the graphic symbol singing it is an aging actress:
Merely when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my archway again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No one is there.
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In the championship vocal for "Anyone Tin can Whistle," he wrote from the point of view of a adult female who institute it hard to love:
Anyone tin whistle,
That's what they say —
Easy.
Anyone can whistle,
Whatever old twenty-four hours —
Piece of cake.
It's all so simple:
Relax, let go, let fly.
So someone tell me why
Can't I?
I can dance a tango
I can read Greek —
Easy.
I tin can slay a dragon
Any one-time week —
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
What's hard is elementary,
What'southward natural comes hard.
Perchance you could show me
How to let go
Lower my baby-sit.
Acquire to be gratis.
Maybe if yous whistle,
Whistle for me.
Over the years, many people theorized that "Anyone Tin 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 about me," he wrote in "Finishing the Chapeau."
Even so, information technology's truthful that he lived a largely solitary romantic life for many years.
"I always thought that song would be Steve'southward epitaph," the playwright and director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the volume for "Anyone Tin Whistle," equally well as "West Side Story," "Gypsy" and "Do I Hear a Waltz?," 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.
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Box Office Struggles
For all these reasons — the high-minded appetite, the seriousness of subject matter, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim'southward shows, though mostly received with critical accolades, were most 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 aforementioned reasons, non all performers were suited to his shows, though over the years several well-known singers became his stalwart interpreters, among them Elaine Stritch, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Cook and Bernadette Peters.
Mr. Sondheim rarely gave audiences the fizzy, feel-adept musical experience or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to await. He also didn't give them the opulent spectacle, the anthemic score or the melodramatic storytelling that became the dominant musical theater manner of the 1980s and '90s with the arrival from Uk of Andrew Lloyd Webber's megahits "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera," and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg'southward "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 first, "Forum," had the longest Broadway run at 964 performances; his second, "Anyone Tin Whistle," lasted nine. "Merrily We Roll Forth," a famously problematic accommodation of the Kaufman and Hart reverse-chronology play virtually how idealistic young artists grow cynical equally they historic period, closed later on just 16. But even his successes were barely successful. Most of his Broadway shows, in their initial runs, failed to earn back the money it price to put them on.
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"I have always conscientiously tried not to practise 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 70. "If you're broken-field running, they can't striking you lot with and so many tomatoes. I certainly feel out of the mainstream because what's happened in musicals is corporate and cookie-cutter stuff. And if I'1000 out of fashion, I'1000 out of fashion. Being a maverick isn't just about being different. It'southward most having your vision of the manner a show might be."
Alone With Female parent
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived first on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his father, was the owner of a dressmaking company; his female parent, the old Etta Janet Fox, known as Foxy, worked for her husband as a designer until he left her, when Stephen was ten. He was sent for a fourth dimension to military machine school, and later to the George School in Pennsylvania, but until he was xvi Stephen, her merely child, lived mostly with his female parent, with whom he had a troubled human relationship throughout his life. (His begetter remarried and had two more sons.)
In the years following his parents' separation, Mr. Sondheim recalled for his biography, his female parent treated him precisely equally she had her husband: flirting with him sexually on the i hand, analytical him on the other. As an adult, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the night before she was to have heart surgery, she wrote a letter to her son and had information technology hand delivered. It read, in role, "The only regret I have in life is giving you birth."
His female parent was, still, responsible for the nearly formative relationship of her son's life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose husband was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II; their son Jamie became friends with young Steve, and when the Hammersteins moved to a Pennsylvania farm, Stephen, who had begun playing the piano at 7, went for a visit and stayed for the summer.
His mother subsequently bought a home nearby, and Stephen was then often at the Hammersteins' that he was thought of as a family member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor — "It was considering of my teenage admiration for him that I became a songwriter," Mr. Sondheim wrote in "Finishing the Hat," although he subsequently assessed Hammerstein as a lyricist of soaring ability but often flawed work. Hammerstein brutally criticized the boy'due south first musical, written at the George School, as "the worst matter I've ever read," adding: "I didn't say that information technology was untalented, I said it was terrible. And if yous want to know why information technology's terrible, I'll tell you."
Prototype
An afternoon-long tutorial followed, pedagogy him, past Mr. Sondheim's business relationship, more about the craft than almost songwriters learn in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Adapt a good play into a musical; conform a flawed play into a musical; conform a story from another medium into a musical; and, finally, write a musical from your own original story. This the young Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater work with serious limerick 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 avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim's first professional bear witness business organization job was not in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s television comedy, "Topper," virtually a fussbudget banker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts. (Much later on, Mr. Sondheim wrote a whodunit film script, "The Terminal of Sheila," with the histrion Anthony Perkins; it was produced in 1973 and directed by Herbert Ross.) By the '50s he had become a connoisseur of word games and puzzles, and an inventor of elaborate games. From 1968 to 1969, he created cryptic crosswords for New York magazine.
His affinity for theatrical misdirection and mystery was best-selling past 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 first professional prove, a musical chosen "Saturday Dark," which was an adaptation of "Front Porch in Flatbush," a play by Philip K. and Julius J. Epstein. He got the chore, to write both words and music, after the composer Frank Loesser turned it down. The show was scheduled to be presented in 1955, but the producer, Lemuel Ayers, died before he had completed raising the money for it, and the production came to a halt. The show was not presented until 1997, by a modest company in London; information technology later on appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was loath to accept either of his first Broadway gigs, "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," because he felt he was a composer, not merely a lyricist — "I enjoy writing music much more lyrics," he confessed in "Finishing the Hat." But 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 book), and the director Jerome Robbins, in the start instance, and from writing for a star similar Ethel Merman in the 2d, fifty-fifty though it was she who had wanted a more experienced Broadway manus, Jule Styne, as the composer.
But once after "Gypsy" would Mr. Sondheim write lyrics for another composer: an unhappy collaboration with Richard Rodgers, "Practise I Hear a Flit?," based on Laurents's play "The Time of the Cuckoo."
Prototype
Mr. Sondheim was asked to have the job by Laurents and past Mary Rodgers, Richard's elder daughter, whom he had met as a teenager at the Hammersteins' and for whom he had complicated feelings over many years. However, the 2 men proved antagonistic as writing partners — years later on Mr. Sondheim was quoted as maxim that Hammerstein was "a man of limited talent and space soul" and Rodgers the reverse — and though the bear witness ran for 220 performances in 1965, information technology never had a Broadway revival, and neither man considered it a success.
The catamenia of Mr. Sondheim's greatest work began when Harold Prince became his manager. They were old friends, having been introduced past Ms. Rodgers in the late 1940s or early '50s, and Mr. Prince had been the producer of "West Side Story." He had proved his chops equally a director as well, with musical successes like "She Loves Me" (1963) and "Cabaret" (1966).
Mr. Prince would direct five Sondheim musicals in the 1970s — "Company," "Follies," "A Little Nighttime Music," "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd'' — and though not all were commercially successful, they were all innovative, the product of two supremely talented artists whose individually authoritative visions were, for the most part, complementary. Every bit Mr. Prince naturally saw a prove'south big moving-picture show, its look and its pace, Mr. Sondheim, who had inherited the Rodgers and Hammerstein belief that the songs are critical elements of the play, pushed the idea further — not just integrating the words and music but imbuing the songs with the concerns of a playwright; that is, providing singers with the cloth to deepen their character portrayals, and in rehearsals concentrating on their delivery and wording.
The partnership foundered on "Merrily We Whorl Along," a evidence that was hampered in part by the youth of its bandage members, who had to play not just young characters but likewise the disillusioned adults they become, and by Mr. Prince's acknowledged failure to find an appropriate expect 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 like?' " Mr. Prince told Ms. Secrest for her Sondheim biography. "That becomes the motor of the show. I never could figure it out."
"Merrily" has had several lives since and so, Off Broadway, in regional theater and overseas, as producers and directors accept tried to solve its issues and showcase what is by and large acknowledged to be a bright and poignant score.
A Younger Collaborator
In whatever instance, the ii men parted artistic company for more than ii decades, non working together again until they hammered out a version of a much-revised musical well-nigh 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 "Road Show." Nether Mr. Prince, it was chosen "Bounciness," and information technology was produced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Center in Washington.
During Mr. Prince'due south absenteeism from his creative life, Mr. Sondheim teamed upward with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the near 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 nigh operatic meditation on the nature of love; and "Lord's day in the Park With George," a work whose first human activity ingeniously creates the artistic procedure of the painter Georges Seurat as he produces his masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," and whose second act jumps ahead a century to illustrate how a contemporary artist makes art in a more consumer-witting age.
With no dancing and a slim plot, there was little of musical theater convention in the show, merely, as Frank Rich wrote in The Times, information technology was startlingly original and securely satisfying. "It'southward anyone'due south approximate whether the public will be shocked or delighted by 'Lord's day 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 piece of work."
Image
It was ane of Mr. Sondheim's most critically admired shows, running for 604 performances. And many critics and other Sondheim-ophiles found in it his nearly personal statement, as if he had used Seurat's view of the creative person's life as a surrogate for his ain. In the evidence'southward signature song, "Finishing the Hat," faced with the loss of the woman he loves because 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 woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the adult female who won't wait for you knows
That, nevertheless you live,
There'south a part of yous always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a lid
Starting on a chapeau
Finishing a chapeau
Look, I made a hat
Where at that place never was a hat.
William McDonald and Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html
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