A Little Night Music Album Art a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum Musical Album Art
Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91
He was the theater'south near revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century and the driving forcefulness behind some of Broadway'south most dear and historic shows.
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The Last Word: Stephen Sondheim
In a never-earlier-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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"One of the kickoff things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should in that location be songs? You can put songs in whatever story, just what I think y'all take to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If information technology's unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to be not very adept." Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the well-nigh important figure in American musical theater of the last half-century. [singing] "Will it exist? Yes, it volition." In shows like "Due west Side Story," "Gypsy," "A Funny Thing 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 similar to modify styles. That's 1 of the things that appeals to me nigh stories, is if I've never washed anything like it before. It has to be some unknown territory. It's got to make you nervous. If it doesn't brand you nervous, so you lot're going to write the same thing you wrote before." We saturday downward with him in June 2008 to talk about his own story and his accomplishments. "What is information technology about the theater that attracted you so, that made you want to spend your career, your life working in it?" "It was very elementary. It was when I was xi years one-time, 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 take become a geologist. Which is, I'm sure, an exaggeration, simply non much." [music playing] Sondheim wasn't known for Top 40 hits, but one of his songs, "Ship in the Clowns," from "A Niggling Night Music," rose to the top of the charts. [singing] "But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns." He wrote it specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the show's stars, and it remains without a doubt his most pop and financially successful work. "Wrote it during rehearsals, brought it essentially overnight. Glynis Johns could not sustain notes, so I thought, I got to write a song with short phrases. And if they're going to exist short phrases, what are better curt phrases than questions? And so the whole idea of, 'Isn't it rich? Are we a pair?' Question, which normally would not occur to me, came into my head. And once I've gotten that, once you get the idea of questions, then it'south quite easy to write." [SINGING] "Isn't it bliss? Don't yous corroborate?" "In one case you go the notion of, 'Isn't it rich? Aren't we schmucks not to be 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-middle-class parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father manufactured dresses, and his mother designed them. But his childhood wasn't all privilege. His family life was hard, with a afar and remote mother and parents who didn't get along. "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 only child. And considering she was a working adult female and besides a celebrity hunter, she knew the Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my historic period, a yr younger, Jimmy. 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 testify when I was 15 years one-time that I idea he would want to produce. It was a show about the school I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed to find out that he wouldn't produce it. But I wanted to be the get-go 15-twelvemonth-former on Broadway with a testify. Only he said, if you desire to know what'due south 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 about 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 blue." Unusual for its mean solar day, it followed the life of an everyman from nascency to age 35. Information technology was their beginning failure, just 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, i way or another, nearly of the shows I've done." Hammerstein laid out a class of education for his teenage protégé, suggesting he write four musicals, each in a different style. "The first one being an adaptation of a play that I idea was good. The second being an adaptation of a play that I liked but was flawed, that mayhap I could feel I could improve. The tertiary, something that was a non-theatrical story, but arrange it and make it theatrical. And and then the 4th was to write an original. And that'southward exactly what I did over a catamenia of years." In the mid-1950s, when Sondheim was in his early 20s, he wrote his first professional bear witness, 'Saturday Night.' [singing] "The moon's similar 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 ambitious young composer was withal without a credit, but and then came an opportunity to work on Broadway, albeit as a lyricist but and not as a composer also. Information technology 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'm about to outset 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.' 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 thought your lyrics were kind of good.' I said, 'All correct.' He said, 'Would you lot like to come up and play for Lenny?' At present, I had no intention of just writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. But I thought, take chances to play for Leonard Bernstein? Why non? So the side by side morning, I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, 'I volition know within a week, and I'll let yous know.' And I said, 'Thank you so much, Mr. Bernstein.' Certain enough, a week afterwards, the phone rang, and he said, 'Would y'all like to do it?' And I said, 'Permit me telephone call you back.' Because I didn't want to exercise just lyrics. And I called Oscar, who's my adviser on everything. And I said, 'Yous know, I don't want to practise this.' But Oscar said, 'Await, you take a chance to work with very gifted professionals on a show that sounds interesting, and you could always write your own music eventually.' He said, 'My advice would be to accept the job.' That's why I took it. And I learned a cracking bargain." [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 at that place were dandy dangers of pretension with this whole show, and the just manner to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and make them very simple." "Yous've said over the years that you're not really happy with the lyrics y'all wrote, even though they're so popular. Yous are?" "No, no, no, they're very self-witting. Lenny wanted everything, the lyrics to exist very poetic. But his idea of poetry and my idea of verse are simply not the same. I mean, 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 world was merely an accost.' That's a perfectly fine line on paper, but the boy from the streets is singing that?" [singing] "Today, the world was only an address, a place for me to live in." "And I've frequently quoted, you know, 'I Feel Pretty': 'It's alarming how charming I feel,' says this girl from the streets, and she sounds like Noel Coward." [singing] "It'due south alarming how charming I feel." "I do like 'Something's Coming.' That's my idea of a poetic lyric, in the sense that it uses imagery." [singing] "Something's coming. I don't know what it is, just information technology is going to be bang-up." "And I like the 'Jet Song,' too." [singing] "When y'all're a Jet, yous're a Jet all the style, from your first cigarette to your last dying day." "But you know, songs similar 'Somewhere,' I mean, that'due south deeply embarrassing. And then —" "Westward Side Story" got mixed reviews when information technology opened in 1957, and didn't win the Tony Award every bit Best Musical, but it was revolutionary in its combination of music and trip the light fantastic toe, and in its searing plot. Sondheim had made his offset mark. He still longed to write both music and lyrics on Broadway, and it looked as if he was going to get the chance with a new musical based on the early life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] "You'll be smashing! Going to accept the whole globe on a plate!" But the bear witness's star objected. "Ethel Merman was already signed to play Rose, the mother, then it was all set. Then Ethel Merman said she would not have me as a composer, because she had just done a show chosen 'Happy Hunting,' with 2 young writers, and it was a flop. And she didn't desire to take a risk on an unknown composer. And she's perfectly happy to have me practise 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 2 advantages. Beginning of all,' he said, 'you have the experience of writing for a star, which is dissimilar than simply writing a bear witness. I hateful, you're tailoring material not only for the character, for the character as played past that specific player or actress.' That's i thing. He said, 'Secondly, it's vi months out of your life. Do it.' And that's exactly what happened. Nosotros wrote that bear witness in nigh 4 months. We wrote very speedily. That'south probably the quickest I've e'er heard of a major Broadway musical being written. Just it wrote, as Barbra Streisand would say, similar butter." [singing] "Honey, everything's coming upwardly roses and daffodils!" "Information technology's considered i of the best, if not the all-time, Broadway musicals of all time." "Yes, absolutely, information technology is. I call back it's probably it's the culmination of that era, that told musicals in chronological lodge, in a linear style. I'd certainly say it was the best." In 1970, Sondheim teamed up with manager Harold Prince to write his breakthrough musical, 'Visitor.' Just every bit 'Gypsy' had been the culmination of the era of the narrative musical, 'Company' bankrupt new ground. It fractured the narrative, told the story in a nonlinear style, and opened the style 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 more often than not, they weren't financial hits. "It takes an audience a while to become used to new ways of storytelling. At that place are exceptional plays that intermission with the tradition, like 'Decease of a Salesman,' and are hits at the same time. But usually, if you bring a new manner of storytelling to the stage — 'Oklahoma!' is the perfect example of taking a chance and is a gigantic hit, only that is non 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 almost powerful work. A gruesome tale of death and revenge, it shows the composer at the summit of his talent. [singing] "Is that just icky —" "It was total of blood and gore and controversy. And though it, likewise, didn't make money in its original run, information technology has often been revived, has been performed past opera companies, and in 2007 was turned into a moving-picture show starring Johnny Depp." [singing] "I will take vengeance!" "You want to talk almost nighttime?" "Well, it's not so dark. It's actually kind of funny, that show, yous know? I mean, nobody takes it seriously. It's not dark the style — it's a melodrama. I don't remember melodramas are night. Anyway, only I go it. The point is, yes, there's a lot of claret." "And in that location'southward a lot of comic relief, there's no doubtfulness nigh it." "Information technology'south not about comic relief. Information technology's the fact the attitude is non a existent attitude. They're all drawing figures. I mean, 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 existent sense in it well-nigh injustice and evil?" "If at that place is for you, then there is for yous. I know Hal always thinks, always thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I thought it was about scaring people." "You 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 laurels. "This is and so much more moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim every bit opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —" "What do you think — if you think about this, what would you lot like your legacy to be?" "Oh, goodness. Oh, I just would like the shows to keep getting done. Whether on Broadway, or in regional theaters, or schools or communities, I would just like the stuff to be done. Only done and done and done and done and done. Y'all know, that would be the fun."
Stephen Sondheim, i of Broadway history's 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, announced the death. He said he did not know the cause but added that Mr. Sondheim had non been known to exist sick and that the decease was sudden. The twenty-four hours before, Mr. Sondheim had historic Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury, Mr. Pappas said. [His expiry certificate, obtained by The Times on Dec. ii, said the crusade was cardiovascular affliction.]
An intellectually rigorous artist who perpetually sought new artistic paths, Mr. Sondheim was the theater's about revered and influential composer-lyricist of the terminal one-half of the 20th century, if non its most 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 "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," through the 1990s, when he wrote the music and lyrics for two audacious musicals, "Assassins," giving vocalization 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 first Broadway bear witness for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 comedy "A Funny Affair Happened on the Way 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 near productive period, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including "Company" (1970), "Follies" (1971), "A Little Nighttime Music" (1973), "Pacific Overtures" (1976), "Sweeney Todd" (1979), "Merrily We Roll Along" (1981), "Sunday 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 phone call Mr. Sondheim peer. The list of major theater composers who wrote words to accompany their ain 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 alone labor, usually late at night, when he was composing or writing, he often spoke lovingly of the collaborative nature of the theater. After the kickoff decade of his career, he was never again 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 on the author and manager James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical form across the bounds of just entertainment.
Mr. Sondheim's music was always recognizable as his own, 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 Time," from "Merrily," and the most famous of his private songs, "Send In the Clowns," from "Night Music" — or jaunty and whimsical, like "Everybody Ought to Take a Maid," from "Forum."
They could besides exist brassy and bitter, like "The Ladies Who Lunch," from "Company," or sweeping, similar the grandly macabre flit "A Niggling 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, 2 mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — almost an entire 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 "Adjacent by Sondheim," "Putting Information technology Together" and the autobiographical "Sondheim on Sondheim." Five of them won Tony Awards for best musical, and six 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 non previously been on Broadway. (It was presented Off Broadway in 1990.)
Prototype
In 1993, Mr. Sondheim received the Kennedy Middle Honors for lifetime accomplishment, and in 2015 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2008, he was given a Tony Award for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, in mayhap the ultimate evidence business accolade, a Broadway house on Westward 43rd Street, Henry Miller's Theater, was renamed in his honour.
For his 90th birthday in March 2020, a Broadway revival of "Company" was planned, with a woman (played past Katrina Lenk) in the central function 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, "Accept Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration," was streamed on the Broadway.com YouTube aqueduct, featuring Broadway performers singing his songs.
Mr. Sondheim, who too maintained a dwelling house in Manhattan, a townhouse on East 49th Street, had been spending most of his fourth dimension during the pandemic in Roxbury, in western Connecticut.
But he returned to New York this month to attend revivals of ii of his musicals: on November. 14, for the opening nighttime of "Assassins," at the Classic Stage Company in Lower Manhattan, and the adjacent dark for the long-delayed starting time preview, since Broadway reopened, of "Company," likewise 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 work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for "Stavisky," Alain Resnais'due south 1974 movie most a French financier and embezzler, and his vocal "Sooner or Afterwards (I Always Get My Human)" for Warren Beatty'south "Dick Tracy" won an Academy Award in 1991. Six bandage albums from his shows won Grammy Awards, and "Ship In the Clowns" won the Grammy for vocal of the year in 1975.
With the exception perhaps of "Forum," Mr. Sondheim'southward shows had hefty ambitions in subject matter, form or both. "Company," which was built from vignettes featuring several couples and their mutual single male person friend, was a bittersweet reflection on matrimony. "Pacific Overtures" aimed to tell the story of the modernization of Nippon from the Japanese perspective. "Sweeney Todd," a bloody tale almost 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 puddle 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 i who wrote very short plays and set up them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambivalence, were frequently impossibly clever but rarely simply clever; his linguistic communication was sometimes erudite but seldom purple. He was a earth-class rhyming gymnast, not only at the ends of lines but inside them — i of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in "Sweeney Todd" was "shepherd'due south pie peppered with actual shepherd" — and he upheld the highest standards for acceptable wordplay, or at least tried to.
Rhymes and Beats
His 2010 creative memoir, "Finishing the Hat" (the name was taken from a vocal title in "Sun in the Park"; a follow-upwards, "Look, I Made a Hat," 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 similar adding unnecessary adjectives to fill up out lines rhythmically and paying insufficient attention to a melodic line. In the vocal "Somewhere" from "West Side Story," for instance, the highest notation in the opening phrase is on the second beat, which means that in the well-known lyric — "There's a place for us" — the emphasis is on the discussion "a."
"The near unimportant word in the opening line is the 1 that gets the most important annotation," he wrote.
In some other example from "West Side Story," he complained about a stanza from "America," which was sung by 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 book, "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 exist in America/OK past me in America/Everything free in America/For a small fee in America.' The little 'for a small fee' was my zinger — except that the 'for' is accented and 'small fee' is impossible to say that fast, so it went 'For a smafee in America.' Nobody knew what information technology meant!"
What nearly distinguished Mr. Sondheim's lyrics, nevertheless, was that they were by and large graphic symbol-driven, ofttimes probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambiguity, anguish or deeply felt conflict. In "Send In the Clowns," for example, he couched the famous plaint about missed romantic chances largely in the language of the theater, because the character singing information technology is an aging extra:
Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No ane is there.
Epitome
In the title song for "Anyone Tin Whistle," he wrote from the indicate of view of a adult female who establish it hard to honey:
Anyone tin whistle,
That's what they say —
Easy.
Anyone can whistle,
Whatever old day —
Easy.
It's all so simple:
Relax, allow go, let fly.
So someone tell me why
Tin can't I?
I can trip the light fantastic toe a tango
I can read Greek —
Easy.
I tin can slay a dragon
Any sometime week —
Easy.
What's hard is simple,
What'due south natural comes hard.
Maybe y'all could show me
How to permit go
Lower my baby-sit.
Learn to exist complimentary.
Perchance if you lot whistle,
Whistle for me.
Over the years, many people theorized that "Anyone Can Whistle" was a cri de coeur past the writer, though Mr. Sondheim denied information technology. "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 Hat."
Nevertheless, it's true that he lived a largely lone romantic life for many years.
"I ever idea that song would be Steve's epitaph," the playwright and director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for "Anyone Can Whistle," besides as "West Side Story," "Gypsy" and "Do I Hear a Waltz?," told Ms. Secrest.
For a time in his 60s, Mr. Sondheim shared his Manhattan townhouse with a immature songwriter, Peter Jones, and in 2017 he married Jeffrey Romley, who survives him, along with a half blood brother, Walter Sondheim.
Epitome
Box Function Struggles
For all these reasons — the high-minded appetite, the seriousness of discipline thing, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim's shows, though generally 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 non grim. For some of the same reasons, not 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-expert musical feel or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to await. He too 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 Uk of Andrew Lloyd Webber's megahits "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera," and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg'due 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 offset, "Forum," had the longest Broadway run at 964 performances; his second, "Anyone Can Whistle," lasted nine. "Merrily We Curl Along," a famously problematic adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart reverse-chronology play about how idealistic young artists grow cynical as they age, closed later on just sixteen. Simply even his successes were barely successful. Near of his Broadway shows, in their initial runs, failed to earn dorsum the money it cost to put them on.
Epitome
"I have always conscientiously tried not to do the same matter 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 hit you with 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'm out of fashion, I'm out of style. Being a maverick isn't only nigh being dissimilar. It's well-nigh having your vision of the fashion 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 possessor of a dressmaking company; his mother, the old 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 armed services school, and subsequently to the George School in Pennsylvania, just 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 1 hand, belittling him on the other. As an adult, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the night before she was to take heart surgery, she wrote a alphabetic character to her son and had it hand delivered. It read, in office, "The only regret I accept in life is giving yous nascency."
His mother was, nonetheless, responsible for the nigh determinative relationship of her son's life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose hubby was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein Ii; their son Jamie became friends with young Steve, and when the Hammersteins moved to a Pennsylvania subcontract, Stephen, who had begun playing the piano at seven, went for a visit and stayed for the summer.
His mother later bought a home nearby, and Stephen was so frequently at the Hammersteins' that he was thought of every bit a family member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor — "It was because of my teenage adoration 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 first musical, written at the George School, equally "the worst thing I've ever read," adding: "I didn't say that information technology was untalented, I said it was terrible. And if you want to know why information technology'southward terrible, I'll tell you."
Prototype
An afternoon-long tutorial followed, educational activity him, by Mr. Sondheim's account, more than about the arts and crafts than most songwriters acquire in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Arrange a adept play into a musical; adapt a flawed play into a musical; adjust a story from another medium into a musical; and, finally, write a musical from your ain 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 composition study under Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, equally he put it, "that art is piece of work and not inspiration, that invention comes with craft." Mr. Sondheim would later study independently with Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim'south first professional show business chore was non in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s tv set comedy, "Topper," virtually a fussbudget banker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts. (Much later, Mr. Sondheim wrote a whodunit film script, "The Last of Sheila," with the histrion Anthony Perkins; it was produced in 1973 and directed past Herbert Ross.) By the '50s he had go 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 analogousness for theatrical misdirection and mystery was acknowledged 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 show, a musical called "Sabbatum Night," which was an adaptation of "Forepart Porch in Flatbush," a play by Philip One thousand. and Julius J. Epstein. He got the task, to write both words and music, afterwards 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 product came to a halt. The show was non presented until 1997, by a minor company in London; it subsequently appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was loath to take either of his first 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 lyrics," he confessed in "Finishing the Chapeau." But he agreed to both on the communication 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 first instance, and from writing for a star like Ethel Merman in the 2d, even though it was she who had wanted a more than experienced Broadway hand, Jule Styne, as the composer.
Merely once after "Gypsy" would Mr. Sondheim write lyrics for another composer: an unhappy collaboration with Richard Rodgers, "Do I Hear a Waltz?," based on Laurents's play "The Time of the Cuckoo."
Prototype
Mr. Sondheim was asked to accept the job by Laurents and by Mary Rodgers, Richard'south 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 every bit writing partners — years afterwards Mr. Sondheim was quoted every bit proverb that Hammerstein was "a homo of limited talent and infinite soul" and Rodgers the reverse — 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'southward greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director. They were quondam friends, having been introduced by 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 as a manager besides, with musical successes similar "She Loves Me" (1963) and "Cabaret" (1966).
Mr. Prince would directly five Sondheim musicals in the 1970s — "Company," "Follies," "A Little Night Music," "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd'' — and though not all were commercially successful, they were all innovative, the product of ii supremely talented artists whose individually authoritative visions were, for the nearly function, complementary. As Mr. Prince naturally saw a show'due south big picture show, its look and its pace, Mr. Sondheim, who had inherited the Rodgers and Hammerstein belief that the songs are disquisitional elements of the play, pushed the thought farther — not only 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 delivery and diction.
The partnership foundered on "Merrily We Coil Along," a show that was hampered in office by the youth of its bandage members, who had to play not just immature characters but too the disillusioned adults they get, and by Mr. Prince's acknowledged failure to find an advisable look for the show as a whole.
"I never knew how to direct it considering 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 bear witness. I never could effigy it out."
"Merrily" has had several lives since then, Off Broadway, in regional theater and overseas, as producers and directors have tried to solve its problems and showcase what is by and large acknowledged to exist a bright and poignant score.
A Younger Collaborator
In whatsoever case, the 2 men parted creative company for more than two decades, not working together over again until they hammered out a version of a much-revised musical about 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." Under Mr. Prince, information technology was chosen "Bounciness," and it was produced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Center in Washington.
During Mr. Prince's absence from his creative life, Mr. Sondheim teamed up with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the most cognitive works of Mr. Sondheim'south career. These included "Into the Wood," which reimagined familiar children's fairy tales into darker adult fables; "Passion," a nearly operatic meditation on the nature of love; and "Sunday 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-conscious historic period.
With no dancing and a slim plot, there was little of musical theater convention in the testify, but, equally Frank Rich wrote in The Times, it was startlingly original and securely satisfying. "Information technology's anyone'due south approximate whether the public will be shocked or delighted past 'Dominicus in the Park,' " Mr. Rich wrote. "What I do know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine take created an adventurous, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching work."
Image
It was one of Mr. Sondheim'southward nearly critically admired shows, running for 604 performances. And many critics and other Sondheim-ophiles found in it his about personal argument, as if he had used Seurat's view of the creative person's life as a surrogate for his own. In the evidence'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 just forceful paean to the joy of bringing original beauty into the world. It ends:
And when the woman that y'all wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I requite."
But the woman who won't wait for y'all knows
That, all the same you alive,
At that place'south a part of you lot always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat
Starting on a chapeau
Finishing a lid
Expect, I made a lid
Where there 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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