Do Ou Let Me Win When You Play Me Baby Do Ou Let Me Win When You Play Me Id Like to Know Gypsy
Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91
He was the theater'southward most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century and the driving strength backside some of Broadway'due south virtually honey and celebrated shows.
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The Concluding Word: Stephen Sondheim
In a never-before-seen interview, Stephen Sondheim sat downwardly with The New York Times in June 2008 to talk about his life, career and accomplishments.
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"One of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should there be songs? You can put songs in any story, but what I call back you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it's unnecessary, then the testify by and large turns out to be not very good." Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the most important effigy in American musical theater of the last one-half-century. [singing] "Will it be? Yes, information technology will." In shows similar "West Side Story," "Gypsy," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," "Company," "Follies," "Sweeney Todd" and "Sun 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'due south one of the things that appeals to me virtually stories, is if I've never washed anything like it before. It has to exist some unknown territory. Information technology's got to brand you nervous. If it doesn't brand yous nervous, so you're going to write the same matter you wrote before." We sat downward with him in June 2008 to talk virtually his own story and his accomplishments. "What is information technology nearly the theater that attracted you so, that fabricated you desire to spend your career, your life working in it?" "Information technology was very simple. It was when I was 11 years sometime, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a surrogate begetter, 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 certain, an exaggeration, merely not much." [music playing] Sondheim wasn't known for Top 40 hits, but one of his songs, "Ship in the Clowns," from "A Lilliputian Night Music," rose to the top of the charts. [singing] "But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns." He wrote information technology specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the evidence's stars, and it remains without a incertitude his nigh pop and financially successful work. "Wrote it during rehearsals, brought it substantially overnight. Glynis Johns could not sustain notes, so I thought, I got to write a song with brusk phrases. And if they're going to be short phrases, what are better brusk phrases than questions? So the whole idea of, 'Isn't it rich? Are nosotros a pair?' Question, which unremarkably would not occur to me, came into my head. And once I've gotten that, once yous go the thought of questions, then it's quite easy to write." [SINGING] "Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve?" "In one case y'all get the notion of, 'Isn't it rich? Aren't nosotros schmucks non to exist together?' I mean, you go that tone, that takes a very short menses of fourth dimension." [singing] "Send in the clowns." Stephen Sondheim was built-in 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 unit life was difficult, with a distant and remote mother and parents who didn't go along. "When I was 10 years one-time, my parents divorced. My mother got custody of me, and she bought a place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, as a sort of summertime residence. And I was an only child. And considering she was a working woman and besides a celebrity hunter, she knew the Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my age, a year younger, Jimmy. And so nosotros became friends and companions. And Oscar obviously realized that I had some gift for songwriting, then he encouraged me during my teen years, and in fact, taught me. And I brought him a show when I was xv years old that I thought he would want to produce. It was a show about the schoolhouse I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed to find out that he wouldn't produce information technology. Just I wanted to exist the first 15-year-old on Broadway with a show. Merely he said, if you want to know what's incorrect with the show, I'll tell you. And he went over it folio by page, starting from the commencement sentence. He treated me like an adult instead of like a kid. By the time the afternoon was over, I actually knew more almost 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 piece of work on their side by side musical, 'Allegro,' in 1947. [singing] "His pilus is fuzzy, his eyes are blue." Unusual for its day, information technology followed the life of an everyman from birth to age 35. It was their showtime failure, merely information technology would influence Sondheim tremendously. "Information technology was experimental, and and so that incurred in me the whole notion of doing experimental stuff, which I've done, 1 style or another, most of the shows I've done." Hammerstein laid out a class of educational activity for his teenage protégé, suggesting he write 4 musicals, each in a different manner. "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 maybe I could feel I could better. The third, something that was a non-theatrical story, but conform it and go far theatrical. And then the fourth was to write an original. And that'southward 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 prove, 'Saturday Dark.' [singing] "The moon's similar a million-watt electric calorie-free. Information technology 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 still without a credit, but then came an opportunity to work on Broadway, albeit as a lyricist just and not as a composer as well. It all began when he bumped into renowned playwright and librettist Arthur Laurents at a political party. "And we cruel to talking, and I said, 'What are y'all doing?' He said, 'I'grand about to get-go on a musical version of "Romeo and Juliet."' And I said, 'And who'southward 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 y'all.' And he literally smote his forehead. And he said, in his typical Arthur Laurents mode, he said, 'I didn't much like your music, but I thought your lyrics were kind of skillful.' I said, 'All right.' He said, 'Would you like to come and play for Lenny?' Now, I had no intention of just writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. Just I thought, chance to play for Leonard Bernstein? Why not? So the next morning time, I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, 'I will know within a week, and I'll let you know.' And I said, 'Thank you lot so much, Mr. Bernstein.' Sure enough, a week afterward, the phone rang, and he said, 'Would you lot like to practise information technology?' And I said, 'Let me call you back.' Because I didn't want to exercise only lyrics. And I called Oscar, who'southward my adviser on everything. And I said, 'You know, I don't want to do this.' Merely Oscar said, 'Look, y'all 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 communication would be to accept the job.' That's why I took information technology. And I learned a great bargain." [singing] "Maria. I just met a girl named Maria." Sondheim didn't ever agree with Bernstein on how the lyrics should exist written. "I knew that in that location were great dangers of pretension with this whole show, and the but manner to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and make them very simple." "You lot've said over the years that you're not really happy with the lyrics you wrote, even though they're so popular. Yous are?" "No, no, no, they're very self-conscious. Lenny wanted everything, the lyrics to be very poetic. Only his idea of poetry and my idea of poetry are merely non the aforementioned. I mean, you know, I was 25 years old, and he was a big, large force, and Lenny kept pushing me to be very fruity. 'Today, the world was just an address.' That's a perfectly fine line on paper, but the boy from the streets is singing that?" [singing] "Today, the earth was simply an address, a place for me to alive in." "And I've often quoted, you lot know, 'I Experience Pretty': 'It's alarming how charming I feel,' says this girl from the streets, and she sounds like Noel Coward." [singing] "It'south alarming how charming I experience." "I do like 'Something's Coming.' That'south my idea of a poetic lyric, in the sense that information technology uses imagery." [singing] "Something'due south coming. I don't know what it is, just it is going to be neat." "And I like the 'Jet Song,' too." [singing] "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the mode, from your offset cigarette to your last dying day." "But you know, songs like 'Somewhere,' I mean, that's deeply embarrassing. So —" "West Side Story" got mixed reviews when information technology opened in 1957, and didn't win the Tony Award as Best Musical, merely it was revolutionary in its combination of music and dance, and in its searing plot. Sondheim had made his first marking. He still longed to write both music and lyrics on Broadway, and it looked as if he was going to go the chance with a new musical based on the early life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] "You'll be keen! Going to accept the whole world on a plate!" But the show's star objected. "Ethel Merman was already signed to play Rose, the female parent, so it was all set up. And then Ethel Merman said she would not accept me as a composer, considering she had simply done a show called 'Happy Hunting,' with two young writers, and it was a flop. And she didn't want to take a take chances on an unknown composer. And she's 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, 'Practice it.' He said, 'There are two advantages. First of all,' he said, 'yous have the feel of writing for a star, which is different than just writing a prove. I mean, you lot're tailoring material not only for the character, for the character as played by that specific actor or actress.' That's one matter. He said, 'Secondly, information technology's half-dozen months out of your life. Practice information technology.' And that's exactly what happened. We wrote that show in about four months. We wrote very quickly. That'southward probably the quickest I've ever heard of a major Broadway musical being written. Merely information technology wrote, as Barbra Streisand would say, like butter." [singing] "Love, everything's coming up roses and daffodils!" "It's considered one of the best, if not the best, Broadway musicals of all time." "Yeah, absolutely, it is. I think it's probably it'south the culmination of that era, that told musicals in chronological gild, in a linear style. I'd certainly say it was the best." In 1970, Sondheim teamed up with director Harold Prince to write his breakthrough musical, 'Company.' Simply as '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 manner, and opened the manner for like musicals, like 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago.' Sondheim and Prince followed company with more than 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 get used to new ways of storytelling. There are exceptional plays that break with the tradition, like 'Expiry of a Salesman,' and are hits at the same time. Only usually, if you bring a new fashion of storytelling to the stage — 'Oklahoma!' is the perfect case of taking a adventure and is a gigantic hit, but that is non the usual example." [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 most powerful piece of 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 full of claret and gore and controversy. And though it, also, didn't make money in its original run, it has oft 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 virtually dark?" "Well, it's not then dark. It's actually kind of funny, that prove, y'all know? I mean, nobody takes information technology seriously. It'due south non dark the mode — it's a melodrama. I don't call up melodramas are dark. Anyhow, merely I become information technology. The indicate is, yes, there'southward a lot of blood." "And there's a lot of comic relief, there'south no incertitude about information technology." "Information technology's not most comic relief. It's the fact the attitude is not a real attitude. They're all drawing figures. I mean, it's an operetta. These are not real people, and they're not supposed to be. They're supposed to be large, larger than life." "But isn't there a real sense in it virtually injustice and evil?" "If there is for you, and so there is for you. I know Hal always thinks, ever thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I thought it was near scaring people." "You all know Steve is a swell dramatist and our greatest living composer and lyricist." In 2010, Sondheim received an ultimate stage accolade. "I weep easy." A Broadway theater was renamed in his honor. "This is and so much more moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim as opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —" "What exercise you think — if you recall about this, what would yous like your legacy to be?" "Oh, goodness. Oh, I but would like the shows to keep getting washed. Whether on Broadway, or in regional theaters, or schools or communities, I would just similar the stuff to be washed. Just done and done and done and done and done. You lot know, that would be the fun."
Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history's songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American phase 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 simply 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 expiry certificate, obtained past The Times on Dec. 2, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.]
An intellectually rigorous artist who perpetually sought new creative paths, Mr. Sondheim was the theater's about revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, if not its most pop.
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 impale American presidents, and "Passion," an operatic probe into the nature of true dearest, he was a relentlessly innovative theatrical force.
The showtime Broadway bear witness for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 one-act "A Funny Thing Happened on the Mode to the Forum," won a Tony Honor for all-time musical and went on to run for more than ii years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his about productive period, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including "Visitor" (1970), "Follies" (1971), "A Piddling Night Music" (1973), "Pacific Overtures" (1976), "Sweeney Todd" (1979), "Merrily We Curlicue Forth" (1981), "Lord's day in the Park With George" (1984) and "Into the Woods" (1987).
Epitome
In the history of the theater, only a handful could call Mr. Sondheim peer. The listing of major theater composers who wrote words to back-trail their ain scores (and vice versa) is a short ane — 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 beginning decade of his career, he was never again a writer 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 afterwards the writer and director James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical form beyond the premises of simply amusement.
Mr. Sondheim's music was ever recognizable every bit his ain, and nonetheless he was dazzlingly versatile. His melodies could be deceptively, disarmingly simple — similar the title vocal of the unsuccessful 1964 musical "Anyone Can Whistle," "Our Time," from "Merrily," and the most famous of his individual songs, "Send In the Clowns," from "Night Music" — or jaunty and whimsical, like "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid," from "Forum."
They could as well be flippant and bitter, like "The Ladies Who Luncheon," from "Company," or sweeping, like the grandly macabre flit "A Picayune Priest," from "Sweeney Todd." And they could be desperately yearning, similar 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 "Dark Music," he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — about 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 past Sondheim," "Putting It Together" and the autobiographical "Sondheim on Sondheim." 5 of them won Tony Awards for all-time musical, and six won for all-time original score. A show that won neither of those, "Sun 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 Center Honors for lifetime achievement, and in 2015 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Liberty by President Barack Obama. In 2008, he was given a Tony Laurels for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, in peradventure the ultimate show business accolade, a Broadway house on West 43rd Street, Henry Miller'south Theater, was renamed in his honor.
For his 90th birthday in March 2020, a Broadway revival of "Company" was planned, with a adult female (played by Katrina Lenk) in the central role of Bobby, just 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 channel, featuring Broadway performers singing his songs.
Mr. Sondheim, who as well maintained a home in Manhattan, a townhouse on Eastward 49th Street, had been spending most of his time during the pandemic in Roxbury, in western Connecticut.
Merely he returned to New York this calendar month to attend revivals of two of his musicals: on Nov. fourteen, for the opening dark of "Assassins," at the Archetype Stage Company in Lower Manhattan, and the next night for the long-delayed start preview, since Broadway reopened, of "Company," 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 work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for "Stavisky," Alain Resnais'due south 1974 pic nigh a French financier and embezzler, and his vocal "Sooner or Later (I Ever Get My Man)" for Warren Beatty'due south "Dick Tracy" won an University Award in 1991. 6 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 field matter, grade or both. "Company," which was built from vignettes featuring several couples and their mutual single 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 encarmine tale nearly a vengeful hairdresser in 19th-century London, approached Grand Guignol in tone and opera in staging and scoring. "The Frogs," which was showtime performed in the Yale Academy swimming pool in 1974 (with Meryl Streep in the cast) earlier information technology 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 every bit a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit 1 who wrote very short plays and set them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with circuitous ideas or emotional ambiguity, were oft impossibly clever but rarely only clever; his linguistic communication was sometimes erudite but seldom purple. He was a world-grade rhyming gymnast, not just at the ends of lines but inside them — ane of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in "Sweeney Todd" was "shepherd'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 artistic memoir, "Finishing the Hat" (the name was taken from a vocal title in "Sunday in the Park"; a follow-up, "Wait, I Made a Chapeau," came out in 2011), was in many ways a primer on the craft of lyric writing. In it, he took himself to chore for numerous sins, including things similar adding unnecessary adjectives to fill out lines rhythmically and paying bereft attention to a melodic line. In the song "Somewhere" from "W Side Story," for example, 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 u.s." — the emphasis is on the word "a."
"The most unimportant give-and-take in the opening line is the ane that gets the near important notation," he wrote.
In another instance 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 articulate to the audition," he said to his biographer Meryle Secrest for her 1998 book, "Stephen Sondheim: A Life." "You don't get a take a chance to hear the lyric twice, and if it doesn't sit and bounciness when the music bounces and rise when the music rises, the audience becomes dislocated."
In "America," he added, "I had this wonderful quatrain that went: 'I like to be in America/OK past me in America/Everything free in America/For a small-scale fee in America.' The niggling 'for a small fee' was my zinger — except that the 'for' is absolute and 'small fee' is impossible to say that fast, so information technology went 'For a smafee in America.' Nobody knew what it meant!"
What almost distinguished Mr. Sondheim's lyrics, nevertheless, was that they were by and large character-driven, oftentimes probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, ache or deeply felt conflict. In "Send In the Clowns," for example, he couched the famous plaint nigh missed romantic chances largely in the language of the theater, considering the character singing it is an crumbling actress:
But 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 one is in that location.
Epitome
In the title song for "Anyone Can Whistle," he wrote from the point of view of a woman who found information technology hard to love:
Anyone tin can whistle,
That's what they say —
Easy.
Anyone tin whistle,
Any sometime day —
Easy.
It's all so simple:
Relax, permit go, let fly.
So someone tell me why
Can't I?
I can dance a tango
I tin read Greek —
Easy.
I tin can slay a dragon
Whatsoever sometime week —
Easy.
What'south hard is uncomplicated,
What'southward natural comes difficult.
Maybe you lot could prove me
How to let go
Lower my guard.
Learn to be free.
Peradventure if you 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 ideology is to believe that I'm the prototypical Repressed Intellectual and that explains everything nigh me," he wrote in "Finishing the Hat."
Still, it's true that he lived a largely solitary romantic life for many years.
"I always idea that song would exist Steve's epitaph," the playwright and director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for "Anyone Can Whistle," every bit well equally "West Side Story," "Gypsy" and "Practise I Hear a Waltz?," told Ms. Secrest.
For a time in his 60s, Mr. Sondheim shared his Manhattan townhouse with a young songwriter, Peter Jones, and in 2017 he married Jeffrey Romley, who survives him, forth with a half brother, Walter Sondheim.
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Box Office Struggles
For all these reasons — the high-minded ambition, the seriousness of bailiwick thing, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim'southward shows, though generally received with critical accolades, were about never popular hits. He suffered from a reputation that he didn't write hummable tunes and that his outlook was austere, if not 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-good musical experience or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to wait. He also didn't requite 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 Britain 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 2d, "Anyone Tin Whistle," lasted ix. "Merrily We Roll Along," a famously problematic adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart reverse-chronology play about how idealistic young artists grow cynical as they historic period, closed after but sixteen. 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 do the same 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 cleaved-field running, they can't hit y'all with then 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 style, I'1000 out of fashion. Being a maverick isn't just about being dissimilar. It's about having your vision of the way a prove might exist."
Alone With Mother
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was built-in on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived first on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his begetter, was the owner of a dressmaking company; his female parent, the former Etta Janet Fob, known equally Foxy, worked for her hubby equally a designer until he left her, when Stephen was 10. He was sent for a time to armed forces school, and later to the George School in Pennsylvania, but until he was 16 Stephen, her only kid, lived mostly with his mother, with whom he had a troubled human relationship throughout his life. (His male parent 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 hubby: flirting with him sexually on the i manus, belittling him on the other. Every bit an developed, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the nighttime before she was to have heart surgery, she wrote a letter to her son and had information technology hand delivered. It read, in part, "The simply regret I have in life is giving you nascency."
His female parent was, nonetheless, responsible for the virtually formative human relationship of her son'due south life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose husband was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II; their son Jamie became friends with immature Steve, and when the Hammersteins moved to a Pennsylvania subcontract, 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 so often at the Hammersteins' that he was idea of as a family member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate male parent and mentor — "It was considering of my teenage admiration for him that I became a songwriter," Mr. Sondheim wrote in "Finishing the Lid," although he afterward assessed Hammerstein every bit a lyricist of soaring ability but frequently flawed work. Hammerstein brutally criticized the male child's first musical, written at the George School, every bit "the worst thing I've always read," adding: "I didn't say that it was untalented, I said it was terrible. And if you desire to know why it'south terrible, I'll tell you."
Paradigm
An afternoon-long tutorial followed, pedagogy him, past Mr. Sondheim's business relationship, more about the arts and crafts than most songwriters learn in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Adapt a good play into a musical; adapt a flawed play into a musical; adapt a story from another medium into a musical; and, finally, write a musical from your own original story. This the immature Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams Higher in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater piece of work with serious limerick study nether Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, equally he put it, "that art is work and not inspiration, that invention comes with craft." Mr. Sondheim would afterward report independently with Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim's first professional prove business job was not in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s television comedy, "Topper," about a fussbudget broker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts. (Much after, Mr. Sondheim wrote a whodunit movie script, "The Last of Sheila," with the actor Anthony Perkins; information technology was produced in 1973 and directed past 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 ambiguous crosswords for New York magazine.
His affinity for theatrical misdirection and mystery was best-selling 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 first professional bear witness, a musical called "Saturday Night," which was an accommodation of "Front end Porch in Flatbush," a play by Philip 1000. 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, but the producer, Lemuel Ayers, died before he had completed raising the money for it, and the production came to a halt. The bear witness was not presented until 1997, past a small visitor in London; it subsequently appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the 2d Stage Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was loath to have either of his first Broadway gigs, "Westward Side Story" and "Gypsy," because he felt he was a composer, not only a lyricist — "I savor writing music much more than lyrics," he confessed in "Finishing the Hat." Just he agreed to both on the advice of Hammerstein, who told him that he would do good from working with the likes of Bernstein; Laurents (who wrote the book), and the managing director Jerome Robbins, in the kickoff example, and from writing for a star like Ethel Merman in the 2nd, fifty-fifty though it was she who had wanted a more than experienced Broadway hand, Jule Styne, as the composer.
Just once 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 chore by Laurents and past Mary Rodgers, Richard's elderberry girl, whom he had met as a teenager at the Hammersteins' and for whom he had complicated feelings over many years. However, the ii men proved antagonistic as writing partners — years afterward Mr. Sondheim was quoted as saying that Hammerstein was "a man of limited talent and infinite soul" and Rodgers the reverse — and though the prove ran for 220 performances in 1965, information technology 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 late 1940s or early '50s, and Mr. Prince had been the producer of "W Side Story." He had proved his chops as a director besides, with musical successes like "She Loves Me" (1963) and "Cabaret" (1966).
Mr. Prince would direct 5 Sondheim musicals in the 1970s — "Company," "Follies," "A Trivial Night 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 almost part, complementary. As Mr. Prince naturally saw a show's big flick, 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 simply 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 grapheme portrayals, and in rehearsals concentrating on their delivery and diction.
The partnership foundered on "Merrily Nosotros Roll Along," a evidence that was hampered in office by the youth of its bandage members, who had to play not only immature characters simply also the disillusioned adults they become, and by Mr. Prince's acknowledged failure to find an appropriate look for the show every bit 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 show. I never could figure information technology 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 generally acknowledged to exist a brilliant and poignant score.
A Younger Collaborator
In any case, the two men parted creative visitor for more than ii decades, not working together 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 "Aureate," "Wise Guys" and "Road Testify." Nether Mr. Prince, it was called "Bounce," and it was produced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Eye in Washington.
During Mr. Prince's 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 Wood," 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 starting time act ingeniously creates the artistic process of the painter Georges Seurat every bit he produces his masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," and whose 2d human activity jumps ahead a century to illustrate how a contemporary creative person 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 bear witness, but, every bit Frank Rich wrote in The Times, it was startlingly original and securely satisfying. "It's anyone's guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted past 'Sunday in the Park,' " Mr. Rich wrote. "What I exercise know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine take created an adventurous, haunting and, in its own intensely personal mode, touching piece of work."
Epitome
It was one of Mr. Sondheim's most critically admired shows, running for 604 performances. And many critics and other Sondheim-ophiles establish in it his most personal argument, equally if he had used Seurat's view of the creative person'due south life as a surrogate for his own. In the show's signature song, "Finishing the Hat," faced with the loss of the woman he loves considering his devotion to painting has superseded his devotion to her, Seurat offers a sorry merely forceful paean to the joy of bringing original beauty into the earth. It ends:
And when the woman that yous wanted goes,
You lot can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the adult female who won't wait for you knows
That, all the same you lot live,
In that location'southward a part of you always standing past,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a chapeau
Starting on a hat
Finishing a lid
Look, 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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