A rare recording of a show Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim wrote and performed —in college — has been discovered hidden in a bookshelf in Milwaukee. Hear it for the first time here.
. Here, a page from the program of the 1948 production at Williams College.I think he is expressing that for the first time. I don't want to psychoanalyze it, but it does sound like there's something for scholars to look at," Salsini says.
The reason they've not been able to look at it before now, ironically, is that Sondheim hid his early work, even from Salsini's magazine"I know how he felt about juvenilia because he got so upset when we published lyrics for his high school show,But the Library of Congress' Horowitz suggests he might have been willing to bend in this case."My experience with Sondheim is it all depends on his mood and when you approached him about things.
And the fact that it's happened now is a mitigating factor as Sondheim was often quoted as saying he didn't care what happened after his death."I think if he were coming back from the ether, this would not be something he would get apoplectic about," Horowitz."He thought it was valuable for people to see early work and mediocre work and realize that even one's heroes grew over time," he says.
Salsini, who's donating the CD to the Sondheim Research Collection in Milwaukee, admits he's not sure where this particular discovery came from, though he's certain it wasn't from Sondheim. Logically, since it's a CD — and they weren't invented until 1982 — it's a copy, and he notes that there are likely other copies.in the private collection of playwright and screenwriter Michael Mitnick.
As for whether Sondheim's collegiate efforts strike listeners today as literally sophomoric, Horowitz is sanguine."He's still pretty smart and talented. It may not reach the exalted levels that his later work achieves, but I've never seen anything among this work that I would think he would be embarrassed by."
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