Stephen Sondheim, the dextrous composer and lyricist of musicals including Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd, died at the age of 91.
In interviews, Sondheim often relayed the story of when he asked Hammerstein for feedback on a musical he had written for school when he was 15. Sondheim asked his mentor to treat him as he would anyone else—and Hammerstein’s assessment was brutal.
In his book Finishing The Hat, Sondheim recalled a moment of triumph: while performing “Together, Wherever We Go,” he heard a “gasp of delight” from Porter. What had done it? The quadruple rhyme in the phrase, “No fits no fights no feuds and no egos—Amigos! Together.” That’s how shar Sondheim was: he could impress even the man who wrote, “do do that voodoo that you do so well.”
It wasn’t until 1962 that Sondheim was credited for writing both music and lyrics in a major musical—fora Zero Mostel vehicle that draws from Plautus to tell the story of the slave Pseudolus. As Sondheim later toldCompany . The groundbreaking show, with a book by George Furth, bucked storytelling conventions to present the anxieties of Bobby, an unmarried thirtysomething living in New York, as a revue-like series of of interactions with his coupled-up friends. By Sondheim’s own telling,”was the first Broadway musical whose defining quality was neither satire nor sentiment, but irony.”
Though nearly all of Sondheim’s shows are now considered classics, he was not always a hitmaker or a critical favorite. 1964’s, told in reverse with a cast of youngsters, both closed quickly. By the time of, though, Sondheim had arguably reached his creative peak: the decade surrounding it saw three of his most enduring works premiere on the Broadway stage, beginning in 1979 withSweeney Todd was a gory production on an operatic scale that rang with morbid humor.
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