Stephen Joshua Sondheim (b. March 22 1930) is an
American stage musical and film composer and lyricist, one of the few people to win an
Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards (seven, more than
any other composer), multiple Grammy Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has been described by Frank Rich in the
The New York Times as "the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the
American musical theater." [1] His most famous
scores include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with
George, Into the Woods, and Assassins, as well as the lyrics for West Side
Story and Gypsy. He was president of the Dramatists Guild from
1973 to 1981.
Early life
Stephen Sondheim was born to Herbert and Janet ("Foxy") Sondheim, in New York City,
New York, and grew up on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan and later on a farm in Pennsylvania. Herbert
was a dress manufacturer and Foxy designed the dresses. While his mother had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family, Sondheim had no formal religious
education or association, did not have a Bar Mitzvah, and reportedly
did not set foot in a synagogue until he was nineteen. An only
child of well-to-do parents living in a high-rise apartment on Central Park West, Sondheim's childhood has been portrayed as isolated and emotionally neglected in
Meryl Secrest's biography, .
Sondheim traces his interest in theater to Very Warm for May, a Broadway
musical he saw at the age of nine. "The curtain went up and revealed a piano," Sondheim recalled. "A butler took a duster and
brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling."[2]
When Stephen was ten years old, his father Herbert, a distant figure in Stephen's life, abandoned him and his mother. Under
the laws of the day, Sondheim's mother retained full custody. Unfortunately for young Stephen, he saw his mother "Foxy Sondheim"
as narcissistic, emotionally abusive, and a hypochondriac.[citation needed] Stephen "famously despised"
Foxy;[1] he once wrote a thank-you note to close
friend Mary Rodgers that read, "Dear Mary and Hank, Thanks for the plate, but where was my
mother's head? Love, Steve."[2] When Foxy died
in September 15, 1993, Sondheim refused to attend her funeral.
Career
Mentorship under Oscar Hammerstein II
At about the age of ten, around the time of his parents' divorce, Sondheim became friends with Jimmy Hammerstein, son of the
well-known lyricist and playwright Oscar Hammerstein II. The elder Hammerstein
became a surrogate father to Sondheim, as the young man attempted to stay away from home as much as possible. Hammerstein had a
profound influence on the young Sondheim, especially in his development of love for musical theater. Indeed, it was at the
opening of Hammerstein's hit show South Pacific that Sondheim met
Harold Prince, who would later direct many of Sondheim's most famous shows. During high
school, Sondheim attended George School, a private Quaker preparatory school in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania. He had the chance to write a comic musical based on the goings-on of his school, entitled By George. It was a major success among his peers, and it inflated the young songwriter's ego
considerably; he took it to Hammerstein, and asked him to evaluate it as though he had no knowledge of its author. Hammerstein
hated it. "But if you want to know why it's terrible," Hammerstein consoled the young man, "I'll tell you." The rest of the day
was spent going over the musical, and Sondheim would later say that "in that afternoon I learned more about songwriting and the
musical theater than most people learn in a lifetime." [3]
Thus began one of the most famous apprenticeships in the musical theatre, as Hammerstein designed a kind of course for
Sondheim to take on the construction of a musical. This training centered around four assignments, which Sondheim was to write.
These were:
None of these "assignment" musicals was ever produced professionally. High Tor and Mary Poppins have never been
produced at all, because the rights holders for the original works refused to grant permission for a musical to be made.
In 1950, Sondheim graduated magna cum laude from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He went on to study composition with
the composer Milton Babbitt. In Mark Eden Horowitz's
Sondheim on Music, Sondheim says that when he asked Babbitt if he could study atonality, Babbitt replied "No, I don't think you've exhausted your tonal
resources yet." Sondheim agreed, and despite frequent dissonance and a highly
chromatic style, his music remains resolutely tonal.
Move to Broadway and work as lyricist
"A few painful years of struggle" followed for Sondheim, during which he conditionally auditioned songs and lived in his
father's dining room to save money. He also spent some time in Hollywood writing for the television series Topper.[2]
Though, to date, Sondheim has only dabbled in movie musicals, he devoured the film of the forties and fifties and has called
cinema his "basic language."[1] In the fifties, his
knowledge of film got him through The $64,000 Question contestant tryouts.
Though his favorite movies include classics like Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, and Stairway
to Heaven, Sondheim says he dislikes movie musicals. He added that "studio directors like Michael Curtiz and Raoul Walsh....were heroes of mine. They went
from movie to movie to movie, and every third movie was good and every fifth movie was great. There wasn't any cultural pressure
to make art."[4]
In 1954, Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics for Saturday Night,
which was never produced on Broadway and was shelved until a 1997 production at London's Bridewell Theatre. In 1998 Saturday Night received a
professional recording, followed by an Off-Broadway run at Second Stage Theatre in
2000.
Sondheim's big break came when he wrote the lyrics to West Side Story,
accompanying Leonard Bernstein's music and Arthur
Laurents's book. The 1957 show, directed by Jerome Robbins, ran for 732
performances. While this may be the best-known show Sondheim ever worked on, he has expressed some dissatisfaction with his
lyrics, stating they don't always fit the characters and are sometimes too consciously poetic.
In 1959, he wrote the lyrics for another hit musical, Gypsy. Sondheim
would have liked to write the music as well, but Ethel Merman, the star, insisted on a
composer with a track record - thus Jule Styne was hired. [5] Sondheim questioned if he should write only the lyrics for yet another show, but
his mentor Oscar Hammerstein told him it would be valuable experience to write for a
star. Sondheim worked closely with book writer Arthur Laurents to create the show. It ran 702 performances.
Finally, Sondheim participated in a musical for which he wrote both the music and lyrics, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It opened in 1962 and
ran 964 performances. The book, based on the farces of Plautus, was by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart. Sondheim's score was not
especially well-received at the time - the show won several Tony Awards, including best
musical, but Sondheim did not even receive a nomination. In addition, some critics felt the songs were not properly integrated
into the farcical action.
At this point, Sondheim had participated in three straight hits - he'd yet to taste failure on Broadway. His next show ended
the streak. Anyone Can Whistle (1964) was a 9-performance flop, although it
introduced Angela Lansbury to musical theatre and has developed a cult following.
In 1965 he donned his lyricist-for-hire hat for one last show, Do I Hear a
Waltz?, with music by Richard Rodgers - the one project he has since openly
regretted working on. [1] In 1966, he
semi-anonymously provided the lyric for The Boy From..., a parody of
The Girl from Ipanema that was a highlight of the off-Broadway revue
The Mad Show. (The official songwriting credit went to the linguistically-minded
pseudonym "Esteban Rio Nido," which translates from the Spanish to "Stephen River Nest." In the show's Playbill, the lyric was credited to "Nom De Plume").
Maturity as composer/lyricist in the 70s
Since then Sondheim has devoted himself to both composing and writing lyrics for a series of varied and adventuresome
musicals, beginning with the innovative "concept musical" Company in 1970.
Sondheim's work is notable for his use of complex polyphony in the vocal parts, such as the
chorus of five minor characters who function as a sort of Greek chorus in 1973's
A Little Night Music. He also displays a penchant for angular harmonies and
intricate melodies reminiscent of Bach (Sondheim has claimed that he "loves Bach"
but his favorite period is Brahms to Stravinsky).[6] To aficionados, Sondheim's musical sophistication is considered to
be greater than that of many of his musical theater peers, and his lyrics are likewise renowned for their ambiguity, wit, and urbanity.
Sondheim collaborated with producer/director Harold Prince on six distinctive musicals
between 1970 and 1981. Company (1970) was a "concept musical", a show centered
around a set of characters and themes rather than a straightforward plot. Follies (1971)
was a similarly-structured show filled with pastiche songs echoing styles of composers from earlier decades. A Little Night Music (1973), a more traditionally plotted show based on an Ingmar Bergman film, was one of his greatest successes, with Time magazine calling it "Sondheim's most brilliant accomplishment to
date."[7] Notably, the score was mostly composed in
waltz time (either ¾ time, or multiples thereof.) Further success was accorded to A
Little Night Music when "Send in the Clowns" became a hit for Judy Collins. Although it
was Sondheim's only Top 40 hit, his songs are frequently performed and recorded by cabaret artists and theatre singers in their
solo careers.
Pacific Overtures (1976) was the most non-traditional of the Sondheim-Prince
collaborations, an intellectual exploration of the westernization of Japan. Sweeney
Todd (1979), Sondheim's most operatic score (and his only show to find a definite foothold in opera houses), once
again explores an unlikely topic, this time murderous revenge and cannibalism. The libretto,
by Hugh Wheeler, is based on Christopher Bond's
1973 stage version of the Victorian original.
Later work
Merrily We Roll Along (1981), with a book by Furth, is one of
Sondheim's more "traditional" scores and was thought to hold potential to generate some hit songs (Frank Sinatra and Carly Simon each recorded a different song from the
show). Sondheim's music director, Paul Gemignani, said,
“Part of Steve’s ability is this extraordinary versatility.” Merrily, however, was a 16-performance flop. "Merrily
did not succeed, but its score endures thanks to subsequent productions and recordings. According to Martin Gottfried, "Sondheim
had set out to write traditional songs… But [despite] that there is nothing ordinary about the music." [8] Sondheim and Furth have extensively revised the show since its initial
opening.
The failure of Merrily greatly affected Sondheim; he was ready to quit theater and do movies or create video games or write mysteries. He was later quoted as saying, "I wanted to find something to satisfy myself
that does not involve Broadway and dealing with all those people who hate me and hate Hal." [9] The collaboration between Sondheim and Prince would largely end after
Merrily.
Instead of quitting the theater following the failure of Merrily, however, Sondheim decided "that there are better
places to start a show", and found a new collaborator in the "artsy" James Lapine. Lapine
has a taste "for the avant-garde and for visually oriented theater in particular."
Sunday in the Park with George (1984), their first collaboration,
was very much the avant-garde, but they had blended it together with the professionalism of
the commercial theater to make a different kind of musical. Sondheim again was able to show his versatility and his adaptability.
His music took on the style of the artist Georges Seurat's painting techniques. In
doing so, Sondheim was able to bring his work to another level. "Sondheim’s work has such reach, there is so much emotional
resonance, that many observers take it personally and become as fascinated with the artist as with the art; they see him in his
work."[citation needed]
In 1985, he and Lapine won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for
Sunday in the Park with George. It is one of the only seven
musicals that have taken this prestigious award. The Sondheim-Lapine collaboration also produced the popular fairy-tale show Into the Woods (1987) and the rhapsodic
Passion (1994).
Despite a popularity among musical theater insiders that continues to grow, it was noted in 2002 that "Sondheim has never
quite escaped the ghetto of cult enthusiasm....[he] has always been an acquired taste. He's never achieved the sort of popularity
of Andrew Lloyd Webber or had a megahit on the order of a Cats."[10]
In the late nineties, Sondheim reunited with Hal Prince for Wise Guys, a long-in-the-works musical comedy about
Addison and Wilson Mizner. Though a Broadway
production starring Nathan Lane and Victor Garber and
directed by Sam Mendes was announced for Spring 2000,[11] the New York debut of the musical was delayed. Rechristened Bounce in 2003, the show was mounted at the Goodman
Theatre in Chicago, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C.. Bounce received disappointing reviews and never reached Broadway. Sondheim has continued to work on
Bounce.
Regarding whether he had any interest in writing new work, Sondheim was quoted in a 2006 Time Out London interview as
saying:
| “ |
No... It’s age. It’s a diminution of energy and the worry that there are no new ideas.
It’s also an increasing lack of confidence. I’m not the only one. I’ve checked with other people. People expect more of you and
you’re aware of it and you shouldn’t be.[12] |
” |
Work away from Broadway
Sondheim's mature career has been varied, encompassing much beyond composition of musicals.
An avid fan of games, in 1968 and 1969 Sondheim published a series of word puzzles in New York magazine. (In 1987, Time referred to
his love of puzzlemaking as "legendary in theater circles," adding that the central
character in Anthony Shaffer's hit play Sleuth was inspired by Sondheim, and the show was even given the working title Who's Afraid of
Stephen Sondheim?)[2] He parlayed this
talent into a film script, written with longtime friend Anthony Perkins, called The
Last of Sheila. The 1973 film, directed by Herbert Ross, starred Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch, Richard
Benjamin, and others.
He tried his hand at writing one more time - in 1996 he collaborated on a play called Getting Away with Murder. It was
not a success, and opened and closed in a few days on Broadway.
His compositional efforts have included a number of film scores, notably a set of songs written for Warren Beatty's 1990 film version of Dick Tracy; one
song, "Sooner or Later", won Sondheim an Academy Award.
Major works
Unless otherwise noted, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
