NEW YORK (AP) — Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter who
reshaped the American musical theater in the second half
of the 20th century with his intelligent, intricately
rhymed lyrics, his use of evocative melodies and his
willingness to tackle unusual subjects, has died. He was
91.
Sondheim’s death was announced by Rick Miramontez,
president of DKC/O&M. Sondheim’s Texas-based attorney,
Rick Pappas, told The New York Times the composer died
Friday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.
Sondheim influenced several generations of theater
songwriters, particularly with such landmark musicals as
“Company,” “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd,” which are
considered among his best work. His most famous ballad,
“Send in the Clowns,” has been recorded hundreds of
times, including by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins.
The artist refused to repeat himself, finding inspiration
for his shows in such diverse subjects as an Ingmar
Bergman movie (“A Little Night Music”), the opening of
Japan to the West (“Pacific Overtures”), French painter
Georges Seurat (“Sunday in the Park With George”),
Grimm’s fairy tales (“Into the Woods”) and even the
killers of American presidents (“Assassins”), among
others.
Tributes quickly flooded social media as performers and
writers alike saluted a giant of the theater. “We shall
be singing your songs forever,” wrote Lea Salonga. Aaron
Tveit wrote: “We are so lucky to have what you’ve given
the world.”
“The theater has lost one of its greatest geniuses and
the world has lost one of its greatest and most original
writers. Sadly, there is now a giant in the sky,”
producer Cameron Mackintosh wrote in tribute. Music
supervisor, arranger and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire
tweeted: “For those of us who love new musical theater:
we live in a world that Sondheim built.”
Six of Sondheim’s musicals won Tony Awards for best
score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize (“Sunday in
the Park”), an Academy Award (for the song “Sooner or
Later” from the film “Dick Tracy”), five Olivier Awards
and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In 2008, he received
a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
Sondheim’s music and lyrics gave his shows a dark,
dramatic edge, whereas before him, the dominant tone of
musicals was frothy and comic. He was sometimes
criticized as a composer of unhummable songs, a badge
that didn’t bother Sondheim. Frank Sinatra, who had a hit
with Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” once complained:
“He could make me a lot happier if he’d write more songs
for saloon singers like me.”
To theater fans, Sondheim’s sophistication and brilliance
made him an icon. A Broadway theater was named after him.
A New York magazine cover asked “Is Sondheim God?” The
Guardian newspaper once offered this question: “Is
Stephen Sondheim the Shakespeare of musical theatre?”
A supreme wordsmith — and an avid player of word games —
Sondheim’s joy of language shone through. “The opposite
of left is right/The opposite of right is wrong/So anyone
who’s left is wrong, right?” he wrote in “Anyone Can
Whistle.” In “Company,” he penned the lines: “Good things
get better/Bad gets worse/Wait — I think I meant that in
reverse.”
He offered the three principles necessary for a
songwriter in his first volume of collected lyrics —
Content Dictates Form, Less Is More, and God Is in the
Details. All these truisms, he wrote, were “in the
service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters.”
Together they led to stunning lines like: “It’s a very
short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and
the pouch and the pension.”
Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein,
Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and
more intellectual place. “If you think of a theater lyric
as a short story, as I do, then every line has the weight
of a paragraph,” he wrote in his 2010 book, “Finishing
the Hat,” the first volume of his collection of lyrics
and comments.
Early in his career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for two
shows considered to be classics of the American stage,
“West Side Story” (1957) and “Gypsy” (1959). “West Side
Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, transplanted
Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to the streets and gangs
of modern-day New York. “Gypsy,” with music by Jule
Styne, told the backstage story of the ultimate stage
mother and the daughter who grew up to be Gypsy Rose Lee.
It was not until 1962 that Sondheim wrote both music and
lyrics for a Broadway show, and it turned out to be a
smash — the bawdy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forum,” starring Zero Mostel as a wily slave in
ancient Rome yearning to be free.
Yet his next show, “Anyone Can Whistle” (1964), flopped,
running only nine performances but achieving cult status
after its cast recording was released. Sondheim’s 1965
lyric collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers — “Do I
Hear a Waltz?” — also turned out to be problematic. The
musical, based on the play “The Time of the Cuckoo,” ran
for six months but was an unhappy experience for both
men, who did not get along.
It was “Company,” which opened on Broadway in April 1970,
that cemented Sondheim’s reputation. The episodic
adventures of a bachelor (played by Dean Jones) with an
inability to commit to a relationship was hailed as
capturing the obsessive nature of striving, self-centered
New Yorkers. The show, produced and directed by Hal
Prince, won Sondheim his first Tony for best score. “The
Ladies Who Lunch” became a standard for Elaine Stritch.
The following year, Sondheim wrote the score for
“Follies,” a look at the shattered hopes and disappointed
dreams of women who had appeared in lavish Ziegfeld-style
revues. The music and lyrics paid homage to great
composers of the past such as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter
and the Gershwins.
In 1973, “A Little Night Music,” starring Glynis Johns
and Len Cariou, opened. Based on Bergman’s “Smiles of a
Summer Night,” this rueful romance of middle-age lovers
contains the song “Send in the Clowns,” which gained
popularity outside the show. A revival in 2009 starred
Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones was nominated
for a best revival Tony.
“Pacific Overtures,” with a book by John Weidman,
followed in 1976. The musical, also produced and directed
by Prince, was not a financial success, but it
demonstrated Sondheim’s commitment to offbeat material,
filtering its tale of the westernization of Japan through
a hybrid American-Kabuki style.
In 1979, Sondheim and Prince collaborated on what many
believe to be Sondheim’s masterpiece, the bloody yet
often darkly funny “Sweeney Todd.” An ambitious work, it
starred Cariou in the title role as a murderous barber
whose customers end up in meat pies baked by Todd’s
willing accomplice, played by Angela Lansbury.
The Sondheim-Prince partnership collapsed two years
later, after “Merrily We Roll Along,” a musical that
traced a friendship backward from its characters’
compromised middle age to their idealistic youth. The
show, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart,
only ran two weeks on Broadway. But again, as with
“Anyone Can Whistle,” its original cast recording helped
“Merrily We Roll Along” to become a favorite among
musical-theater buffs.
“Sunday in the Park,” written with James Lapine, may be
Sondheim’s most personal show. A tale of uncompromising
artistic creation, it told the story of artist Georges
Seurat, played by Mandy Patinkin. The painter submerges
everything in his life, including his relationship with
his model (Bernadette Peters), for his art.) It was most
recently revived on Broadway in 2017 with Jake
Gyllenhaal.)
Three years after “Sunday” debuted, Sondheim collaborated
again with Lapine, this time on the fairy-tale musical
“Into the Woods.” The show starred Peters as a glamorous
witch and dealt primarily with the turbulent
relationships between parents and children, using such
famous fairy-tale characters as Cinderella, Little Red
Riding Hood and Rapunzel. It was most recently revived in
the summer of 2012 in Central Park by The Public Theater.
“Assassins” opened off-Broadway in 1991 and it looked at
the men and women who wanted to kill presidents, from
John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. The show received
mostly negative reviews in its original incarnation, but
many of those critics reversed themselves 13 years later
when the show was done on Broadway and won a Tony for
best musical revival.
“Passion” was another severe look at obsession, this time
a desperate woman, played by Donna Murphy, in love with a
handsome soldier. Despite winning the best-musical Tony
in 1994, the show barely managed a six-month run.
A new version of “The Frogs,” with additional songs by
Sondheim and a revised book by Nathan Lane (who also
starred in the production), played Lincoln Center during
the summer of 2004. The show, based on the Aristophanes
comedy, originally had been done 20 years earlier in the
Yale University swimming pool.
One of his more troubled shows was “Road Show,” which
reunited Sondheim and Weidman and spent years being
worked on. This tale of the Mizner brothers, whose get-
rich schemes in the early part of the 20th century
finally made it to the Public Theater in 2008 after going
through several different titles, directors and casts.
He had been working on a new musical with “Venus in Fur”
playwright David Ives, who called his collaborator a
genius. “Not only are his musicals brilliant, but I can’t
think of another theater person who has so chronicled a
whole age so eloquently,” Ives said in 2013. “He is the
spirit of the age in a certain way.”
Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, into a wealthy family,
the only son of dress manufacturer Herbert Sondheim and
Helen Fox Sondheim. At 10, his parents divorced and
Sondheim’s mother bought a house in Doylestown, Pa.,
where one of their Bucks County neighbors was lyricist
Oscar Hammerstein II, whose son, James, was Sondheim’s
roommate at boarding school. It was Oscar Hammerstein who
became the young man’s professional mentor and a good
friend.
He had a solitary childhood, one that involved verbal
abuse from his chilly mother. He received a letter in his
40s from her telling him that she regretted giving birth
to him. He continued to support her financially and to
see her occasionally but didn’t attend her funeral.
Sondheim attended Williams College in Massachusetts,
where he majored in music. After graduation, he received
a two-year fellowship to study with avant-garde composer
Milton Babbitt.
One of Sondheim’s first jobs was writing scripts for the
television show “Topper,” which ran for two years (1953-
1955). At the same time, Sondheim wrote his first
musical, “Saturday Night,” the story of a group of young
people in Brooklyn in 1920s. It was to have opened on
Broadway in 1955, but its producer died just as the
musical was about to go into production, and the show was
scrapped. “Saturday Night” finally arrived in New York in
1997 in a small, off-Broadway production.
Sondheim wrote infrequently for the movies. He
collaborated with actor Anthony Perkins on the script for
the 1973 murder mystery “The Last of Sheila,” and besides
his work on “Dick Tracy” (1990), wrote scores for such
movies as Alain Resnais’ “Stavisky” (1974) and Warren
Beatty’s “Reds” (1981).
Over the years, there have been many Broadway revivals of
Sondheim shows, especially “Gypsy,” which had
reincarnations starring Angela Lansbury (1974), Tyne Daly
(1989) and Peters (2003). But there also were productions
of “A Funny Thing,” one with Phil Silvers in 1972 and
another starring Nathan Lane in 1996; “Into the Woods”
with Vanessa Williams in 2002; and even of Sondheim’s
less successful shows such as “Assassins” and “Pacific
Overtures,” both in 2004. “Sweeney Todd” has been
produced in opera houses around the world. A reimagined
“West Side Story” opened on Broadway in 2020 and a
scrambled “Company” opened on Broadway in 2021 with the
genders of the actors switched.
Sondheim’s songs have been used extensively in revues,
the best-known being “Side by Side by Sondheim” (1976) on
Broadway and “Putting It Together,” off-Broadway with
Julie Andrews in 1992 and on Broadway with Carol Burnett
in 1999. The New York Philharmonic put on a star-studded
“Company” in 2011 with Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen
Colbert. Tunes from his musicals have lately popped up
everywhere from “Marriage Story” to “The Morning Show.”
An HBO documentary directed by Lapine, “Six by Sondheim,”
aired in 2013 and revealed that he liked to compose lying
down and sometimes enjoyed a cocktail to loosen up as he
wrote. He even revealed that he really only fell in love
after reaching 60, first with the dramatist Peter Jones
and then in his last years with Jeff Romley.
In September 2010, the Henry Miller Theatre was renamed
the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. “I’m deeply embarrassed.
I’m thrilled, but deeply embarrassed,” he said as the sun
fell over dozens of clapping admirers in Times Square.
Then he revealed his perfectionist streak: “I’ve always
hated my last name. It just doesn’t sing.”
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