The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim died on Friday at the age of 91 years old, at his home in the small town of Roxbury in Connecticut. Reinventing the form with an emphasis on character and the willingness to explore sometimes harrowing themes, renowned for the sophistication of his lyrics and the headlong complexity of his compositions, Sondheim straddled over the American musical like a heroic figure as the arch innovator of the second half of the twentieth century, always at some remove and with one foot firmly in the past.
With Show Boat and Oklahoma!, his friend and mentor Oscar Hammerstein II had forged the integrated musical, a step beyond revues and other comic entertainments where songs vied for attention with dances and sketches and were largely ancillary to any narrative thrust. Now the song numbers served to advance plot and reveal character, with the new musical socially resonant and capable of cohering into an artistic whole.
After getting his start as a lyricist as the integrated or book musical reached its narrative apogee, Sondheim stretched his hands behind the piano and began to expand the possibilities of the form. Company explored adult themes and the realities of contemporary relationships, shorn of the romanticism of earlier works and told through a series of vignettes, with jumps in the chronological order. Pacific Overtures depicted the Westernization of Japan, and Sunday in the Park with George drew from the masterpiece of the pointillist painter Georges Suerat as a meditation on community and the artistic vocation.
Sweeney Todd enlarged the psychological backstory of a vengeful barber, becoming an exhaustive account of obsession set amid the societal tumult of London during the Industrial Revolution. Often considered Sondheim’s most operatic score, around 80 percent of the production was set to music, with four notes from the liturgical dirge ‘Dies Irae’ serving as the murderous motif. And in the carnivalesque Assassins, the concept musical found its edge as the composer cycled through the hearts and minds of a series of famous and would-be presidential killers.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930, into an upper middle class Jewish family who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father manufactured the dresses designed by his mother, and the young Sondheim attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and spent several summers at Camp Androscoggin, before his parents divorced when he was 10 years old.
Sondheim would note how he had lived the whole of his life within the space of a few blocks in Manhattan, but after the divorce, his mother bought a house in the Doylestown borough of Pennsylvania where he began to spend the bulk of his summers. As a working woman who wanted her young son out of her hair, he was briefly sent to the New York Military Academy, which Sondheim appreciated less for the discipline and more for the steady routine, providing him with a sense of place away from the anguish of his home life.
He felt that his mother projected onto him all of the anger over the end of her marriage, saying ‘What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time’. Eventually they would grow estranged, and in the seventies she sent him a hand-delivered letter on the night before she was to undergo open-heart surgery which read ‘The only regret I have in life is giving you birth’.
Described by her son as a celebrity hunter, when Sondheim was 11 years old he was introduced to the family of the famed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who lived nearby in Pennsylvania and had a son of similar age. Sondheim and James Hammerstein struck up a friendship and began to attend George School in Bucks County. Coming to view Oscar Hammerstein II as a surrogate father, Sondheim developed a love for the musical theatre, later remarking that if Hammerstein had been a geologist, he too would have wound up studying rocks.
It was at George School that Sondheim wrote his first musical, presenting it to Hammerstein and fully expecting to become the first 15 year old with a play on Broadway. Instead Hammerstein told him in no uncertain terms that his musical was no good. But he said that Sondheim was not without talent, and over the course of one afternoon as the celebrated lyricist took his work apart page by page, Sondheim said that he had learned more about songwriting and the nuts and bolts of the musical theatre than most people learn in a lifetime.
Hammerstein set Sondheim the task of writing four musicals: one based on a play which he admired, one on a play which he thought flawed, one on an undramatised novel or short story, and the other an original work. In the meantime Sondheim enrolled at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he contemplated a career in mathematics before studying music under Robert Barrow, and became acquainted with the composer and theorist Milton Babbitt, with whom he would dissect Rodgers and Hart, George Gerswhin, and other popular and classical songs. Sondheim graduated from Williams College magna cum laude in 1950.
Between the opening of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific and apprenticeships at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, Sondheim became friends with Mary Rodgers and the future producer and director Hal Prince. The 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along, with music and lyrics by Sondheim and direction by Prince, was based partly on some of the early struggles endured by the trio as they chased between audition rooms and offices, eager to catch their big break.
Sondheim lived in his father’s dining room, drew inspiration from Hollywood pictures, and briefly moved to Los Angeles to write for the television series Topper before returning to New York. When the producer Lemuel Ayers began shopping around a play by the screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, the team eventually landed on Sondheim as the composer and lyricist, who worked with Julius in California over the course of several months. Saturday Night was set to open on Broadway in the fall of 1955, but the untimely death of Ayers shelved the project.
Sondheim would not have to wait long for his first Broadway success. Invited to a party by the lyricist Burt Shevelove, he soon got talking to Arthur Laurents. The playwright was currently working on a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with the famed conductor Leonard Bernstein, and Laurents had witnessed one of the auditions for Saturday Night and admired Sondheim as a lyricist. He arranged for an impromptu audition with Bernstein, who after pondering for one week offered Sondheim the part.
Any reservations were dispelled by Oscar Hammerstein II, who advised the aspiring composer to grasp the chance to work alongside such gifted professionals, even though Sondheim was reluctant to be cast as a lyricist. The result was West Side Story, which opened in 1957 and ran for 732 performances on Broadway, with Bernstein handing his young collaborator sole credit for the lyrics as the musical went on to receive six nominations at the Tony Awards.
Sondheim occasionally clashed with Bernstein over the lyrics for the tale of star-crossed lovers caught between rival street gangs. He lamented the lyric from the duet ‘Tonight’, where the lovestruck teenager Tony sings ‘Today, the world was just an address’, and suggested that the line ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel’ from ‘I Feel Pretty’ made the young Puerto Rican girl Maria sound too much like Noel Coward. For Sondheim, the language was out of character and the poetry too fruity, but it was still Bernstein who bought him the Baldwin piano on which he would compose at home for the rest of his life.
With a short turnaround, Sondheim was approached by Laurents and the West Side Story director Jerome Robbins to work on a musical adaptation of the life of the burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee. The show was to star Ethel Merman, who on the back of a flop by a first-time composer demanded that the music be written by the experienced Jule Styne. Once more denied the chance to compose, Sondheim was again spurred by Hammerstein, who told him to seize the opportunity to write for the First Lady of the musical comedy stage.
The success of Gypsy allowed Sondheim to purchase a house in Turtle Bay Gardens, an oasis amid the bustle of the city where his neighbours included the actress Katharine Hepburn. Over four stories and sharing one of the only communal gardens left in Manhattan, Sondheim made a home in Turtle Bay Gardens, where he lived with his Baldwin piano and a couple of poodles, later spending time between the townhouse and his Roxbury estate.
As West Side Story and Gypsy made their bows on the big screen, finally Sondheim had won the chance to compose. Inspired by the farces of the Roman playwright Plautus, with a book by Burt Shevelove and the future M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart, he wrote both the music and lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which opened on Broadway in 1962. Boosted by some last-minute advice from Jerome Robbins, the production wound up running for 964 performances, and won six Tony Awards including the prize for Best Musical.
On the back of three major successes, his next show Anyone Can Whistle marked the musical debut of Angela Lansbury, but wrapped after just nine performances amid varied reviews. Sondheim briefly returned to the life of a lyricist with Do I Hear a Waltz?, which marked a creative nadir for the artist, who came to regard the project as his sole professional regret.
Conceived by Arthur Laurents as a small chamber musical for the duo of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the death of Oscar Hammerstein II in 1960 had put the project on hold. Indebted to Laurents and bearing a sense of obligation following the death of his mentor, Sondeheim agreed to write the lyrics even though both he and Rodgers agreed that the original play did not lend itself to the form. Rehearsals were marked by rancour as Rodgers battled with alcoholism, and while the show ran for 220 performances, Sondheim described it as dead on arrival, with the result forcing a break in his relationship with Laurents.
Sondheim began to envision a musical based on the showgirls of the Ziegfeld Follies, enlisting the author and playwright James Goldman as his latest collaborator. He provided the lyrics for ‘The Boy From…’, a parody of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ which appeared in the off-Broadway revue The Mad Show, and with Goldman wrote the television musical Evening Primrose, which aired as part of the anthology series ABC Stage 67.
He was courted by John Guare, Jerome Robbins, and Leonard Bernstein to collaborate on a musical adaptation of the Lehrstücke of Bertolt Brecht. Though Sondheim disapproved of Brecht’s didacticism, he signed on to the project after some persuasion, with Bernstein reportedly refusing to work without his guiding hand as the conductor embarked on a return to the stage. But incompatible working practices and a clash of egos between Robbins and Bernstein led to the collapse of the play when Robbins decamped for the airport midway through the audition process.
Dedicating himself to composition, Sondheim partnered up with his old friend Hal Prince and began to adapt eleven one-act plays by George Furth for the musical stage. In a series of vignettes linked by the birthday celebrations of a 35-year-old confirmed bachelor, the new musical would explore contemporary marriage amid all of the camaraderie and alienation of life in New York.
Never having been married himself, but realising that he had no good reason for being alone, he called up Mary Rodgers, who had just got hitched for the second time, adding her experiences to his knack for turning a lyric. With the phrase ‘Sorry-Grateful’ providing the keynote for the piece, Company breathed fresh life into the musical theatre, with Sondheim saying:
‘Broadway theatre has been for many years supported by upper middle class people with upper middle class problems. These people really want to escape that world when they go to the theatre, and then here we are with Company talking about how we’re going to bring it right back in their faces.’
Company opened on Broadway in 1970 and ran for 705 performances, earning a record-setting fourteen Tony nominations and emerging with six awards. Larry Kent replaced Dean Jones in the lead role one month into the production, ‘Getting Married Today’ saw Sondheim successfully revive the patter song with its ultra-fast tempo and rapid-fire verbal utterances, and a documentary film by D. A. Pennebaker of the original cast recording captured the travails and eventual triumph of Elaine Stritch, who made ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ her signature turn.
The success of Company and his partnership with the director Hal Prince prompted the richest vein of Sondheim’s career. Follies with its book by James Goldman opened in 1971, at lavish cost and to the ambivalence of critics and audiences. Yet the musical won seven Tony Awards and has experienced several major revivals, admired for its haunting depiction of nostalgia and evocative vaudeville sequences, while producing another signature song of survival by way of ‘I’m Still Here’.
Inspired by the film Smiles of a Summer Night by Ingmar Bergman, A Little Night Music hewed more closely to a conventional narrative, while Sondheim experimented with counterpoint and polyphony through trios and Greek choruses, with most of the score written in 3/4 waltz time. Written for the ‘small, silvery voice’ of Glynis Johns almost as an afterthought, the ballad ‘Send In the Clowns’ became the only popular smash of Sondheim’s career, with the composer sometimes referring to the song as the ‘medley of his hits’ after winning versions by Judy Collins and Frank Sinatra.
In 1974, Sondheim and Burt Shevelove staged a free adaptation of The Frogs by the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes at the swimming pool of the Yale University gymnasium. The composer continued to develop his interest in contrapuntal writing, though he said that this first performance of the musical was like ‘putting on a show in a men’s urinal’.
His next Broadway production was Pacific Overtures, which opened in 1976. Without using the pentatonic scale, Sondheim employed parallel fourths and no leading tone to conjure the spectre of Asian music, while the production was staged in the style of classical kabuki theatre, with men playing the female parts and set changes carried out by stagehands clad in black in full view of the audience. Pacific Overtures also incorporated a daring subject matter, the creeping Westernization of Japan from The Arrival of the Black Ships in 1853, when an expedition of warships from the United States ended the country’s longstanding policy of isolation.
The casting and production demands of Pacific Overtures have rendered the show one of Sondheim’s least performed musicals, even while the score features some of his most sophisticated compositions. But for the artist who fondly recalled working as a gofer on the set of the Rodgers and Hammerstein flop Allegro, which used a Greek chorus and minimal staging as it sought to depict in epic terms the life of a doctor from childhood to disillusionment, a show like Pacific Overtures confirmed his commitment to experimental theatre.
Darker still was the tale of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Based on an earlier play by Christopher Bond, which provided a compelling backstory to the popular Victorian macabre, and adapted for the stage by Hugh Wheeler, in Sondheim’s hands the piece became a searing portrait of obsession. Larger than life and conceived as one staggering edifice, the show still contained rippling threads of black comedy, with Angela Lansbury persuaded to take the part of the pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett.
Sondheim drew from the scope of his interests as he worked on the music for Sweeney Todd, incorporating echoes of Stravinsky and Ravel, borrowing a harmony which the Citizen Kane and Vertigo composer Bernard Herrmann often used in his film scores, and building the murderous motif of Sweeney out of four notes from the ‘Dies Irae’, which he described as his favourite sequence. Repetition in the form of reprises and leitmotifs were key as he expounded the cycle of bloody murder and heartrending grief.
Amid the factory whistles and cracked shafts of light, the director Hal Prince saw Sweeney Todd as a critique of social upheaval during the Industrial Revolution. Shunning the ‘peasants on the green’, his own term for scenes in which crowds gather to glibly expose the plot, Sondheim turned the song ‘Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir’ into a bravura display of rhyme. Tougher still was his task with the ‘Epiphany’ of Todd, where the character’s now encompassing desire to avenge himself on the human race must alternate with a threnody for his wife and daughter.
Sweeney Todd was a success on Broadway, running for 557 performances before heading to the West End, and the show picked up Tony and Olivier awards for best musical. But with Merrily We Roll Along, the composer arrived at an unexpected halt. Based on the 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the musical was also inspired by some of Sondheim’s own life experiences, with ‘Opening Doors’ by his own admission the only autobiographical song of his career. But with its young cast, backward structure, and chaotic series of preview performances, Merrily We Roll Along opened to negative reviews and closed after just 16 shows.
Sondheim fondly recalled the month of ‘fervent hysterical activity’ as he and his collaborators tried to salvage the show as the most fun of his career. Yet he was perturbed by the fate of Merrily We Roll Along, feeling that the Broadway community had grown tired and resentful of he and Prince, and now wished them to fail. Following their decade of kinship from Company to Sweeney Todd, Sondheim and Hal Prince would now not work together until the production of Bounce in 2003.
After contemplating a late change of career, Sondheim sought solace off-Broadway and caught a show by the young playwright James Lapine, later saying ‘I was discouraged, and I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t discovered Twelve Dreams at the Public Theatre’. Sondheim admired Lapine’s avant-garde sensibility and strong visual instincts, as the two men bonded over shared interests despite the disparity in age and their differing backgrounds.
Their discussions turned to the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by the pointillist Georges Seurat, which Lapine had featured in his adaptation of the Gertrude Stein play Photograph. When Lapine observed that the principal character of the painting was missing from the canvas, highlighting the absence of the artist, both men knew their next act.
Featuring a fictionalised version of Seurat, and imagining a great-grandson also called George who has grown into a jaded contemporary artist, Sunday in the Park with George opened off-Broadway in 1983 with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters heading the cast. The second act of the show was finalised the following year, a few days before the musical opened on Broadway.
A sustained treatise on the possibilities and limitations of art, on the artistic vocation, community, and the legacy we might leave behind, Sunday in the Park with George remained for Sondheim the most cherished of his own musicals. Working with Lapine, he achieved a formal looseness and an emotional vulnerability, realising later that ‘by having to express the straightforward, unembarrassed goodness of James’s characters I discovered the Hammerstein in myself – and I was the better for it’.
Sondheim and Lapine collaborated again on Into the Woods, which entwined the plot of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales, opening in San Diego where the anthemic and cathartic ‘No One Is Alone’ was added as the penultimate song of the second act. Trading in small transgressions of character and abounding in overlapping musical motifs, the figures of Cinderella, Little Red Ridinghood, Rapunzel, and beanstalk Jack each face fresh consequences, while the quotidian couple of a baker and his wife provided a through-line to the narrative, wandering the world of fantasy in their hopes of having a child.
In 1990, Sondheim reconnected with John Weidman, who had written the book for Pacific Overtures. Their political discursiveness this time resulted in Assassins, which opened off-Broadway at the Playwrights Horizons at the end of the year. From John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald to more marginal figures like Giuseppe Zangara and Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, the show was a carnival ride through the dark psyche of America, shown through the eyes of the aspiring murderers of presidents of the United States.
Then in 1994, Sondheim and Lapine fulfilled Passion, a musical which had been percolating in the mind of the composer ever since he saw the Italian drama film Passione d’Amore by Ettore Scola back in 1983. Set in Italy during the Risorgimento of the nineteenth century, the swooning score of the musical carried the story of a dashing soldier brought low, when he succumbs to a tortuous romance with a mentally ill woman named Fosca. Passion was not well received by audiences, with Sondheim describing the intensity of the reaction as a case of ‘the lady doth protest too much’, but like several of his shows it fared better on the revival circuit.
Stephen Sondheim, who received warm notices as an actor in college, brought an actorly sensibility to his penchant for songwriting, taking pains to understand the motivations and interpret the character behind each part. Often this understanding came through extensive conversation with his librettists, who Sondheim plied for information, sometimes asking them to write separate monologues which served as the basis for his lyrics. He mulled so thoroughly over character choices and dialogue that by the time a show went into rehearsal, he often felt he knew the script better than the librettist.
Character motivated an endless process of revision. ‘I Feel Pretty’ was cut from the latest Broadway revival of West Side Story, partly for reasons of pacing and partly bearing in mind Sondheim’s longstanding aversion to the song. In Finishing the Hat, the first book in his two-part set of collected lyrics, he wrote that the song showed the hand of the author rather than authenticity of character, which made him blush. Donna McKechnie, who starred in the original production of Company and worked with Sondheim again on a revival of Follies, said:
‘There’s a general feeling that in acting you’re as good as your choices, meaning that’s where your talent is – in the choices and how specific you make them. And for him to be able to get into each character that completely and make the most important and very specific and clear choices, I think that’s what makes his music really define the art form of musical theatre because that’s what it’s all about.’
After writing for Ethel Merman on Gypsy, the role of Joanne in Company was specifically designed for Elaine Stritch, who had remarked ‘Just give me a bottle of vodka and a floor plan’ after entering a bar in the early hours of one morning with George Furth. His biggest hit ‘Send In the Clowns’ was devised in short phrases around the breathy voice of Glynis Johns, after the staging of Hal Prince put the spotlight on the character of Desiree even when the scene seemed to be written around Fredrik. On the page the focus for Sondheim was always on character, but he cherished the process of collaboration, which was inseparable from his realisation as an artist.
Patti LuPone, who worked with Sondheim across numerous revivals, recalled him as a hard taskmaster, whose criticism was often tough to hear but always made her a better singer. Jason Alexander, the future Seinfeld star who made his Broadway debut as a 22-year-old in Merrily We Roll Along, remembered how Sondheim asked him during the rehearsal process if there was anything unusual about his ‘instrument’. Alexander replied that he had trouble discerning between sharps and flats, only for Sondheim to return several days later with a song full of intricate sharps and flats, telling the aspiring performer ‘You have to learn’.
Teaching was a sacred profession for Sondheim, who fell in love for the first time at the age of 60, and never had children, a fact which he grew to lament. Oscar Hammerstein II had saved his life by taking him under his wing as an adolescent, and Sondheim sought to repay the favour by passing on what he had learned, in rehearsals, seminars, or personal messages. Like Hammerstein, he served as a mentor of sorts to young composers like Adam Guettel, the son of Mary Rodgers, who received some painfully constructive criticism from the master at the age of 14, and Jonathan Larson who recounted his own tribulations as a young striver in the musical Tick, Tick… Boom!
Still as a tough and original critic, even Hammerstein himself was not safe from the keen eyes, discerning ears, and sometimes curt words of his onetime pupil. While regarding Hammerstein as a profound and monumental lyricist, Sondheim still condemned his penchant for redundancy and overly florid imagery, which showed for instance in his apparently boundless fondness for the humble lark. He found Ira Gershwin convoluted and Lorenz Hart sloppy, but admired the whimsy of Yip Harburg and the conversational manner of Dorothy Fields and Frank Loesser.
The lyrics of Irving Berlin combined deceptive simplicity with sometimes banal sentiments, while Cole Porter by Sondheim’s estimation bore a dazzling sophistication and an overt sense of camp. Sondheim saved special praise for DuBose Heyward, calling his lyrics for Porgy and Bess the ‘most beautiful and powerful in our musical-theatre history’. Among contemporary composers and lyricists, he admired the work of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh and counted Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and John Kander and Fred Ebb as friends. He cited Floyd Collins by Adam Guettel and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut as some of the best musicals of their generation.
His three guiding principles were Less Is More, Content Dictates Form, and God Is in the Details, finding the first the hardest to consistently put into practice. He also believed that each show should contain ‘a secret metaphor that nobody knows except the authors’, with Hal Prince often staging their work around this metaphor or central theme. In Pacific Overtures the unwritten concept was of a Japanese playwright who had seen a few shows on Broadway, before returning home to reinterpret the form for his native land. Between Company and Assassins, it was Sondheim who cultivated the concept musical as an encompassing work of art.
For all of his peeves and predilections, and beyond his own narrative concision and strictures of character, in the public conception Sondheim seemed to marry the plainspokenness of Oscar Hammerstein II and the conversational chatter of Fields and Loesser with a Brechtian sense of alienation plus the sparking wit, urbanity, and ardent longing of Lorenz Hart. Sometimes derided as cold or detached, familiarity with his music shows the barely sublimated nerve ends.
His hobbies included vintage board games, crosswords and anagrams, and murder mystery novels. Sondheim is credited for carrying cryptic crosswords across the pond, introducing the British device to American audiences via the puzzles he created for New York magazine between 1968 and 1969. With Anthony Perkins he wrote the 1973 neo noir mystery film The Last of Sheila, and in 1996 he collaborated with the Company and Merrily We Roll Along librettist George Furth for the play Getting Away with Murder, which closed after 17 performances on Broadway.
He also continued to compose music for the screen. Warren Beatty had asked Sondheim to write five originals for his 1990 crime comedy Dick Tracy, with three of the songs appearing on the accompanying Madonna album I’m Breathless. Performed on stage by Madonna at the 63rd Academy Awards, the smoky jazz ballad ‘Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)’ saw Sondheim claim the Oscar for Best Original Song. He could add the slender statuette to the eight Tony Awards and eight Grammy Awards he won during the course of his career, plus the Pulitzer Prize for Drama which he received alongside James Lapine in 1985 for Sunday in the Park with George.
He provided the score for the Alain Resnais and Jean-Paul Belmondo collaboration Stavisky, and songs for the films Reds and The Birdcage. Back on Broadway, he composed the song ‘Hollywood and Vine’ for the George Furth play Twigs, and furnished fresh lyrics for the operetta Candide by his old chum Leonard Bernstein. On television he played a supporting role in the 1974 adaptation of the play June Moon by George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner, and made a guest appearance as himself in the ‘Yokel Chords’ episode of The Simpsons.
When it came to his own musicals, Sondheim engaged in a sometimes copious process of revision. He said that the turning point for Merrily We Roll Along arrived in 1985, when James Lapine staged a production of the show at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, replacing the opening number ‘Rich and Happy’ with ‘That Frank’ and casting more experienced actors as the leads. Sondheim and Furth continued to tinker with the musical until a 1992 production in Leicester convinced them that its flaws had been fixed.
In 1987, Sondheim was compelled to write four new songs for Follies as the show was staged in the West End with a substantially revised book by James Goldman. The playwright and the producer Cameron Mackintosh agreed to shift some of the focus away from the character of Ben, but Sondheim continued to prefer the ambiance of the original. Songs were added and subtracted from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Into the Woods, and Passion, which in subsequent performances in London and on Broadway sometimes combined several roles.
In the years following Passion, Sondheim finally agreed to the public performance of Saturday Night, describing his fondness for his first professional musical after witnessing an off-Broadway production in 2000. He celebrated his 70th birthday with a concert at the Library of Congress, where guests performed a selection of songs he wished he had written, while Nathan Lane, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Davis Gaines revived his old Yale musical The Frogs. With seven new songs by Sondheim and a book substantially revised and expanded by Lane, an ‘even more freely adapted’ version of The Frogs made its debut on Broadway in 2004.
In the meantime Sondheim and John Weidman had begun work on a new musical, which was originally titled Wise Guys when it premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop in late 1999. Conceived as a vaudevillian escapade, partially based on the road movies of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and inspired by an unfinished Irving Berlin project, legal issues and rewrites delayed the show, which offered a fanciful account of the brothers Addison and Wilson Mizner from the Klondike gold rush to the Florida real estate boom of the roaring twenties.
Eventually the vaudeville concept was dropped, and the show opened as Bounce at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2003, with Hal Prince back together with Sondheim as the producer and director. The musical also played at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. before another process of rewrites culminated in Road Show, which opened off-Broadway in 2008 at The Public Theater.
In 2002 the Kennedy Center had staged a 15-week repertory festival of six Sondheim musicals. As part of the celebrations, Sondheim engaged in a series of discussions with the essayist Frank Rich of The New York Times, with the pair reprising their conversations at venues across the United States over the course of the next decade. In 2010 the musical revue Sondheim on Sondheim, conceived and directed by James Lapine, received a brief run on Broadway.
Stephen Sondheim was celebrated for his 80th birthday in 2010 with a concert at the Lincoln Center which featured the likes of Elaine Stritch, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, and Donna Murphy among the retinue of his former collaborators. The composer was also toasted at New York City Center and the Proms, while Henry Miller’s Theatre operated by the Roundabout Theatre Company was renamed in his honour. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, his 90th birthday was celebrated in 2020 with the virtual concert Take Me to the World, which boasted an all-star cast headlined by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Meryl Streep, and Raúl Esparza.
While Sondheim admitted that age and expectation had stunted the flow of creativity, he served as a consultant for Tim Burton’s screen adaptation of Sweeney Todd in 2007, and took a more active role when Into the Woods was adapted for film in 2014. At New York City Center he collaborated on more than two dozen jazz interpretations of his songs with the acclaimed trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
And he continued to loom large in the popular consciousness, as his songs featured prominently in the films Joker, Marriage Story, and Knives Out, while he lent his voice to the tail end of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s adaptation of Tick, Tick… Boom! which arrived in theatres and on Netflix in November. A major movie adaptation of West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Tony Kushner, will land on screens later this month.
In 2012 came the announcement that Sondheim was working on a new musical with David Ives, which was later confirmed to be based on two films by the Spanish surrealist director Luis Buñuel. In 2016 a reading of the musical was held at The Public Theater, but amid much speculation theatrical seasons and proposed preview dates came and went. Only in September, during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert a few months prior to his death, did Sondheim confirm the title of the musical as Square One, with Nathan Lane revealing that he and Bernadette Peters were involved in the reading.
Sondheim therefore remained active in the days before his death, attending the opening night of the latest revival of Assassins at the Classic Stage Company on 14 November, and a preview of the gender-swapped revival of Company at the Jacobs Theatre the following night. Then on Wednesday he pulled double duty with a matinee and evening performance of two short documentary plays on Broadway.
Stephen Sondheim married Jeffrey Scott Romley in 2017, and had been spending the bulk of his time during the pandemic at his estate in Roxbury in western Connecticut. As the world of Broadway and beyond paid tribute to the life and legacy of the composer, Sondheim managed to have the last word courtesy of an interview conducted with The New York Times last Sunday. Typically eschewing his reputation for introversion and anxiety-laced ambivalence, Sondheim joked about playing the score from an upcoming musical called ‘Fat Chance’ and reflected on the lifespan of his favourite shows, saying ‘I’ve been lucky’.
