Josh Mercado

W0659575
Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Joshua Sondheim, born in March 22, 1930 and still living to this day, has contributed a
heavy load to the world of musical theatre for over 50 years. He was born in New York City to
father and mother, Etta Janet and Herbert Sondheim. His father was a dress manufacturer and his
mother was a designer. They divorced in 1942 and Sondheim moved to Doylestown,
Pennsylvania with his mother. He began studying piano and organ at a young age, and he was
already practicing songwriting as a student at the George School.
In Pennsylvania, Sondheim became friends with the son of Broadway lyricist and
producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave him advice and tutelage in musical theater as well as
serving as a surrogate father during a time of disorder. In his teenage years, Sondheim had wrote
a satire about his school, the musical By George!, which he thought his mentor would love and
thus asked for feedback. Hammerstein in fact thought the project needed tons of work and
offered honest criticism, which Sondheim would later see as invaluable. Sondheim also worked
as an assistant on 1947's Allegro, one of Hammerstein's theater collaborations with composer
Richard Rodgers, with the experience having long-lasting implications on the his approach to his
work.
He attended Williams College, where he majored in music and also performed in two
productions, Phinneys Rainbow and All That Glitters. He also performed duties in the
preparation and rehearsals of the Rogers and Hammerstein productions of South Pacific and The
King and I. Upon graduation he won the Hutchinson Prize, which enabled him to study
composition at Princeton University. After graduating from the school in 1950, he studied further
with composer Milton Babbitt and moved to New York City.
In the early 1950s, Stephen Sondheim moved to Los Angeles, California and wrote
scripts for the television series Topper and The Last Word. Returning to New York, he composed
background music for the play The Girls of Summer in 1956. An acquaintance with director
Arthur Laurents brought Sondheim into contact with composer Leonard Bernstein and
choreographer Jerome Robbins, who were looking for a lyricist for a contemporary musical
adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Writing the song lyrics for West Side Story, which
opened in 1957, Sondheim thus became part of one of Broadway's most successful productions
of all time.
His next theater project was similarly high-profile: He teamed up with composer Jule
Styne to write the lyrics for Gypsy, which opened in 1959 with Ethel Merman as the lead. After

musical contributions to 1960's Invitation to a March, Sondheim then wrote both lyrics and
music for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a farce based on comedies by
ancient playwright Plautus. It opened in 1962, ran for nearly 1,000 performances and won a Tony
Award for best musical.
Sondheim won several more Tony Awards in the 1970s for his collaborations with
producer/director Harold Prince, including the musicals Company (1970), a meditation on
contemporary marriage and commitment; Follies (1971), an homage to the Ziegfeld Follies and
early Broadway; A Little Night Music (1973), a period comedy-drama that included the hit song
"Send in the Clowns"; and Sweeney Todd (1979), a gory melodrama set in Victorian London
destined to become a 2007 Tim Burton film.
He became known for his witty, conversational lyrics, his seamless merging of words
with music, and the variety of his source materials. Pacific Overtures (1976) was partially
inspired by haiku poetry and Japanese Kabuki Theater, and 1981's Merrily We Roll Along was
adapted from a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. He also later created Marry Me
A Little which was a revue of songs that were obscure and discarded form his other shows. He
also wrote the original score of the film Reds by Warren Beatty.
In the 1980s, Sondheim collaborated several times with playwright/director James
Lapine. Their Sunday in the Park with George, which opened in 1984, was inspired by the iconic
painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, and 1987's Into the Woods was a
collage of plots from classic fairy tales. (The latter was eventually made into a 2014 film)
He was asked to translate Mahagonny-Songspiel, although he did not state the time. He
said, "But, I'm not a Brecht/Weill fan and that's really all there is to it. I'm an apostate: I like
Weill's music when he came to America better than I do his stuff before ... I love The Threepenny
Opera but, outside of The Threepenny Opera, the music of his I like is the stuff he wrote in
America when he was not writing with Brecht, when he was writing for Broadway." He was
also asked to musicalize Nathanael West's A Cool Million with James Lapine around 1982, but
he refused.
He worked with William Goldman on Singing Out Loud, a movie musical, in 1992.
Sondheim stated that Goldman wrote one or two drafts of the script and Sondheim wrote six and
a half songs, only to have director Rob Reiner lose interest in the project. The songs "Dawn" and
"Sand" from the project were recorded for the albums Sondheim at the Movies and Unsung
Sondheim. Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein wrote The Race to Urga, scheduled to play at the
Lincoln Center in 1969, but when Jerome Robbins left the project, it went unproduced.
In 1991, was working with Terrence McNally on a musical entitled All Together Now.
McNally said, "Steve was interested in telling the story of a relationship from the present back to
the moment when the couple first met. We worked together a while, but we were both involved
with so many other projects that this one fell through". The script, with concept notes by

McNally and Sondheim, is archived in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the
University of Texas at Austin. The story follows Arden Scott, a 30-something female sculptor,
and Daniel Nevin, a slightly younger, sexually charismatic restaurateur.
He continued to combine various musical genres with sharp lyrical writing and
unexpected subject matter in the 1990s, though some of his work of that decade received less
critical and popular acclaim. Assassins (1990) told the tales of nine presidential assassins in
American history; and Passion, a 1994 collaboration with Lapine, was a melodramatic romance
based on the Italian film Passione d'Amore. He also wrote five songs for the 1990 film Dick
Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna, and won an Academy Award for "Sooner or Later."
His work has also been the subject of several revues, including Side by Side by Sondheim
in 1976, Putting It Together in 1993 and Sondheim on Sondheim in 2010. Broadway has
continued to host Sondheim classics as well, including the 2009 revivals of West Side Story and
A Little Night Music, with the latter starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury. A
revival of Follies with Bernadette Peters was opened in 2011.
He wrote a book of annotations of his lyrics titled Finishing the Hat (2010), a collection
of his lyrics "from productions dating 19541981. In addition to published and unpublished
lyrics from West Side Story, Follies and Company, the tome finds Sondheim discussing his
relationship with Oscar Hammerstein II and his collaborations with composers, actors and
directors throughout his lengthy career." This book, part one of a two-part series, is named after a
song he wrote for Sunday in the Park With George. Sondheim said "It's going to be long. I'm not,
by nature, a prose writer, but I'm literate, and I have a couple of people who are vetting it for me,
whom I trust, who are excellent prose writers." Finishing the Hat was published in October 2010.
The review of the book in The New York Times stated that "The lyrics under consideration here,
written during a 27-year period, aren't presented as fixed and sacred paradigms, carefully
removed from tissue paper for our reverent inspection. They're living, evolving, flawed
organisms, still being shaped and poked and talked to by the man who created them." The book
was number 11 on The New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction list for November 5, 2010.
The follow-up book, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (19812011) was released on
November 22, 2011. The book begins with Sunday in the Park With George, where Finishing the
Hat stopped, and includes sections on his work in movies and television.
Next, a composer named Jonathan Larson. Larson, who had musicalized Nineteen Eighty-Four
and called his work Superbia, had a workshop set up for the musical, which Sondheim attended.
In the musical Tick, Tick... Boom!, the actual phone message left by Sondheim is played, in
which he apologizes for leaving after the show but wants to meet with him sometime, and that he
was impressed with his work. After Larson's death, Sondheim said Larson was one of the few
composers "attempting to blend contemporary pop music with theater music, which doesn't work
very well; he was on his way to finding a real synthesis. A good deal of pop music has interesting

lyrics, but they are not theater lyrics." Sondheim explained that a musical theatre composer
"must have a sense of what is theatrical, of how you use music to tell a story, as opposed to
writing a song. Jonathan understood that instinctively."
The organization, Young Playwrights, founded by Sondheim in 1981, is intended to
introduce young people to writing for the theatre. He is the Executive Vice President.
The Stephen Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts opened December 79, 2007, and
is located at the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center in Fairfield, Iowa. The Center opened with
performances from seven Broadway performers, including Len Cariou, Liz Callaway, and
Richard Kind, all of whom had taken part in the musicals of Sondheim. The center is the first one
in the world named after him.
A Broadway theatre on West 43rd Street in New York City, Henry Miller's Theatre, was
renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on September 15, 2010, in honor of his 80th birthday. In
attendance were Nathan Lane, Patti LuPone, and John Weidman. Sondheim said of the naming,
"I'm deeply embarrassed. Thrilled, but deeply embarrassed. I've always hated my last name. It
just doesn't sing. I mean, it's not Belasco. And it's not Rodgers and it's not Simon. And it's not
Wilson. It just doesn't sing. It sings better than Schoenfeld and Jacobs. But it just doesn't sing."
Lane said of the day, "We love our corporate sponsors and we love their money, but there's
something sacred about naming a theatre, and there's something about this that is right and just."
Sondheim, an enthusiast for games and puzzles, co-wrote two non-musical mysteries: the
film The Last of Sheila (1973), with Anthony Perkins, and the play Getting Away with Murder
(1996), with George Furth. The HBO documentary Six by Sondheim (2013) chronicled his life
and artistic process.
Over the last 50 years, Sondheim has set an unsurpassed standard of brilliance and artistic
integrity in the musical theater. His music, steeped in the history of the stage, is also deeply
informed by the classical tradition and the advances of modern concert music. His words,
unequalled in their wit and virtuosity, have recorded a lifetime of profound, unblinking insight
into the joys and sorrows of life and love.