NEW YORK (REUTERS) – Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who helped American musical theatre evolve past pure leisure and attain new inventive heights with works reminiscent of West Aspect Story, Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd, died early on Friday (Nov 26) on the age of 91, his publicist mentioned.
The musical nice died at his house in Roxbury, Connecticut, spokesperson Kathryn Zuckerman informed Reuters by e-mail, saying she had little further data. The information was reported earlier by the New York Instances.
Sondheim, whose eight lifetime Tony Awards surpassed the whole of some other composer, began early, studying the artwork of musical theatre when he was simply a teen from The Sound of Music lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.
In a tweet on Friday, New York Mayor Invoice de Blasio mentioned of Sondheim: “One of many brightest lights of Broadway is darkish tonight. Could he relaxation in peace.”
Actor and singer Anna Kendrick referred to as Sondheim’s dying “a devastating loss”.
“Performing his work has been among the many biggest privileges of my profession,” Kendrick added in a tweet.
Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, has referred to as him musical theatre’s biggest lyricist.
Sondheim’s most profitable musicals included Into the Woods, which opened on Broadway in 1987 and used kids’s fairy tales to untangle grownup obsessions, the 1979 thriller Sweeney Todd a few murderous barber in London whose victims are served as meat pies, and 1962’s A Humorous Factor Occurred on the Method to the Discussion board, a vaudeville-style comedy set in historical Rome.
“I like the theatre as a lot as music, and the entire thought of getting throughout to an viewers and making them snicker, making them cry – simply making them really feel – is paramount to me,” Sondheim mentioned in a 2013 interview with Nationwide Public Radio.
A number of of Sondheim’s hit musicals had been changed into motion pictures, together with the 2014 movie Into the Woods, starring Meryl Streep, and the 2007 Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp. A brand new movie model of West Aspect Story, for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s music, opens subsequent month.
His songs had been celebrated for his or her sharp wit and perception into trendy life and for giving voice to advanced characters, however few of them made the pop charts.
‘Clowns’ hit
He had a success, nevertheless, with the Grammy-winning Ship within the Clowns from his 1973 musical A Little Night time Music. It was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Judy Collins, amongst others.
Considered one of Sondheim’s biggest triumphs was his Pulitzer Prize for the 1984 musical Sunday within the Park with George, about Nineteenth-century French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat.
As Sondheim collected accolades, New York Metropolis’s Broadway theater trade underwent many adjustments. It had a key function in American tradition by means of the Fifties, with many Broadway songs making the pop charts, however misplaced significance as rock music gained a maintain on the general public beginning within the Sixties.
More and more, musicals borrowed materials from tv and films, as an alternative of the opposite method round, composer Mark N. Grant wrote in his guide The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical. Sondheim shared the view that Broadway had skilled decline, expressing it repeatedly in interviews.
“There are such a lot of types of leisure, theater is turning into extra marginalised,” he informed British newspaper The Instances in 2012.
However Broadway musicals additionally turned extra inventive and Sondheim performed a key function of their evolution, critics mentioned. He explored such weighty matters as political assassinations in Assassins, the human want for household and the pull of dysfunctional relationships in “Into the Woods”, social inequality in Sweeney Todd, and Western imperialism in Pacific Overtures.
He additionally developed new strategies for presenting a play. As a substitute of telling a narrative from starting to finish, he would leap in time to discover a single theme. It was referred to as the “idea musical”.
Broadway audiences had been launched to Sondheim with West Aspect Story in 1957. The story a few love affair between a Puerto Rican lady, Maria, and a white boy, Tony, in working-class Manhattan was changed into an Oscar-winning movie in 1961. The central characters expressed their infatuation within the songs Maria, Someplace and Tonight.
Battle with mom
Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, in New York Metropolis to prosperous Jewish mother and father who labored in style. He described his early childhood as a lonely one, with servants as his most important firm.
After his mother and father break up up when he was 10 years outdated, Sondheim moved together with his mom to rural Pennsylvania, the place she purchased a farm. He later mentioned his mom took out her wrath over the divorce on him. He discovered a surrogate household within the close by family of Hammerstein and his spouse, Dorothy.
Hammerstein, who together with accomplice Richard Rodgers created the basic musicals Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, taught the teenage Sondheim write musical theatre.
After Sondheim turned well-known, he mentored others on Broadway. When Miranda started work on a rap musical about American founding father Alexander Hamilton, Sondheim inspired and critiqued him. The play turned a smash hit on Broadway in 2015.
In field workplace success, Sondheim fell in need of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer behind The Phantom of the Opera and Cats with whom Sondheim shared a birthday.
Sondheim pushed audiences, which typically resulted in field workplace flops.
A few of his least commercially profitable performs had been lauded by critics. These included the 1976 Pacific Overtures, which depicted Japan throughout an age of Western colonialism, and his 1990 off-Broadway manufacturing Assassins about real-life figures who every got down to kill an American president.
Sondheim had many followers within the tutorial world. In 1994, a quarterly journal referred to as the Sondheim Evaluate was based to look at his work, 5 years after Oxford College in England named him a visiting professor of drama.
His devotees celebrated the acerbic irony of his lyrics, which they described as commenting on every thing from the bounds of America’s melting pot to the draw back of marriage.
These traces from The Girls Who Lunch in his 1970 musical Firm contained a typical slice of Sondheim’s wit: “Here is to the women who play spouse/Aren’t they an excessive amount of?/Holding home however clutching a duplicate of ‘LIFE’/Simply to keep up a correspondence.”
Sondheim, who was homosexual, didn’t dwell with a romantic accomplice till age 61, in response to a 2000 profile in The New York Instances Journal, during which he mentioned his romantic relationships had been hardly ever intense or long-lasting.
