Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter who reshaped the American musical theater within the second half of the twentieth century along with his clever, intricately rhymed lyrics, his use of evocative melodies and his willingness to deal with uncommon topics, has died. He was 91.
Sondheim’s dying was introduced by Rick Miramontez, president of DKC/O&M. Sondheim’s Texas-based legal professional, Rick Pappas, instructed The New York Instances the composer died Friday at his house in Roxbury, Connecticut.
Sondheim influenced a number of generations of theater songwriters, significantly with such landmark musicals as “Firm,” “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd,” that are thought-about amongst his greatest work. His most well-known ballad, “Ship within the Clowns,” has been recorded lots of of occasions, together with by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins.
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The artist refused to repeat himself, discovering inspiration for his exhibits in such various topics as an Ingmar Bergman film (“A Little Night time Music”), the opening of Japan to the West (“Pacific Overtures”), French painter Georges Seurat (“Sunday within the Park With George”), Grimm’s fairy tales (“Into the Woods”) and even the killers of American presidents (“Assassins”), amongst others.
Tributes rapidly flooded social media as performers and writers alike saluted a large of the theater. “We will be singing your songs endlessly,” wrote Lea Salonga. Aaron Tveit wrote: “We’re so fortunate to have what you’ve given the world.”
“The theater has misplaced one in all its biggest geniuses and the world has misplaced one in all its biggest and most authentic writers. Sadly, there’s now a large within the sky,” producer Cameron Waterproof coat wrote in tribute. Music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire tweeted: “For these of us who love new musical theater: we reside in a world that Sondheim constructed.”
Six of Sondheim’s musicals gained Tony Awards for greatest rating, and he additionally obtained a Pulitzer Prize (“Sunday within the Park”), an Academy Award (for the music “Sooner or Later” from the movie “Dick Tracy”), 5 Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In 2008, he obtained a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
Sondheim’s music and lyrics gave his exhibits a darkish, dramatic edge, whereas earlier than him, the dominant tone of musicals was frothy and comedian. He was typically criticized as a composer of unhummable songs, a badge that didn’t hassle Sondheim. Frank Sinatra, who had a success with Sondheim’s “Ship within the Clowns,” as soon as complained: “He may make me quite a bit happier if he’d write extra songs for saloon singers like me.”
To theater followers, Sondheim’s sophistication and brilliance made him an icon. A Broadway theater was named after him. A New York journal cowl requested “Is Sondheim God?” The Guardian newspaper as soon as supplied this query: “Is Stephen Sondheim the Shakespeare of musical theatre?’
A supreme wordsmith and an avid participant of phrase video games, Sondheim’s pleasure of language shone by. “The other of left is true/The other of proper is mistaken/So anybody who’s left is mistaken, proper?” he wrote in “Anybody Can Whistle.” In “Firm,” he penned the strains: “Good issues get higher/Unhealthy will get worse/Wait — I believe I meant that in reverse.”
He supplied the three ideas obligatory for a songwriter in his first quantity of collected lyrics — Content material Dictates Kind, Much less Is Extra, and God Is within the Particulars. All these truisms, he wrote, have been “within the service of Readability, with out which nothing else issues.” Collectively, they led to gorgeous strains like: “It’s a really quick highway from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension.”
Taught by no much less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical right into a darker, richer and extra mental place. “For those who consider a theater lyric as a brief story, as I do, then each line has the load of a paragraph,” he wrote in his 2010 e-book, “Ending the Hat,” the primary quantity of his assortment of lyrics and feedback.
Early in his profession, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for 2 exhibits thought-about to be classics of the American stage, “West Facet Story” (1957) and “Gypsy” (1959). “West Facet 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, instructed the backstage story of the last word stage mom and the daughter who grew as much as be Gypsy Rose Lee.
It was not till 1962 that Sondheim wrote each music and lyrics for a Broadway present, and it turned out to be a smash — the bawdy “A Humorous Factor Occurred on the Approach to the Discussion board,” starring Zero Mostel as a wily slave in historic Rome craving to be free.
But his subsequent present, “Anybody Can Whistle” (1964), flopped, working solely 9 performances however reaching cult standing after its forged recording was launched. Sondheim’s 1965 lyric collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers — “Do I Hear a Waltz?” — additionally turned out to be problematic. The musical, primarily based on the play “The Time of the Cuckoo,” ran for six months however was an sad expertise for each males, who didn’t get alongside.
It was “Firm,” which opened on Broadway in April 1970, that cemented Sondheim’s repute. The episodic adventures of a bachelor (performed by Dean Jones) with an incapacity to decide to a relationship was hailed as capturing the obsessive nature of striving, self-centered New Yorkers. The present, produced and directed by Hal Prince, gained Sondheim his first Tony for greatest rating. “The Girls Who Lunch” turned an ordinary for Elaine Stritch.
The next 12 months, Sondheim wrote the rating for “Follies,” a have a look at the shattered hopes and disillusioned desires of ladies who had appeared in lavish Ziegfeld-style revues. The music and lyrics paid homage to nice composers of the previous reminiscent of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and the Gershwins.
In 1973, “A Little Night time Music,” starring Glynis Johns and Len Cariou, opened. Primarily based on Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer time Night time,” this rueful romance of middle-age lovers comprises the music “Ship within the Clowns,” which gained recognition exterior the present. A revival in 2009 starred Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones was nominated for a greatest revival Tony.
“Pacific Overtures,” with a e-book by John Weidman, adopted in 1976. The musical, additionally produced and directed by Prince, was not a monetary success, however it demonstrated Sondheim’s dedication to offbeat materials, filtering its story of the westernization of Japan by a hybrid American-Kabuki fashion.
In 1979, Sondheim and Prince collaborated on what many imagine to be Sondheim’s masterpiece, the bloody but usually darkly humorous “Sweeney Todd.” An formidable work, it starred Cariou within the title position as a murderous barber whose clients find yourself in meat pies baked by Todd’s keen confederate, performed by Angela Lansbury.
The Sondheim-Prince partnership collapsed two years later, after “Merrily We Roll Alongside,” a musical that traced a friendship backward from its characters’ compromised center age to their idealistic youth. The present, primarily based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, solely ran two weeks on Broadway. However once more, as with “Anybody Can Whistle,” its authentic forged recording helped “Merrily We Roll Alongside” to turn out to be a favorite amongst musical-theater buffs.
“Sunday within the Park,” written with James Lapine, could also be Sondheim’s most private present. A story of uncompromising creative creation, it instructed the story of artist Georges Seurat, performed by Mandy Patinkin. The painter submerges every thing in his life, together with his relationship along with his mannequin (Bernadette Peters), for his artwork. It was most just lately revived on Broadway in 2017 with Jake Gyllenhaal.
Three years after “Sunday” debuted, Sondheim collaborated once more with Lapine, this time on the fairy-tale musical “Into the Woods.” The present starred Peters as a glamorous witch and dealt primarily with the turbulent relationships between dad and mom and kids, utilizing such well-known fairy-tale characters as Cinderella, Little Purple Using Hood and Rapunzel. It was most just lately revived in the summertime of 2012 in Central Park by The Public Theater.
“Assassins” opened off-Broadway in 1991 and it appeared on the women and men who wished to kill presidents, from John Wilkes Sales space to John Hinckley. The present obtained principally unfavourable evaluations in its authentic incarnation, however a lot of these critics reversed themselves 13 years later when the present was finished on Broadway and gained a Tony for greatest musical revival.
“Ardour” was one other extreme have a look at obsession, this time a determined lady, performed by Donna Murphy, in love with a good-looking soldier. Regardless of successful the best-musical Tony in 1994, the present barely managed a six-month run.
A brand new model of “The Frogs,” with extra songs by Sondheim and a revised e-book by Nathan Lane (who additionally starred within the manufacturing), performed Lincoln Heart through the summer time of 2004. The present, primarily based on the Aristophanes comedy, initially had been finished 20 years earlier within the Yale College swimming pool.
One in all his extra troubled exhibits was “Street Present,” which reunited Sondheim and Weidman and spent years being labored on. This story of the Mizner brothers, whose get-rich schemes within the early a part of the twentieth century lastly made it to the Public Theater in 2008 after going by a number of totally different titles, administrators and casts.
He had been engaged on a brand new musical with “Venus in Fur” playwright David Ives, who referred to as his collaborator a genius. “Not solely are his musicals sensible, however I can’t consider one other theater one that has so chronicled an entire age so eloquently,” Ives stated in 2013. “He’s the spirit of the age in a sure manner.”
Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, right into a rich household, the one son of gown producer Herbert Sondheim and Helen Fox Sondheim. At 10, his dad and mom divorced and Sondheim’s mom purchased a home in Doylestown, Pa., the place one in all their Bucks County neighbours was lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, whose son, James, was Sondheim’s roommate at boarding college. It was Oscar Hammerstein who turned the younger man’s skilled mentor and an excellent buddy.
He had a solitary childhood, one which concerned verbal abuse from his chilly mom. He obtained a letter in his 40s from her telling him that she regretted giving beginning to him. He continued to help her financially and to see her sometimes however didn’t attend her funeral.
Sondheim attended Williams Faculty in Massachusetts, the place he majored in music. After commencement, he obtained a two-year fellowship to review with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt.
One in all Sondheim’s first jobs was writing scripts for the tv present “Topper,” which ran for 2 years (1953-1955). On the similar time, Sondheim wrote his first musical, “Saturday Night time,” the story of a gaggle of younger folks in Brooklyn in Nineteen Twenties. It was to have opened on Broadway in 1955, however its producer died simply because the musical was about to enter manufacturing, and the present was scrapped. “Saturday Night time” lastly arrived in New York in 1997 in a small, off-Broadway manufacturing.
Sondheim wrote occasionally for the films. He collaborated with actor Anthony Perkins on the script for the 1973 homicide thriller “The Final of Sheila,” and moreover his work on “Dick Tracy” (1990), wrote scores for such films as Alain Resnais’ “Stavisky” (1974) and Warren Beatty’s “Reds” (1981).
Through the years, there have been many Broadway revivals of Sondheim exhibits, particularly “Gypsy,” which had reincarnations starring Angela Lansbury (1974), Tyne Daly (1989) and Peters (2003). However there additionally have been productions of “A Humorous Factor,” one with Phil Silvers in 1972 and one other starring Nathan Lane in 1996; “Into the Woods” with Vanessa Williams in 2002; and even of Sondheim’s much less profitable exhibits reminiscent of “Assassins” and “Pacific Overtures,” each in 2004. “Sweeney Todd” has been produced in opera homes all over the world. A reimagined “West Facet Story” opened on Broadway in 2020 and this 12 months an off-Broadway “Assassins” opened off-Broadway at Traditional Stage Firm and a scrambled “Firm” opened on Broadway with the gender of the protagonist switched. A movie model of “West Facet Story” is to open this December, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Sondheim’s songs have been used extensively in revues, the best-known being “Facet by Facet by Sondheim” (1976) on Broadway and “Placing It Collectively,” off-Broadway with Julie Andrews in 1992 and on Broadway with Carol Burnett in 1999. The New York Philharmonic placed on a star-studded “Firm” in 2011 with Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Colbert. Tunes from his musicals have recently popped up all over the place from “Marriage Story” to “The Morning Present.”
An HBO documentary directed by Lapine, “Six by Sondheim,” aired in 2013 and revealed that he appreciated to compose mendacity down and typically loved a cocktail to loosen up as he wrote. He even revealed that he actually solely fell in love after reaching 60, first with the dramatist Peter Jones after which in his final years with Jeff Romley.
“Sometimes somebody comes alongside that essentially shifts a whole artwork kind. Stephen Sondheim was a kind of. As tens of millions mourn his passing I additionally wish to specific my gratitude for all he has given to me and so many extra,” singer and actor Hugh Jackman wrote by way of Twitter.
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