Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim (born March 22, 1930, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 26, 2021, Roxbury, Connecticut) was an American composer and lyricist whose brilliance in matching words and music in dramatic situations broke new ground for Broadway musical theater.

Precocious as a child, Sondheim showed an early musical aptitude among other wide-ranging interests. He studied piano and organ, and at age 15 he wrote a musical at George School in Bucks county, Pennsylvania. Under the tutelage of a family friend, Oscar Hammerstein II, he studied musical theater. He also studied music at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and wrote college shows there. When he graduated in 1950, he received the Hutchinson Prize for composition, a fellowship. He then studied further in New York City with the composer Milton Babbitt.

In the early 1950s Sondheim wrote scripts in Hollywood for the television series Topper. After returning to New York City, he wrote incidental music for the play The Girls of Summer (1956). He made his first significant mark on Broadway, though, as the lyricist for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, which opened in 1957. He then wrote the lyrics for Gypsy (1959; music by Jule Styne).

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—based on comedies by the Roman playwright Plautus—opened on Broadway in 1962, with music and lyrics by Sondheim. It ran for 964 performances and won the Tony Award for best musical. Two years later, however, his Anyone Can Whistle closed after only nine performances.

After contributing lyrics to Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965; music by Richard Rodgers), Sondheim focused solely on shows in which he wrote both music and lyrics. He won Tony Awards for best score for Company (1970), on contemporary marriage and bachelorhood; Follies (1971), a tribute to early 20th-century Broadway that includes many pastiche songs; A Little Night Music (1973; film 1977), based on Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night (1955); and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979; film 2007), a macabre tale set in Victorian-era London. All were either produced or directed by Harold Prince, as were Pacific Overtures (1976), in which Sondheim looked to Japanese Kabuki theater for stylized effects, and Merrily We Roll Along (1981), adapted from a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

Sondheim next collaborated with playwright-director James Lapine to create Sunday in the Park with George (1984), a musical inspired by the painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by pointillist Georges Seurat. Sondheim and Lapine paired again for Into the Woods (1987; film 2014), which deconstructs and interweaves the plots of familiar fairy tales, and Passion (1994), a melodramatic romance based on the Italian film Passione d’amore (1981). Both shows won the Tony Award for best score. Assassins (1990) explores the lives of nine historical characters, such as John Wilkes Booth, who either assassinated U.S. presidents or attempted to do so. Later Sondheim works include Bounce (2003; retitled Road Show in 2008), about the colourful adventures of a pair of early 20th-century American entrepreneurs.

Sondheim’s acerbic lyrics hit responsive chords with many theatergoers. Most critics agree that his work marked a break from more traditional and sentimental musical comedies of the earlier decades of the century. Several revues of his work were staged, among them Side by Side by Sondheim (1976), Putting It Together (1992), and Sondheim on Sondheim (2010). In 2000 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theater/film, and in 2008 he was honored with a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement in the theater. The book Finishing the Hat (2010) is a collection of Sondheim’s lyrics, with his own commentaries on them.

Sondheim, an enthusiast for games and puzzles, cowrote two nonmusical mysteries: the film The Last of Sheila (1973), with Anthony Perkins, and the play Getting Away with Murder (1996), with George Furth. He also notably wrote five songs for the movie Dick Tracy (1990), winning an Academy Award for “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man).” The HBO documentary Six by Sondheim (2013) chronicled his life and artistic process. In 2015 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.