Sondheim was hatching ‘virile’ work at 91
Tributes to lyricist and composer, who died last week, as impresario reveals creative drive to the last
STEPHEN SONDHEIM, musical theatre’s most influential composer-lyricist of the past half-century, was working on his most “virile and inventive” work yet at the time of his death on Friday.
The writer behind such classic musicals as Sweeney Todd, Company and Into
the Woods played songs from his unfinished latest project to West End producer and close friend Cameron Mackintosh just days before he died at the age of 91.
Sondheim’s lawyer described his death as sudden.
Last Sunday evening, Mackintosh spent an hour and a half on the phone with Sondheim “working through the score” of his new musical.
“He wanted me to listen to it and give him some feedback,” Mackintosh told The Sunday Telegraph.
The producer, who was responsible for the acclaimed 1987 London revival of Sondheim’s musical Company, described the new work as “a very surreal piece.”
“There were some brilliant lyrics in it and some really good tunes. I kept saying: I like that, it would be good if you could extend this tune a bit more.”
Entitled Square One, the show was inspired by two films from the Spanish surrealist director Luis Buñuel: 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and 1962’s The Exterminating Angel.
According to Mackintosh: “There were many things that only [Sondheim] would manage to make extraordinary.”
Restaurants, and food in general, are key themes in the new show, which made Mackintosh, with whom Sondheim frequently stayed when he was in London, “roar with laughter”.
“There is someone writing so brilliantly about food, and restaurant menus, and this is a man who can’t even boil an egg. He wasn’t very practical in that way.”
Tomorrow at 7pm, West End theatres will dim their lights for two minutes in memory of Sondheim.
In the lead-up to the tribute, his friends and collaborators remember Stephen Sondheim:
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Whenever I met Stephen I was slightly in awe of him. None the less, we had a smile backstage at the celebration of [the director] Hal Prince at the Majestic Theatre, New York [in 2019]. He was a little frail. He was sitting at the back, and I walked past because it was dark. He said: “Hi Andrew, it’s Steve!”
I feel that many people are going to be talking about him as a great lyricist. He’s peerless in that regard. But I want to raise my hand up about him as a composer and I think he always regarded himself first and foremost as a composer.
Seeing Company in 1970 made me aware of his extraordinary musical ability and I recognised what a great melodist he was. I’ll never forget seeing Follies at the Winter Garden, New York. His work in that is remarkable, even the pastiche is amazing. In A Little Night Music, the whole thing is in 3/4 time – the genius of that is that after a while you forget that it is.
We nearly collaborated once. In the late 1970s Stephen and I had lunch and I brought up the rivalry between two 19th-century opera composers, Ruggero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini.
There was a huge falling out between them. I said: “Why don’t we do something along these lines?” and he said: “Actually a musical about [musical] rivalry would be really interesting.” I don’t know what would have happened, whether it would have been us working side by side … Nothing came of it, but I remember it well.
Cameron Mackintosh
I knew him for 45 years. Even though I only produced a handful of his shows, there was something that clicked between us and he became my oldest friend.
Our relationship wasn’t obsessed with what was going on in the theatre. We went on holiday together: everywhere from South America to my boat to my estate in Scotland. I’ve got pictures of him wading through the lochs and climbing down the hills in Rio de Janeiro. He loved getting off the boat and exploring. He was incredibly curious to find new places. He used to dash around. He didn’t like sitting on a boat and ordering a cocktail.
He considered London his other home, not his second home. He would come over and use my house as his base for many years. He used to play and compose on both my pianos. On occasions I had Claude-Michel Schönberg [ Les Miserables] and Stephen writing different shows in my house. They would meet at breakfast.
I would also go and visit him. I saw the original production of Sweeney Todd in New York and I remember walking all the way from the theatre across town to Steve’s house. I was so bowled over by it I had to tell him.
It’s a masterwork.
He loved a hit, and that’s one of the reasons why when Merrily We Roll Along vanished quickly [his 1981 musical closed after just 16 performances] it was such a blow for him. [But] he was a realist. He knew that many of the subjects he wanted to write about weren’t necessarily the kind of stories that had blockbuster runs.
People will be talking about him in a hundred years. I said that to him regularly. Steve’s work is with my [licensing] company, Music Theatre International. I said “Isn’t it fantastic that every year, more and more people do all your shows?” He said it’s fantastic that everyone’s celebrating it. He looked at me and went, “Oh, I see Cameron, I’ll get the cachet and you’ll get the cash!”
The emotional observations in his lyrics are extraordinary for a man who did not have that many relationships. In my 40 years, I only knew of two and the biggest one is Jeff [Romley], who has been with him all his last years. That brilliant mind was still working right to the last minute.
Is there a particular stand-out song for me? Not a Day Goes By, and there won’t be a day that goes by without me thinking of him.
Dominic Cooke
Sondheim was very collaborative, very open and interested in how I was going to do the production of Follies that I directed for the National Theatre in 2017. I went round a couple of times to his house to have dinner with him and we worked on different versions. He was funny, curious, easy-going.
He understood that theatre is a living breathing medium, he was the opposite of those who always want their pieces only to be done in a certain way.
One of the last times I saw him he had been given an award and I made a speech about him and afterwards he said to me, I really don’t recognise myself in what you said. I had been talking about why his work is so extraordinary – but he never experienced himself as someone who had figured out what they’re doing.
He would never begin the process of writing a musical unless he felt he had a new form with which to explore an idea.
Sometimes I almost think he was working in the wrong medium, he was so avant-garde.
I think Merrily We Roll Along was a flop when it first premiered because it was almost too groundbreaking to be playing in 1,200-seat theatres to audiences expecting some musical theatre – what he was offering was something much more complex, much more radical.
There’s a line that the character Sally says at the end of Follies: “I should have died before, I should have died the first time” (she’s talking about when she tried to kill herself). It hadn’t been performed in a major production until we did it – they’d taken it out because it was too dark.
But now I think Sondheim’s arrived at his time because we’re more comfortable with ambivalence these days, we don’t want resolutions because we don’t really believe them. The right time for Follies was 50 years after it was written. We had caught up with him.
The playwright Sondheim is closest to is Shakespeare. The reason is that the answers to how to perform Shakespeare are all in the language – you have to look closely at how it’s all put together. With Sondheim similarly it’s in the construction of the songs – both music and lyrics. That sort of mastery of form, where it tells you about a character’s emotional and psychological life, is a really unusual talent. Mozart’s another one who did it. But it’s very rare.