The songwriter who became musical theater’s Shakespeare
Stephen Sondheim 1930–2021
Stephen Sondheim reinvented the American musical with every new work. After making his Broadway debut with lyrics for 1957’s West Side Story and 1959’s Gypsy—both stage sensations that became Hollywood hits—the songwriter dedicated himself to pushing musical theater into uncharted territory. He adapted the comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus into 1962’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; reworked an Ingmar Bergman film into A Little Night Music, written almost entirely in waltz time; and assembled everyone who had tried to assassinate an American president in the 1990 black comedy Assassins. Some critics accused him of being needlessly highbrow—his most devoted followers produced an academic quarterly, The Sondheim Review—but Sondheim insisted he was aiming at a mass audience. “I’m not writing for myself,” the lyricist and composer said in 2014. “I’m writing to entertain, to make people laugh and cry and think.”
He was born in Manhattan, the only child of a dress manufacturer father and a mother who designed gowns, said The Times (U.K.). Sondheim became fascinated with the theater at age 9, after his father took him to see the musical Very Warm for May. “It was a rare happy memory in a childhood overshadowed by incessant marital strife and parental neglect.” His father left the family for another woman when Sondheim was 10; his mother took her fury out on her son, subjecting him to extreme verbal abuse and “coming on” to him sexually in his teenage years. But she did Sondheim an “inadvertent favor” by moving with Stephen to a Pennsylvania farm, where Oscar Hammerstein was a neighbor. At age 15, Sondheim presented the renowned lyricist with a completed musical. Hammerstein proclaimed it “the worst thing I’ve ever read,” then gave him an afternoon-long tutorial on musical theater. Sondheim said he learned more about songwriting in those few hours “than most people learn in a lifetime.”
After studying music at Williams College in Massachusetts, he “briefly earned a living in Hollywood as a TV telescripter,” said Variety. His Broadway breakthrough came after he was introduced to Leonard Bernstein, who hired Sondheim to write the lyrics for West Side Story, his musical updating of Romeo and Juliet. The show launched Sondheim’s career, but he considered many of his lyrics “embarrassing,” saying they “melt in the mouth as gracelessly as peanut butter.” From then on, he would work relentlessly at his wordcraft, sculpting such stunning lines as Night Music’s “It’s a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension.”
Many of his shows “were warmly received by critics but didn’t prove commercially successful,” said The Wall Street Journal. A Funny Thing Happened—the first Broadway show for which he wrote both lyrics and music—was his biggest commercial hit, with a run of 964 performances on the Great White Way. His follow-up, Anyone Can Whistle, lasted nine performances, said
The Washington Post. It was 1970’s Company, an acerbic look at marriage through the eyes of a commitment-phobic bachelor, “that cemented Sondheim’s reputation” and earned him his first of eight Tony Awards. His “most personal show,” Sunday in the Park With George, won Sondheim the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama. It tells the story of painter Georges Seurat, who sidelines romance in his obsessive pursuit of artistic glory. Sondheim, who came out as gay at age 40, kept a tight lid on his personal life. But he wasn’t a loner, and considered the cast and crew of each show a family. “It may be a temporary family,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, “but it always gives me a solid sense of belonging to something outside of myself.”