A critic's tribute to Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, a master of storytelling in song.
The theater legend behind seminal works from “West Side Story” to “Sweeney Todd” has a show on Broadway and a movie due soon.” the first of his magnificent two-volume edition of collected lyrics and commentaries, Sondheim stressed that “every lyric in this collection is prompted by the beginning, middle or end of a culmination of incidents before it.” “In Buddy’s Eyes” from “Follies” may seem like a beautiful middle-aged love number when performed in a cabaret.
In recounting Hammerstein‘s profound influence, Sondheim recalled to Eyre: “I showed him everything I wrote from the age of fifteen on, and he treated it absolutely on a level with professional work. … As a result of Oscar I think I probably knew more about writing musicals at the age of nineteen than most people do at the age of ninety.”
Sondheim didn’t disagree. In fact, he acknowledged that the experience was as consequential as “West Side Story,” the 1957 show in which he made his Broadway debut as a lyricist, alongside composer Leonard Bernstein, book writer Arthur Laurents and director-choreographer Jerome Robbins. Sondheim harbored resentment that the show’s star, Ethel Merman, didn’t want to take a gamble on him as a composer. But what the team achieved was nothing short of groundbreaking — a musical that revealed new possibilities of dramatic complexity through its character-centered vision.A doc illuminates the dark hold of Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ in a Classic Stage Company benefit reminding us why theater has been such a pandemic loss.
But these conceptually daring shows with Prince, while not always commercially successful, replenished a Broadway landscape that had grown fallow. Sondheim didn’t invent the concept musical, but he revealed with unsurpassed style that it could think and feel at the same time. More significant, perhaps, he showed that it could deal with emotions that were ambiguous, repressed or even downright contradictory.
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