In Memoriam: Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)

[Like most theater people in the United States, I’ve had a lot of contact with the work of Stephen Sondheim, the esteemed and beloved theater composer and lyricist who died on Friday, 26 November 2021, the day after Thanksgiving.  He was 91. 

[When I was an amateur actor in the army, I played Larry (that’s the husband of Joanne, the character who sings “The Ladies Who Lunch”) in Company back in the early ’70s.  When I came to New York City to train as a professional, I took singing lessons and one of the songs on which I worked—one of the hardest, but loveliest—was “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd.

[Of course, I saw many of Sondheim’s shows—A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which I saw when I was about 15), A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods; West Side Story and Gypsy I only saw on film, not on stage—but the only one I wrote up was Pacific Overtures (probably my favorite—although it’s hard to pick) when I was taking a graduate class in criticism in 1976.

[I’ve already posted that old review, as a tribute to Jonathan Tunick, the orchestrator and arranger for many of Sondheim’s musicals, on the occasion of his winning the fifth Stephen Sondheim Award, given by Arlington, Virginia’s Signature Theatre to honor “those who have contributed to the works of legendary composer, Stephen Sondheim, and the canon of American theater,” in 2014.  (“Pacific Overtures (1976)” was posted on 15 May 2014 at https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2014/05/pacific-overtures-1976.html.)

[So, as an homage to Stephen Sondheim, dubbed the Shakespeare of American musicals, I’ve collected four recent pieces published in the great composer-lyricist’s memory to post on Rick On Theater: two are memorials from the monthly theater magazine American Theatre, one’s a memoir from singer-songwriter Judy Collins from The Nation, and the last is an obituary from the quintessential theater chronicle, Playbill.]

“A HEART BROKEN, ALSO FULL: WHAT SONDHEIM GAVE US” 
by Jeanine Tesori 

[Jeanine Tesori’s personal reflection on Sondheim’s death was posted on the American Theater website (americantheatre.org) on 1 December.  Tesori was the founding artistic director of Encores! Off Center!, the series of concert presentations at City Center devoted to Off-Broadway musicals, companion to the Encores! program for Broadway shows, from 2013 to 2017.]

He was like a father to many of us, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he did what a good father does: He kept showing up, and showing his love.

In 2014, I produced Tick, Tick . . . Boom! [Jonathan Larson’s pre-Rent musical, premièred Off-Broadway in 2001] as part of the Encores Off-Center program at City Center, then a new program designed to celebrate smaller musicals, primarily those that had first played Off-Broadway or Off-Off-Broadway. Lin-Manuel Miranda [who made a film of the play in 2020, released last November] had pitched the show to me over eggs and coffee at a Times Square diner, and I had immediately agreed. His relationship with the show, his unbridled enthusiasm for what Jonathan Larson had ignited in him—it was a golden idea.

Part of my programming for Off-Center included what became known as the Lobby Projects: short and hopefully revelatory events held in the City Center lobby before each performance. Unlike talkback sessions after a work, these events were designed to provide a context for the work, points of entry.

One night was an event called The Sondheim Remix. Given Jonathan’s close relationship to Steve, I had asked for permission to invite theatre writers to create variations on any song from Sunday in the Park With George. He granted that permission, as well as his blessing for them to change words and harmonies, letting his work serve only as inspiration; five would be chosen to play for Steve in the intimate setting of the upper lobby at City Center before the final performance of Tick, Tick . . . Boom!. We received hundreds of submissions in all conceivable genres: math rock, emo, spoken word. Steve delighted in this news, and in the notion that his work had inspired these writers—so many young people!

On the night of the concert [26 June 2014], I greeted Steve at the stage door. He pulled me aside. “Jeanine,” he said, “Mary Rodgers died today and my heart is broken. I had to show up for these young people, but I just can’t stay to see the show.” I put a glass of wine in his hand and we silently walked up as the gathered crowd upstairs waited for the Arrival of Stephen Sondheim.

[Note: Mary Rodgers was the composer of, among other musicals, Once Upon a Mattress (1959); she died at 83. She was the daughter of Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, with whom Sondheim collaborated on Do I Hear a Waltz? in 1965. ~Rick]

They sang directly to him that night, his eyes closed as he listened, smiling with each new idea, every surprising chord or turn of phrase. Finally, George Abud [actor, The Band’s Visit: Off-Broadway, 2016; Broadway, 2017] sang his rendition of “Children and Art,” gently accompanying himself on the oud [a lute-like musical instrument of the Middle East and northern Africa], his version exploring his own relationship to his father. Tears streamed down Steve’s face.

He ended up staying to see the performance of Tick, Tick . . . Boom! that night after all, his heart clearly broken, but also full. Perhaps it’s possible to be broken by life and restored by each other. Maybe that’s what I witnessed that night in June 2014, a tiny miracle on 55th Street.

Stephen Sondheim wasn’t a father, but he parented a lot of us, and he made a lot of work.

So, yes. Children. And Art.

[Jeanine Tesori is the composer of Fun Home; Violet; Caroline, or Change; Soft Power; Shrek, the Musical; and Kimberly Akimbo.  She was also the vocal producer for the new film of West Side Story.]

*  *  *  *
“NOTHING THAT’S NOT BEEN SAID: ON SONDHEIM”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

[Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of AT, was previously the founding editor, from 1994, of Back Stage West, based in Los Angeles.  His memoir of Sondheim was posted on americantheatre.com on 30 November.]

His path-breaking musicals have handily outlasted their detractors, in part because they remain so singularly alive.

What to say? He was the man with all the words. And here’s the thing: I have already probably written more about Stephen Sondheim—in reviews, features, blog posts, random musings, and an in-depth interview I’m singularly happy with [“Stephen Sondheim, Playwright in Song,” AT, 1 April 2011; https://www.americantheatre.org/2011/04/01/stephen-sondheim-playwright-in-song/]—than any other artist I’ve had the privilege of writing about in my career. As hot and cold as I’ve run on his shows, about some of which my opinions have changed almost yearly, this has clearly been one of his enduring gifts to me and my fellow ink-stained wretches: He has been a worthy subject, even an inexhaustible one. His work has always amply rewarded my attention and rumination, even—perhaps especially—when I have struggled with it.

So the sudden news of his death last week, which I happened to receive in the midst of a long weekend spent emptying out my childhood home in Phoenix, prompted a complicated surge of sorry-grateful thoughts and feelings. Much as was the case with the house-clearing project, I knew this day would come and yet was woefully unprepared for it. The original cast albums went on rotation immediately, of course, more or less in order, prompting a few ugly cries and no small amount of appreciative chortles (and not just at the jokes). It did not escape my notice that I was spending hours sorting through the pieces of my own and my family’s history while simultaneously roller-coastering through the peaks and valleys of Sondheim’s career, and that they happened to run in roughly parallel chronology: Over the weekend I found news clippings and restaurant menus that my mom had saved from as far back as the late 1950s, about the same time Sondheim burst on the scene as the lyricist of West Side Story; and most of the stuff in the house had been accumulated in the ’70s and ’80s, the decades when Sondheim’s career had its peak run, from Company to Assassins.

I can’t quite claim that Sondheim was part of my life then; I remember a friend showing me the video of Sunday in the Park With George, which I found intriguing but remote, while the video capture of Sweeney Todd outright horrified me. It wasn’t until the 1990s, when my reviewing beat was the small theatres of Los Angeles, that I saw, heard, and at last embraced his shows as if they were newly minted: a lively Company at West Coast Ensemble, a crackling Assassins at Los Angeles Repertory Company (though that show, oddly enough, had its L.A.-area premiere at Rio Hondo College), a romping Into the Woods at Actors’ Co-op, a sharp Putting It Together at the Colony Theatre (at least as good as the Taper’s later staging [the Mark Taper Forum is L.A.’s institutional theater]), and an excellent Sweeney at East West Players [Asian-American theater comany in L.A., founded in 1965]. East West later opened their Little Tokyo theatre with what remains for me the definitive Pacific Overtures.

That his shows can thrive in small spaces as well as or better than in larger ones is something that seems to be continually rediscovered, from the Menier Chocolate Factory [London] to Barrow Street Theatre [Greenwich Village in New York City]. It’s something I asked him about when I had a chance. Why did they work so well in intimate settings, I wondered? His reply:

I think it’s about character. A lot of the shows I’ve been connected with have been very character-driven. The characters created by the book writers I’ve worked with have all kinds of subtleties, and they come across better, I think, when the camera is close in on them. It’s not so much necessarily that they suffer on a larger scale; they are larger than life, but they are filled with subtleties. They are closer to characters in straight plays than other musicals. And if they’re rich characters, then they’re very good close up.

In recent days, I have read a surfeit of smart and moving pieces about the life he led, the formidably questing intelligence he possessed, the ties that bind his disparate catalogue together (especially, in my opinion, his work’s most crucial glue: his too often underrated music). Like many, I was especially struck by Helena Fitzgerald’s deeply personal and intensely thoughtful tribute [New York-based writer; “a fragment of the day,” 27 November; https://griefbacon.substack.com/p/a-fragment-of-the-day], not least for the way she captures, with a rueful precision worthy of Sondheim himself, how wrenchingly painful it is to now speak of him and his work in the past tense, like a geological era that has entered the fossil record. Even for a writer who hadn’t completed a show since 2008, Sondheim still felt like a part of the conversation.

And of course his work remains so, perhaps ever more so, and not only because a gender-switched Company and the eerily prophetic Assassins are currently running in New York. Musicals of his once dismissed or damned with faint praise by critics, including me, haven’t improved with age so much as they’ve taught us to listen more closely, to attune ourselves to their unique individual logic. Personally, I have never considered wasted the time I’ve spent giving a Sondheim show or score I didn’t initially like another chance, and another, and yet another; and luckily I’ve had many chances and heartily expect to have more. Meanwhile the ones I’ve warmed to in nearly every incarnation I’ve witnessed—a list that includes Forum, Company, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd—only seem to get better, deeper, and fresher with age.

This, after all, is what a canon is, if we must have canons: not invariable paragons of perfection, necessarily, but works that somehow stay alive with surprise, with the shock of recognition, with argument. The musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote with a handful of deft collaborators remain among the most teemingly alive works anyone has ever composed for the stage, and it is hard to imagine a day when they won’t feel that way. As he put it in the second volume of lyric collection/memoir, Look, I Made a Hat [2011, Alfred A. Knopf], “The very thing that makes theatre impermanent is what makes it immortal. In a sense, every night of a show is a revival.”

As I packed up a suitcase full of mementoes, including theatre programs, and headed to the airport to fly home yesterday, I happened to be listening to Road Show, the quaint, valedictory show Sondheim and John Weidman wrestled with for years in various incarnations until it sputtered to a bittersweet final stop at the Public Theater [2008], where director John Doyle’s set consisted chiefly of assorted luggage. The story of two brothers, one an inveterate hustler, the other his reluctant accomplice and occasional nemesis, Road Show anatomizes what little they, and by extension we, have left to show after lives of anxious acquisition and needless competition: little more than a suitcase of scraps.

But also each other. The show ends with the two siblings bantering in a sort of afterglow, if not quite an afterlife.

“Where do you think guys like us go after they die?” asks Willie Mizner. Replies his brother, Addison: “I don’t think they go anywhere. I think they just keep going.”

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.]

*  *  *  *
“JUDY COLLINS REMEMBERS STEPHEN SONDHEIM” 
By Judy Collins 

[Singer and musician Judy Collins’s remembrance of Sondheim was published on The Nation’s website, thenation.com, on 30 November.  Collins made a popular hit of “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music in 1975.]

The singer and activist writes about discovering the “amazing, creative, thunderous force” of Sondheim’s music.

In 1973, I was feeling desperate, searching for the next songs that I could record and not sure that I was on the right track in my own career. One afternoon, I got a call from Nancy Bacal, a dear friend, who said, “I’m sending you over a record I want you to listen to.” The song, on the cast album of Little Night Music [released April 1973], was “Send in the Clowns.” Hearing it was an extraordinary experience. I was shaken to my very toes, weeping and laughing at the same time because this song said everything. Here on my turntable was the answer to my prayers. I called Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim’s producer, and told him that I had heard “Clowns” and that it was a very good song. He said, “Yes, it’s a wonderful song! Two hundred people have already recorded it.” I said I didn’t care, that I just knew I had to record it.

Then I asked him whom he thought I should have do the orchestration and he suggested Jonathan Tunick, who has, I think, orchestrated all but one of his shows. That was the beginning of a very close working relationship and friendship between myself and Tunick.

My recording of “Send in the Clowns” became an instant hit, first in the UK and then here in the United States and finally around the world. The recording won a Grammy for song of the year in 1975 and has gone on to become a standard in the classic sense—everyone knows it and most people can even sing along with a lyric or two.

It was a triumph for Sondheim, having crossed so many boundaries from the theater world to the pop world to the folk world. Sondheim and I have often met and talked together. In 1993, I sat with him one day at his home in New York, and as he played me his songs, I realized that every note in his theatrical productions is a note that he placed there carefully himself before any orchestrator added strings, oboes, harps, violins, and percussion. The songs are all there under Sondheim’s fingers as he plays them with their nuances and the astonishing chord changes and leaps—think of “Finishing the Hat” [Sunday in the Park]; think of “Liaisons” [Little Night Music]; think of “Sundays in the Park with George.”

It had been a great life experience to delve deeply into his work and discovered this amazing, creative, thunderous force in his music and of course the dynamo whom Stephen Sondheim was. He changed my life for the better as well as changing Broadway for all time.

Sondheim’s passing is incredibly sad for all those who know his music, have performed in his theatrical productions, gone to his musicals, and sat in theaters while the mystery and majesty of his writing has thrilled them and set them laughing and weeping and knowing they are in the presence of one of the great artists of all times. Thank you, Stephen Sondheim, for sharing your soul with us. You have helped us weather the storms, lifted our spirits, and given us something to live for. That is what great art does, and you did it.

[Judy Collins is a singer, songwriter, and activist.  Her rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” released on her best-selling album Judith, was one of her most successful recordings.]

*  *  *  *
“LEGENDARY COMPOSER STEPHEN SONDHEIM DEAD AT 91”
by Robert Simonson 

[This obituary of Sondheim from Playbill, the national theater magazine, appeared on playbill.com on 26 November, the very date of his death.]

Stephen Sondheim, the composer-lyricist whose thematically complex, lyrically nimble, and musically challenging scores changed the face of musical theatre during the latter half of the 20th century, and continue to influence the genre and its artists today, died November 26. He was 91. The news was confirmed to the New York Times by Mr. Sondheim’s lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas.

A 1994 cover story in the New York Times Magazine asked “Is Sondheim God?” and, indeed, by that point in his career—the year his last major work, Passion, debuted on Broadway—he had attained the status of a deity in the theatre. He retained that towering position for the remainder of his long life, inspiring a sort of adulation, artistic analysis, and ever-increasing reputation enjoyed by no other composer in his field. “Mr. Sondheim bears a relationship to his vocation that is unlike that of any artist in any other field,” noted New York Times critic Ben Brantley in his review of the 2010 Broadway show Sondheim on Sondheim [“Hymn to Himself,” 23 Apr 2010, sec. C (“Weekend Arts”): 1], one of many celebratory revues the writer enjoyed through his career. “Even when his shows have been commercial flops, they are studied, revered, and eventually reincarnated to critical hosannas.”

[note: Simonson’s in error: “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” was asked not in the New York Times Magazine, but in New York magazine (4 April 1994), and not on the cover (which went to Al Sharpton), but on the “Contents” page (5).  The accompanying article, by James Kaplan, was headlined “The Cult of Saint Stephen Sondheim,” pp. 48-54.  Brantley mentions this (correctly) in the review Simonson cites.  ~Rick]

That career began as auspiciously as possible, as a junior partner in the team of Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins, who brought West Side Story to life. The musical, a New York gangland take on Romeo and Juliet, was groundbreaking—as would be many shows in the man’s long career. Though he chafed at functioning only as a lyricist—he had written full songs from the time he was a teenager, as the adoring protege of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II—he contributed to another instant classic, Gypsy, before finally striking out on his own with the 1962 knockabout farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Though the Zero Mostel comedy was full of slapstick and broad humor, Mr. Sondheim’s songs stood out even then for their worldly-wise wit and wordplay.

Short runs for Anyone Can Whistle and Do I Hear the Waltz? followed. But then came 1970, when, with Company, his star rose and never dimmed. The world was in tumult; America had shed its confident post-War persona, torn asunder by war, civil rights battles, sexual revolution, and general dissolution. The moment was ripe for the string of neurotic, rueful, musical self-examinations that Mr. Sondheim brought to life with director Harold Prince, in one of the most famous and fruitful collaborations in theatre history. Company, a dissection of married life, and Follies, about the impossibility of reliving the past, smashed illusions left and right—about the nature of American life, as well as what an American musical should look and sound like. A new production, re-imagined by director Marianne Elliott to center around a female protagonist, is currently in previews on Broadway [opening scheduled for Thursday, 9 December, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre], a transfer from London’s West End. Prior to a pandemic delay, the production was scheduled to open on Mr. Sondheim’s 90th birthday in 2020.

Follies, which takes place at a reunion of aging veterans of Ziegfeld Follies-like performers, was, according to young critic Frank Rich, nothing less than “the death of the American musical as a metaphor for the death of American innocence.” It was “the first Proustian musical,” Time magazine said [T. E. Kalem, “Seascape with Frieze of Girls,” Time 12 April 1971: 78].

[Note: The Follies quotation attributed to Frank Rich wasn’t from a New York Times column, it appears.  In a book Rich co-authored with Lisa Aronson, The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson (Knopf, 1987), he wrote: “. . . Follies used the death of vaudeville as a metaphor for the death of American innocence” (p. 231; emphasis mine). ~Rick]

To the composer’s eye, any subject matter was a suitable subject for musicalization. Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night, about a series of civilized trysts among the Swedish upper classes, became A Little Night Music in 1973. Admiral Perry’s opening of Japan to Western trade and influence became Pacific Overtures in 1976. Mr. Sondheim and bookwriter Hugh Wheeler turned a penny dreadful about a vengeful, murderous Victorian London barber into the operatic Sweeney Todd in 1979.

Mr. Sondheim reached a sort of apogee of achievement and adulation in 1984 with Sunday in the Park With George, his look at the post-Impressionist French painter George Seurat’s creation of his masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and, more generally, the very nature of artists and art-creation. The New York Times’ Frank Rich made a personal mission out of championing the show, which had an intricate, Pointillistic score to match Seurat’s style of painting. Mr. Sondheim won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, if not the Tony Award. (Previous Sondheim shows to win Best Musical Tony Awards included A Funny Thing Happened . . ., Company, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd. He would win again for Passion in 1994, and take home a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2008.)

From Sunday on, he could do little wrong in the eyes of critics. Early gripes against his work—that it lacked memorable melodies; was mordant and too cynically sophisticated for its own good; that it espoused an essentially dark view of human nature—faded, and his every artistic move was anticipated and closely watched, even as his new works became rarer.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, New York City, a city whose mores and culture he would write about so tellingly in Saturday Night, Company, Follies, and Merrily We Roll Along. His father, Herbert Sondheim, was a dress manufacturer with a musical ear. His mother, whose maiden name was Janet Fox, and was called “Foxy” by everyone, was a vivacious, would-be sophisticate who was her husband’s chief designer. The family moved into the newly built and fashionable Sam Remo towers on Central Park West. Herbert Sondheim was a self-taught piano player who would pick out Broadway tunes on the piano, and would put his son’s hand on his little finger as he played the melody. Young Stephen took piano lessons for two years beginning when he was seven years old. He began another two years when he was 14.

Life changed irrevocably when he was ten. His father left his wife for another woman, and Mr. Sondheim was sent to military school. Mr. Sondheim’s relationship with the willful, charismatic Foxy following the divorce was tempestuous. In the biography Sondheim: A Life [Meryle Secrest; Knopf, 1998], he would claim that, when he was a teenager, she would try to sexually provoke him. Jamie Hammerstein [son of Oscar Hammerstein II and his second wife, Dorothy Kiaora Blanchard and prep-school classmate of Sondheim] characterized their relationship as something out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

As a young man, he found solace with the Hammersteins, who lived just a few miles from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where his mother had bought a home. Oscar Hammerstein II became a second father and musical mentor to him. The elder man taught him the importance of choosing each word with meticulous care. Once, when Stephen was 15, the young man gave Hammerstein his first complete show, called By George, asking for his honest, objective opinion. Hammerstein stunned the boy by doing just that, telling him it was the worst thing he’d ever read. He then, however, spent the afternoon going over the script with him, line by line, telling him why it was terrible. “If it hadn’t been for the Hammersteins, I really don’t know where I would be—if I’d even be alive,” said Mr. Sondheim. “That’s essentially how I became a songwriter. Because I wanted to do what Oscar did. I’ve often said that if he had been a geologist, I would probably have been a geologist.”

Mr. Sondheim went to the prep school George School in Pennsylvania, then attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he found an inspiring music teacher in Robert Barrow. He won the Hutchinson Prize [two-year fellowship to study music] upon graduating from Williams, which won him the opportunity to take lessons with noted avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt, who was disdainful of show business, noted that the young writer wasn’t very interested in becoming a “serious composer,” but “wanted to know a great deal more about serious music because he thought it would be suggestive and useful.”

He based his first professional show, Saturday Night, which he wrote when he was 23 years old, on a play called Front Porch in Flatbush by Philip and Julius Epstein, well-known screenwriters. But after six backers’ auditions, leading producer Lem Ayers suddently [sic] died, and the project died on the vine. Opportunity came knocking when he met playwright Arthur Laurents at a party at the home of actor and salon hostess Ruth Ford. In one of the most legendary moments of serendipity in musical history, Laurents mentioned he was working on a musical with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein and they were looking for a lyricist. Mr. Sondheim was initially not much interested in just writing lyrics for West Side Story—at that time, his lyrics were more highly rated than his music, a state of opinion that would persist for many years to come—but Oscar Hammerstein said, “Take the job.” And he did. “A true luck story,” Mr. Sondheim later called it. His career in the theatre began.

Neither Anyone Can Whistle, nor Do I Hear a Waltz? helped his reputation as a composer-lyricist much at the time of their premieres. Both were short-lived on Broadway. He later confessed to regretting writing the latter, which was a collaboration with Richard Rodgers and based on friend Arthur Laurents’ play The Time of the Cuckoo [1952]. “When Hammerstein was dying, he asked me if I would consider doing a show with Dick Rodgers. He said, ‘I know you want to do your own music. But Dick is going to feel very bereft and if he has any ideas and throws them to you I wish you would give them some consideration.’ So when Arthur Laurents suggested that he and I do his play, The Time of the Cuckoo as a musical with Richard Rodgers, I thought this was one way of killing two birds with one stone.”

Mr. Sondheim recalled meeting Harold Prince in the early 1950s through mutual friend Mary Rodgers, though Prince put the meeting much earlier, at the opening night of South Pacific [7 April 1949]. Prince would produce the early Sondheim shows West Side Story and Forum, but with Company he would graduate to producer-director. Company grew out of a series of one-act plays written by George Furth, an actor-playwright friend of the composer. Sondheim liked them and asked Prince what he thought of the vignettes, which were mostly about marriage and relationships. Prince suggested they would make a good musical about the state of marriage today.

The three men began working on the project, Furth retaining only a portion of the original one-acts, and Boris Aronson creating a famous, non-site-specific, multi-tiered set. To understand his subject matter better, Sondheim—who admitted to knowing little about committed relationships—asked friend Mary Rodgers, who was on her second marriage, to come over and discuss her experiences. “I took a yellow pad out and I took notes, exactly as if it were a lecture.”

Company not only impressed critics, it confounded and startled them. It would become the first of what would later be termed “concept musicals,” shows that hung loosely on a narrative storyline as opposed to a plot, and trafficked more in ideas than emotions. “Until Company, I thought that musicals had to have very strong plots,” said Mr. Sondheim. “One of the things that fascinated me about the challenge of the show was to see if a musical could be done without one.” The script centered on the never-married Bobby and his ten best friends, all married, who act as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the hero’s actions. Aside from the New York Times—whose Clive Barnes would often fault Sondheim shows for a surfeit of cynicism and a paucity of heart—the critics hailed it as brilliant. “So extraordinary in execution that it defies comparison with any musical that has come before it,” wrote one [Stewart Klein, WNEW-TV; now WNYW, an affiliate of Fox Television].

Prince had agreed to produce Mr. Sondheim’s next musical even before he set upon directing Company. Initially called The Girls Upstairs, it grew into Follies, a work even more ambitiously conceptual than Company. Librettist James Goldman originally envisioned the piece as a sort of murder mystery. But Prince was inspired to change the focus of Follies by a photograph of Gloria Swanson standing in the rubble of the Roxy Theatre. The story was set at a reunion of veterans of a pre-WWII follies, among them two former showgirls who had met their husbands as stage door Johnnies. An impromptu revue ensues, with faded stars performing their signature tunes of yesterday—all brilliant musical pastiches of bygone theatre styles. This yielded to an opulent fantasy sequence in “Loveland,” in which the four spouses perform songs illustrating their own personal follies.

Critics praised it as possessing “a rare complexity of structure and feeling.” As with Company, it won the Tony Award for Best Score.

Mr. Sondheim would win a third consecutive Tony for Best Score for his next work, A Little Night Music. The show marked another thematic departure, a near-operetta taking place in turn-of-the-century Sweden, and composed entirely in three-quarter waltz time. The show became a rarity: a money-making Sondheim musical. It also produced the writer’s single popular hit song, “Send in the Clowns,” which was recorded by Judy Collins and became a top-40 hit.

Mr. Sondheim’s musical influences were various and many. The spare, ornamental score of Pacific Overtures was built around a quasi-Japanese pentatonic scale. And his sweeping score for Sweeney Todd was partially inspired by Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann, whose score for the 1940s film noir Hangover Square [1945] he had admired since first seeing the movie as a teenager.

Sondheim and Prince’s professional relationship ended with Merrily We Roll Along in 1981. A musical version of the Kaufman and Hart play [1934] about the price friendship and integrity pay in the pursuit of success, the story ran backwards, from the present to the past, tracing the roots of the central three characters. The score went on to be praised as one of Sondheim’s most memorable and tuneful; Prince later admitted he could not find the right vision or look for the piece, which he had decided to cast using sweatshirt-donning theatre students who were in their teens. The musical’s problems were slavishly recounted in the press, and the reviews bad. “Compromise, the sellout, loss of integrity,” wrote Walter Kerr [“A Libretto Has to Face the Music,” New York Times 13 December 1981]. “These are not so much fighting words to Prince and Sondheim as they are creative words, words that help them choose their materials.” The resultant flop led to a breakup between the two collaborators. Prince felt they had “run out of steam.”

Producer Lewis Allen introduced Sondheim to the man who would become his next, and second most important, collaborator in his life, a 30-something playwright named James Lapine, who at that point only knew Sondheim from Sweeney Todd. They met to discuss a possible musical based on Nathanael West’s satire A Cool Million, and ended up hatching the idea of a show about Georges Seurat. Critics and colleagues would come to see parallels between the composer and his dual subjects—the cloistered, intense, socially-detached Seurat, whose life is consumed in “Finishing the Hat,” and his great-grandson, another artist, who is the focus of the second act. But Mr. Sondheim would insist the musical was primarily the child of Lapine.

Like Sunday, Mr. Sondheim and Lapine’s next show, Into the Woods, was divided into two distinct acts, the first illustrating The Shining Ideal and second revealing The Cruel Reality. A host of classic fairy-tale characters (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack of beanstalk fame) get what they want by first act curtain. But in a second, bittersweet act, those achievements have unexpected, real-world complications. The show also contained pointed examinations of the nature of parenting (“Children Will Listen”) and the fallibility of mothers and fathers.

Sondheim and Lapine’s third major collaboration, Passion, derived from Sondheim seeing Passione d’amore, a 1981 Italian film by Ettore Scola about the bottomless, selfless love of an ugly woman named Fosca for Giorgio, an attractive soldier. Besides Sweeney Todd, it was the only idea for a Sondheim musical that had come from Sondheim himself. “We’re all Fosca,” he argued. “I think we’re all also Giorgio.” Critical reception was divided between those who found the show dark and depressing and those who thought it adult and inspired. But, as with nearly all Sondheim shows, Passion’s reputation only grew with time.

Assassins came next, in 1991. In it, he and librettist John Weidman stepped through the looking glass to survey American history through the eyes of Presidential assassins. Its Off-Broadway opening [Playwrights Horizons, December 1990-February 1991] unhappily coincided with the first Gulf War [17 January 1991-28 February 1991], canceling its hopes of moving to Broadway. Assassins would not reach a Broadway theatre until a heralded 2004 revival directed by Joe Mantello. A new revival production from director John Doyle opened at Off-Broadway’s Classic Stage Company November 14.

Fifteen years would pass between Passion and the New York bow of the 50-years-in-the-making Road Show [Public Theater, 2008], a musical telling of the misadventures of the early-20th-century con-men brothers, Addison and Wilson Mizner. By then, major West End, Broadway, and regional revivals of Sondheim musicals were frequent. Many of them were valiant attempts to reclaim and reexamine works that hadn’t succeeded the first time around, like Merrily We Roll Along, or to build up one-off curiosities, like The Frogs, which was first performed in a swimming pool at Yale [Yale Repertory Theatre, May 1974; Broadway revival by the Lincoln Center Theatre, 2004], and Saturday Night, the 1950s work which Mr. Sondheim had once hoped would be his Broadway debut [staged by Chicago’s Pegasus Players in 1999, Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre in 2000, and in London’s West End in 2009]. At the time of his death, he had been at work with playwright David Ives on a musical adaptation of two Luis Buñuel films: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Exterminating Angel (1962). Though he had shared in April that progress on the project had stalled, an iteration of the work, under the title Square One, received a developmental reading in September.

[Note: Sondheim said in an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on 16 September that he and Ives were encouraged by the reception of the reading and hoped to have the show in production by “next season.” ~Rick]

Along the way, Mr. Sondheim indulged in a few quixotic projects. Evening Primrose was a 1966 made-for-TV musical about a secret society of people living in department stores [16 November 1966 on ABC Stage 67]. He co-wrote a film with actor Anthony Perkins in 1973, the murder mystery The Last of Sheila [14 June 1973]. In 1974, he executed a rare acting turn, playing a cynical pianist in a television movie of George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner’s comedy June Moon [30 January 1974           on Great Performances, PBS]. He wrote a few songs for Warren Beatty’s 1990 film Dick Tracy; “Sooner or Later” won him an Oscar. And in 1995, he collaborated with George Furth on his only straight play with Getting Away With Murder [Broadway, 20 February-17 March 1996; 17 performances].

Throughout his career, Sondheim the man became as much a source of fascination as Sondheim the artist. So vastly skilled, he seemed unknowable, and many found him intimidating. Arthur Laurents remarked that his abundant intelligence caused him to not “suffer fools gladly,” and frequent collaborator Burt Shevelove said he has “a thin veneer of protective varnish that does make people afraid of him.”

His collection of puzzles seemed a fitting metaphor for the complexity of his personality and talent. The walls of his famous Turtle Bay townhouse were covered with 19th-century game boards, and he even created his own homemade puzzles and games. His collection of amusements inspired playwright Anthony Shaffer to write Sleuth [1970] after having spent several nights playing games at Mr. Sondheim’s home.

Sondheim himself made self-deprecating fun of his own work habits, regularly calling himself a procrastinator and lazy. “I usually write lying down,” he said, “so I can go to sleep easily.” But, when pressed, he would expound at length about the nature of songwriting and musical theatre. He referred to lyric writing as a craft, while music was to him “the richest form of art.” At the same time, he was always ready to praise the lesser-sung librettists of his musicals as equal artistic partners. “Although one can’t underestimate the importance of the songs, it’s the book that the musical theatre is all about, not the songs, and I’m not being modest. It annoyed me deeply when the reviews of Follies said the show was good in spite of the book. The show is good because of the book.”

By the dawn of the 21st century, the artistic world that Mr. Sondheim created through his shows came to dominate the musical theatre. Young composers were either seen of as following his example (among them Jason Robert Brown, William Finn, and Michael John LaChiusa) or rebelling against it. Actors such as Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, Len Cariou, Michael Cerveris, Elaine Stritch, Patti LuPone, and Barbara Cook saw their career guided and changed by their exposure to his music. And theatre observers came to generally, and somewhat mournfully, acknowledge that in him, the theatre had seen its last giant.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Sondheim became more comfortable talking about himself and his status as an icon. He willingly participated in the 2010 revue Sondheim on Sondheim, contributing taped segments of himself talking about his life and his art. In one such segment, discussing Sunday in the Park With George, he observed, “Part of that subject matter is that wonderful thing that happens to any artist when they’re creating art, which is losing the world. You trance out and then you come back into the real world, and it’s both a good and a bad feeling.”

Mr. Sondheim is survived by his husband, Jeffrey Romley; the two were wed in 2017.

[One thing that Simonson left out of his extensive obituary is the relationship Sondheim had at the end of his life with Hamilton creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda.  It seems significant to me because I see the two men as so different, and yet the bond that Miranda describes is fundamental.

[In 2017, Miranda wrote about his friendship with Sondheim in T: The New York Times Style Magazine (“Stephen Sondheim, Theater’s Greatest Lyricist,” 16 October 2017).  One paragraph seems to illustrate their relationship:

Sondheim was one of the first people I told about my idea for a piece about Alexander Hamilton, back in 2008.  It was in this townhouse, on the first floor.  I’d been hired to write Spanish translations for a Broadway revival of “West Side Story” [première in Washington, D.C., 2008; Broadway, 2009] and during our first meeting he asked me what I was working on next.  I told him “Alexander Hamilton,” and he threw back his head in laughter and clapped his hands.  “That is exactly what you should be doing.  No one will expect that from you.  How fantastic.”  That moment alone, the joy of surprising Sondheim, sustained me through many rough writing nights and missed deadlines.  I sent him early drafts of songs over the seven-year development of “Hamilton,” and his email response was always the same.  “Variety, variety, variety, Lin.  Don’t let up for a second.  Surprise us.”

[Miranda’s In the Heights won four Tony awards in 2008, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.  When Miranda accepted the trophy for the score, he did so with a little rap, a take on Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George:

“Mr. Sondheim / Look, I made a hat! / Where there never was a hat! / It’s a Latin hat at that!”

[An acknowledgment from a 28-year-old composer-lyricist to a mentor, colleague, and friend who was 78.  That’s continuity!]