Some of his least commercially successful plays were lauded by critics. Pacific Overtures was not a success commercially, but was loved by critics. Sondheim pushed audiences' boundaries, which sometimes resulted in box office flops. In box office success, Sondheim fell short of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer behind The Phantom of the Opera and Cats with whom Sondheim shared a birthday. The play became a smash hit on Broadway in 2015. When Miranda began work on a rap musical about American founding father Alexander Hamilton, Sondheim encouraged and critiqued him. Hammerstein, who along with partner Richard Rodgers created the classic musicals Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, taught the teenage Sondheim how to write musical theatre.Īfter Sondheim became famous, he mentored others on Broadway. He found a surrogate family in the nearby household of Hammerstein and his wife, Dorothy.
He later said his mother took out her wrath over the divorce on him. He described his early childhood as a lonely one, with servants as his main company.Īfter his parents split up when he was 10 years old, Sondheim moved with his mother to rural Pennsylvania, where she bought a farm. Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City to affluent Jewish parents who worked in fashion. Stephen Sondheim said theatre had become marginalised. Early mentoring by Oscar Hammerstein rubbed off The central characters expressed their infatuation in the songs Maria, Somewhere and Tonight. The story about a love affair between a Puerto Rican girl, Maria, and a white boy, Tony, in working-class Manhattan was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1961.
It was called the concept musical.īroadway audiences were introduced to Sondheim in 1957 when he wrote the lyrics for West Side Story to go with Leonard Bernstein's music and it became an American classic. Instead of telling a story from beginning to end, he would jump backward and forward in time to explore a single theme. He also developed new methods for presenting a play. He explored such weighty topics as political assassinations in Assassins, the human need for family and the pull of dysfunctional relationships in Into the Woods, social inequality in Sweeney Todd, and Western imperialism in Pacific Overtures. "There are so many forms of entertainment, theatre is becoming more marginalised," he told British newspaper The Times in 2012.īut Broadway musicals also became more artistic and Sondheim played a key role in their evolution, critics said. Sondheim shared the view that Broadway had experienced a decline, expressing it repeatedly in interviews. Increasingly, musicals borrowed material from television and movies, instead of the other way around, composer Mark N Grant wrote in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical. It had a key role in American culture through the 1950s, with many Broadway songs making the pop charts, but lost significance as rock music gained a hold on the public starting in the 1960s.
( Reuters: Lucas Jackson, File)Īs Sondheim collected accolades, New York City's Broadway theatre industry underwent many changes. Several of Stephen Sondheim's works were adapted for the big screen, including Sweeney Todd, directed by Tim Burton. "I love the theatre as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry - just making them feel - is paramount to me," Sondheim said in a 2013 interview with National Public Radio. Sondheim's most successful musicals included Into the Woods, which opened on Broadway in 1987 and used children's fairy tales to untangle adult obsessions, the 1979 thriller Sweeney Todd about a murderous barber in London whose victims are served as meat pies, and 1962's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a vaudeville-style comedy set in ancient Rome. Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, called him musical theatre's greatest lyricist. Sondheim learned the art of musical theatre when he was just a teenager from The Sound of Music lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. His eight lifetime Tony Awards surpassed the total of any other composer. Sondheim, who helped American musical theatre evolve beyond pure entertainment and reach new artistic heights, died early on Friday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, the New York Times reported.
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