But Then Again Suden Ii Lyrics
Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Expressionless at 91
He was the theater'southward well-nigh revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last one-half of the 20th century and the driving force behind some of Broadway'southward most beloved and celebrated shows.
Video
transcript
transcript
The Last Word: Stephen Sondheim
In a never-before-seen interview, Stephen Sondheim sat down with The New York Times in June 2008 to talk about his life, career and accomplishments.
-
"Ane of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should in that location be songs? You can put songs in any story, but what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If information technology's unnecessary, so the evidence generally turns out to exist not very practiced." Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the well-nigh important effigy in American musical theater of the final half-century. [singing] "Will it be? Yes, it volition." In shows like "Due west Side Story," "Gypsy," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," "Company," "Follies," "Sweeney Todd" and "Sunday in the Park With George," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, he created songs essential to the stories and inverse the nature of the Broadway musical. "I like to change styles. That'due south one of the things that appeals to me about stories, is if I've never washed anything like it before. It has to be some unknown territory. It'southward got to make you nervous. If it doesn't brand you nervous, and so you're going to write the same affair you wrote earlier." We sabbatum down with him in June 2008 to talk about his own story and his accomplishments. "What is it about the theater that attracted you and so, that made yous desire to spend your career, your life working in it?" "It was very simple. Information technology was when I was eleven years erstwhile, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a surrogate father, and I merely wanted to exercise what he did. And he was a songwriter for the theater, and so I became a songwriter for the theater. If he was a geologist, I would have become a geologist. Which is, I'chiliad certain, an exaggeration, simply not much." [music playing] Sondheim wasn't known for Height xl hits, but i of his songs, "Ship in the Clowns," from "A Lilliputian Nighttime Music," rose to the acme of the charts. [singing] "But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns." He wrote it specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the evidence'south stars, and it remains without a doubtfulness his most pop and financially successful piece of work. "Wrote it during rehearsals, brought information technology essentially overnight. Glynis Johns could not sustain notes, so I thought, I got to write a song with curt phrases. And if they're going to be short phrases, what are ameliorate short phrases than questions? So the whole idea of, 'Isn't information technology rich? Are nosotros a pair?' Question, which ordinarily would not occur to me, came into my head. And in one case I've gotten that, one time y'all get the idea of questions, then it'due south quite easy to write." [SINGING] "Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve?" "One time you become the notion of, 'Isn't information technology rich? Aren't we schmucks not to be together?' I mean, y'all get that tone, that takes a very short period of time." [singing] "Send in the clowns." Stephen Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, to upper-middle-course parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father manufactured dresses, and his mother designed them. But his childhood wasn't all privilege. His family life was difficult, with a afar and remote female parent and parents who didn't become forth. "When I was 10 years old, my parents divorced. My mother got custody of me, and she bought a place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, as a sort of summer residence. And I was an simply child. And because she was a working adult female and also a celebrity hunter, she knew the Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my historic period, a year younger, Jimmy. And so we became friends and companions. And Oscar obviously realized that I had some gift for songwriting, so he encouraged me during my teen years, and in fact, taught me. And I brought him a show when I was 15 years old that I thought he would want to produce. It was a testify nearly the schoolhouse I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed to find out that he wouldn't produce it. But I wanted to be the first 15-year-sometime on Broadway with a show. But he said, if yous want to know what's wrong with the show, I'll tell y'all. And he went over it page past page, starting from the first sentence. He treated me like an adult instead of like a kid. By the time the afternoon was over, I really knew more about the nuts and bolts of writing a musical than most people larn in a lifetime." Hammerstein and his partner Richard Rodgers were fresh from the success of 'Oklahoma!' and 'Carousel' when they hired the teenage Sondheim to work on their adjacent musical, 'Allegro,' in 1947. [singing] "His hair is fuzzy, his eyes are blueish." Unusual for its day, information technology followed the life of an everyman from birth to age 35. It was their commencement failure, just it would influence Sondheim tremendously. "It was experimental, and so that incurred in me the whole notion of doing experimental stuff, which I've washed, one way or another, well-nigh of the shows I've done." Hammerstein laid out a form of education for his teenage protégé, suggesting he write iv musicals, each in a dissimilar style. "The beginning ane being an adaptation of a play that I thought was good. The 2nd beingness an accommodation of a play that I liked but was flawed, that maybe I could feel I could improve. The third, something that was a non-theatrical story, but adapt it and arrive theatrical. And and so the fourth was to write an original. And that'due south exactly what I did over a period of years." In the mid-1950s, when Sondheim was in his early on 20s, he wrote his showtime professional show, 'Sabbatum Nighttime.' [singing] "The moon's similar a meg-watt electrical light. It shines on the metropolis —" Information technology was headed to Broadway when its atomic number 82 producer all of a sudden died, forcing the show to close out of boondocks. The ambitious young composer was still without a credit, but then came an opportunity to piece of work on Broadway, admitting as a lyricist merely and non as a composer besides. Information technology all began when he bumped into renowned playwright and librettist Arthur Laurents at a party. "And nosotros fell to talking, and I said, 'What are y'all doing?' He said, 'I'm about to start on a musical version of "Romeo and Juliet."' And I said, 'And who's doing the score?' He said, 'Leonard Bernstein.' I said, 'Who'south doing the lyrics?' And he said, 'Oh, my god. Well, I never thought of you.' And he literally smote his forehead. And he said, in his typical Arthur Laurents fashion, he said, 'I didn't much like your music, but I thought your lyrics were kind of skillful.' I said, 'All correct.' He said, 'Would y'all like to come and play for Lenny?' Now, I had no intention of only writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. But I thought, chance to play for Leonard Bernstein? Why not? And so the next morning, I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, 'I volition know inside a calendar week, and I'll let you know.' And I said, 'Cheers and so much, Mr. Bernstein.' Sure enough, a week later, the telephone rang, and he said, 'Would you like to do it?' And I said, 'Let me call you dorsum.' Because I didn't want to exercise simply lyrics. And I called Oscar, who'due south my adviser on everything. And I said, 'Y'all know, I don't desire to practice this.' But Oscar said, 'Look, you have a adventure to work with very gifted professionals on a prove that sounds interesting, and you lot could always write your own music eventually.' He said, 'My advice would be to take the chore.' That's why I took it. And I learned a great deal." [singing] "Maria. I but met a girl named Maria." Sondheim didn't always concord with Bernstein on how the lyrics should be written. "I knew that there were groovy dangers of pretension with this whole show, and the just way to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and make them very simple." "You've said over the years that you're not really happy with the lyrics you lot wrote, even though they're and so popular. You lot are?" "No, no, no, they're very self-conscious. Lenny wanted everything, the lyrics to be very poetic. But his idea of poetry and my idea of verse are simply not the same. I hateful, you know, I was 25 years former, and he was a big, large force, and Lenny kept pushing me to be very fruity. 'Today, the world was but an address.' That'southward a perfectly fine line on paper, but the male child from the streets is singing that?" [singing] "Today, the world was just an accost, a place for me to live in." "And I've oft quoted, you know, 'I Feel Pretty': 'Information technology's alarming how charming I feel,' says this daughter from the streets, and she sounds like Noel Coward." [singing] "Information technology'south alarming how charming I feel." "I exercise like 'Something'south Coming.' That'due south my idea of a poetic lyric, in the sense that information technology uses imagery." [singing] "Something's coming. I don't know what it is, just information technology is going to be great." "And I like the 'Jet Song,' too." [singing] "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your outset cigarette to your last dying day." "But yous know, songs like 'Somewhere,' I hateful, that'due south deeply embarrassing. And so —" "Westward Side Story" got mixed reviews when information technology opened in 1957, and didn't win the Tony Award as Best Musical, simply it was revolutionary in its combination of music and trip the light fantastic, and in its searing plot. Sondheim had made his offset marker. He even so longed to write both music and lyrics on Broadway, and information technology looked as if he was going to become the gamble with a new musical based on the early on life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] "You'll be neat! Going to have the whole globe on a plate!" Only the show's star objected. "Ethel Merman was already signed to play Rose, the mother, so it was all set. And then Ethel Merman said she would non take me as a composer, considering she had just done a show called 'Happy Hunting,' with two immature writers, and information technology was a flop. And she didn't want to take a hazard on an unknown composer. And she's perfectly happy to accept me do the lyrics. So I said no, and Arthur tried to persuade me, and I said, 'No, I really want to write music, this is nonsense.' Again, Oscar stepped into the breach, and he said, 'Do information technology.' He said, 'At that place are two advantages. Starting time of all,' he said, 'you have the feel of writing for a star, which is different than only writing a show. I mean, you're tailoring textile not only for the grapheme, for the character as played by that specific actor or actress.' That's i thing. He said, 'Secondly, it'due south half dozen months out of your life. Do information technology.' And that's exactly what happened. We wrote that show in about 4 months. Nosotros wrote very speedily. That's probably the quickest I've always heard of a major Broadway musical being written. But it wrote, as Barbra Streisand would say, like butter." [singing] "Honey, everything's coming up roses and daffodils!" "It'due south considered one of the best, if non the best, Broadway musicals of all time." "Yeah, absolutely, it is. I remember information technology'southward probably it's the culmination of that era, that told musicals in chronological lodge, in a linear style. I'd certainly say it was the best." In 1970, Sondheim teamed upwards with director Harold Prince to write his quantum musical, 'Company.' But as 'Gypsy' had been the culmination of the era of the narrative musical, 'Company' broke new ground. It fractured the narrative, told the story in a nonlinear fashion, and opened the manner for similar musicals, similar 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago.' Sondheim and Prince followed visitor with more breakthroughs: 'Follies,' 'A Fiddling Dark Music,' 'Pacific Overtures.' They were revolutionary, but by and large, they weren't financial hits. "It takes an audience a while to get used to new ways of storytelling. In that location are exceptional plays that break with the tradition, like 'Death of a Salesman,' and are hits at the same time. But usually, if you bring a new style of storytelling to the stage — 'Oklahoma!' is the perfect example of taking a adventure and is a gigantic hitting, just that is not the usual case." [singing] "These are probably the worst pies in London!" 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Armada Street' is considered by many to be Sondheim's best and most powerful work. A gruesome tale of expiry and revenge, information technology shows the composer at the summit of his talent. [singing] "Is that simply icky —" "It was total of blood and gore and controversy. And though it, too, didn't make money in its original run, it has often been revived, has been performed by opera companies, and in 2007 was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp." [singing] "I will take vengeance!" "You want to talk well-nigh dark?" "Well, information technology's not so dark. It's actually kind of funny, that evidence, yous know? I hateful, nobody takes it seriously. It's not dark the fashion — information technology's a melodrama. I don't think melodramas are dark. Anyway, but I become it. The indicate is, yes, there'due south a lot of blood." "And in that location's a lot of comic relief, in that location'southward no doubt about it." "It's not well-nigh comic relief. It'southward the fact the attitude is not a existent attitude. They're all cartoon figures. I mean, information technology'south an operetta. These are not real people, and they're not supposed to be. They're supposed to exist big, larger than life." "But isn't in that location a existent sense in it well-nigh injustice and evil?" "If there is for you, then there is for you. I know Hal e'er thinks, always thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I idea information technology was nearly scaring people." "You all know Steve is a slap-up dramatist and our greatest living composer and lyricist." In 2010, Sondheim received an ultimate stage accolade. "I cry easy." A Broadway theater was renamed in his honor. "This is so much more moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim every bit opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —" "What do you think — if yous think virtually this, what would you lot like your legacy to be?" "Oh, goodness. Oh, I just would like the shows to go along getting done. Whether on Broadway, or in regional theaters, or schools or communities, I would just like the stuff to be done. Just washed and done and done and done and done. Y'all know, that would be the fun."
Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history'south songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91.
His lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas, appear the death. He said he did not know the cause but added that Mr. Sondheim had not been known to exist ill and that the decease was sudden. The 24-hour interval earlier, Mr. Sondheim had historic Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury, Mr. Pappas said. [His decease document, obtained past The Times on Dec. 2, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.]
An intellectually rigorous creative person who perpetually sought new creative paths, Mr. Sondheim was the theater'due south most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, if not its nigh popular.
His piece of work melded words and music in a fashion that enhanced them both. From his primeval successes in the late 1950s, when he wrote the lyrics for "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," through the 1990s, when he wrote the music and lyrics for 2 audacious musicals, "Assassins," giving voice to the men and women who killed or tried to kill American presidents, and "Passion," an operatic probe into the nature of true love, he was a relentlessly innovative theatrical force.
The first Broadway testify for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 comedy "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," won a Tony Laurels for best musical and went on to run for more two years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his most productive period, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including "Company" (1970), "Follies" (1971), "A Piffling Dark Music" (1973), "Pacific Overtures" (1976), "Sweeney Todd" (1979), "Merrily We Ringlet Along" (1981), "Sunday in the Park With George" (1984) and "Into the Woods" (1987).
Image
In the history of the theater, only a handful could call Mr. Sondheim peer. The listing of major theater composers who wrote words to accompany their own scores (and vice versa) is a short one — it includes Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman and Noël Coward.
Though Mr. Sondheim spent long hours in solitary labor, usually belatedly at night, when he was composing or writing, he ofttimes spoke lovingly of the collaborative nature of the theater. After the get-go decade of his career, he was never over again a writer for rent, and his contribution to a prove was always integral to its conception and execution. He chose collaborators — notably the producer and director Hal Prince, the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and subsequently the writer and director James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical course across the bounds of only amusement.
Mr. Sondheim's music was ever recognizable as his own, and yet he was dazzlingly versatile. His melodies could exist deceptively, disarmingly elementary — like the title song of the unsuccessful 1964 musical "Anyone Can Whistle," "Our Time," from "Merrily," and the most famous of his private songs, "Send In the Clowns," from "Night Music" — or jaunty and whimsical, similar "Everybody Ought to Take a Maid," from "Forum."
They could also exist flippant and bitter, like "The Ladies Who Tiffin," from "Company," or sweeping, similar the grandly macabre waltz "A Little Priest," from "Sweeney Todd." And they could be desperately yearning, like the plaintive "I Read," from "Passion."
Image
Tonys and a Pulitzer
He wrote speechifying soliloquies, conversational duets and chattery trios and quartets. He exploited time signatures and forms; for "Night Music," he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — virtually an entire score written in permutations of triple time.
Over all, he wrote both the music and the lyrics for a dozen Broadway shows — not including compendium revues similar "Side past Side by Sondheim," "Putting Information technology Together" and the autobiographical "Sondheim on Sondheim." Five of them won Tony Awards for best musical, and six won for best original score. A testify that won neither of those, "Sunday in the Park," took the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Of the many revivals of his shows, iii won Tonys, including "Assassins" in 2004, even though it had non previously been on Broadway. (It was presented Off Broadway in 1990.)
Epitome
In 1993, Mr. Sondheim received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement, and in 2022 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2008, he was given a Tony Honor for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, in peradventure the ultimate testify business concern accolade, a Broadway house on Westward 43rd Street, Henry Miller'south Theater, was renamed in his honor.
For his 90th birthday in March 2020, a Broadway revival of "Company" was planned, with a woman (played by Katrina Lenk) in the central office of Bobby, simply it was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times published a special section devoted to him, and a virtual concert, "Take Me to the Earth: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration," was streamed on the Broadway.com YouTube aqueduct, featuring Broadway performers singing his songs.
Mr. Sondheim, who as well maintained a home in Manhattan, a townhouse on E 49th Street, had been spending most of his time during the pandemic in Roxbury, in western Connecticut.
But he returned to New York this month to attend revivals of two of his musicals: on Nov. 14, for the opening dark of "Assassins," at the Archetype Phase Company in Lower Manhattan, and the next night for the long-delayed first preview, since Broadway reopened, of "Visitor," also starring Patti LuPone, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was "extremely" pleased by both productions, Mr. Pappas, his lawyer, said.
In addition to his theater work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for "Stavisky," Alain Resnais'due south 1974 movie most a French financier and embezzler, and his song "Sooner or Later (I E'er Get My Human being)" for Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" won an Academy Award in 1991. Half dozen cast albums from his shows won Grammy Awards, and "Send In the Clowns" won the Grammy for song of the year in 1975.
With the exception perhaps of "Forum," Mr. Sondheim's shows had hefty ambitions in subject matter, course or both. "Company," which was congenital from vignettes featuring several couples and their mutual single male friend, was a bittersweet reflection on marriage. "Pacific Overtures" aimed to tell the story of the modernization of Nippon from the Japanese perspective. "Sweeney Todd," a bloody tale virtually a vengeful barber in 19th-century London, approached Thousand Guignol in tone and opera in staging and scoring. "The Frogs," which was start performed in the Yale University swimming pool in 1974 (with Meryl Streep in the cast) before it was revised for Broadway in 2004, composite the Greek one-act of Aristophanes with present-day political commentary.
Image
Mr. Sondheim liked to think of himself less equally a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit one who wrote very short plays and set up them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with circuitous ideas or emotional ambivalence, were frequently impossibly clever but rarely only clever; his language was sometimes brainy but seldom purple. He was a world-class rhyming gymnast, not only at the ends of lines but within them — one of the broiled dishes on the ghoulish menu in "Sweeney Todd" was "shepherd'due south pie peppered with bodily shepherd" — and he upheld the highest standards for adequate wordplay, or at least tried to.
Rhymes and Beats
His 2010 artistic memoir, "Finishing the Hat" (the name was taken from a song title in "Dominicus in the Park"; a follow-upwards, "Look, I Made a Chapeau," came out in 2011), was in many ways a primer on the craft of lyric writing. In information technology, he took himself to task for numerous sins, including things like adding unnecessary adjectives to fill out lines rhythmically and paying insufficient attention to a melodic line. In the song "Somewhere" from "West Side Story," for example, the highest note in the opening phrase is on the 2nd beat, which means that in the well-known lyric — "There'due south a place for us" — the accent is on the give-and-take "a."
"The most unimportant word in the opening line is the one that gets the well-nigh important notation," he wrote.
In another example from "West Side Story," he complained near a stanza from "America," which was sung by a chorus of immature Puerto Rican women.
"Words must sit on music in order to become clear to the audition," he said to his biographer Meryle Secrest for her 1998 volume, "Stephen Sondheim: A Life." "You lot don't become a take a chance to hear the lyric twice, and if information technology doesn't sit and bounce when the music bounces and rise when the music rises, the audience becomes confused."
In "America," he added, "I had this wonderful quatrain that went: 'I like to exist in America/OK by me in America/Everything free in America/For a small fee in America.' The little 'for a small fee' was my zinger — except that the 'for' is accented and 'small fee' is impossible to say that fast, so it went 'For a smafee in America.' Nobody knew what it meant!"
What most distinguished Mr. Sondheim's lyrics, nevertheless, was that they were by and large character-driven, frequently probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, ache or securely felt conflict. In "Send In the Clowns," for example, he couched the famous plaint about missed romantic chances largely in the linguistic communication of the theater, because the character singing information technology is an aging actress:
Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my archway again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No one is in that location.
Image
In the title song for "Anyone Tin Whistle," he wrote from the point of view of a woman who found it difficult to dear:
Anyone can whistle,
That's what they say —
Easy.
Anyone can whistle,
Any old day —
Easy.
It's all so simple:
Relax, let go, let fly.
So someone tell me why
Tin can't I?
I can trip the light fantastic toe a tango
I tin read Greek —
Easy.
I can slay a dragon
Any old week —
Easy.
What's hard is elementary,
What'due south natural comes difficult.
Mayhap you could show me
How to allow become
Lower my guard.
Learn to exist free.
Peradventure if you whistle,
Whistle for me.
Over the years, many people theorized that "Anyone Can Whistle" was a cri de coeur by the author, though Mr. Sondheim denied it. "To believe that 'Anyone Tin can Whistle' is my credo is to believe that I'm the prototypical Repressed Intellectual and that explains everything about me," he wrote in "Finishing the Lid."
Still, it'due south true that he lived a largely lonely romantic life for many years.
"I ever thought that vocal would be Steve's epitaph," the playwright and director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for "Anyone Tin Whistle," as well equally "West Side Story," "Gypsy" and "Do I Hear a Waltz?," told Ms. Secrest.
For a time in his 60s, Mr. Sondheim shared his Manhattan townhouse with a young songwriter, Peter Jones, and in 2022 he married Jeffrey Romley, who survives him, along with a one-half brother, Walter Sondheim.
Paradigm
Box Office Struggles
For all these reasons — the high-minded ambition, the seriousness of subject matter, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim'due south shows, though mostly received with disquisitional accolades, were almost never popular hits. He suffered from a reputation that he didn't write hummable tunes and that his outlook was austere, if not grim. For some of the aforementioned reasons, not all performers were suited to his shows, though over the years several well-known singers became his stalwart interpreters, among them Elaine Stritch, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Melt and Bernadette Peters.
Mr. Sondheim rarely gave audiences the fizzy, experience-good musical experience or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to wait. He also didn't give them the opulent spectacle, the anthemic score or the melodramatic storytelling that became the dominant musical theater manner of the 1980s and '90s with the arrival from Britain of Andrew Lloyd Webber'due south megahits "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera," and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's "Les Misérables" and "Miss Saigon," followed past the corporate productions of Disney.
Of the shows for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, his outset, "Forum," had the longest Broadway run at 964 performances; his second, "Anyone Tin can Whistle," lasted ix. "Merrily We Curlicue Forth," a famously problematic adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart reverse-chronology play about how idealistic young artists grow cynical as they age, closed later simply 16. But even his successes were barely successful. Nearly of his Broadway shows, in their initial runs, failed to earn dorsum the coin it price to put them on.
Prototype
"I accept always conscientiously tried non to do the same thing twice," Mr. Sondheim said, reflecting on his career in an interview with The New York Times Mag in 2000, when he turned 70. "If yous're cleaved-field running, they can't hit y'all with so many tomatoes. I certainly feel out of the mainstream because what's happened in musicals is corporate and cookie-cutter stuff. And if I'one thousand out of fashion, I'm out of mode. Existence a bohemian isn't simply about existence different. It'due south well-nigh having your vision of the way a show might be."
Lonely With Mother
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived first on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his father, was the possessor of a dressmaking company; his mother, the former Etta Janet Fox, known equally Foxy, worked for her hubby as a designer until he left her, when Stephen was 10. He was sent for a time to military school, and later to the George Schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, but until he was sixteen Stephen, her only child, lived by and large with his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship throughout his life. (His male parent remarried and had two more than sons.)
In the years following his parents' separation, Mr. Sondheim recalled for his biography, his female parent treated him precisely as she had her married man: flirting with him sexually on the one hand, belittling him on the other. As an adult, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the night before she was to have heart surgery, she wrote a letter to her son and had it hand delivered. Information technology read, in part, "The only regret I have in life is giving you birth."
His female parent was, all the same, responsible for the most formative relationship of her son's life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose husband was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II; their son Jamie became friends with young Steve, and when the Hammersteins moved to a Pennsylvania farm, Stephen, who had begun playing the piano at 7, went for a visit and stayed for the summertime.
His female parent subsequently bought a home nearby, and Stephen was so frequently at the Hammersteins' that he was thought of every bit a family member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor — "It was because of my teenage adoration for him that I became a songwriter," Mr. Sondheim wrote in "Finishing the Lid," although he later assessed Hammerstein every bit a lyricist of soaring power but often flawed work. Hammerstein brutally criticized the boy'due south starting time musical, written at the George School, equally "the worst thing I've e'er read," calculation: "I didn't say that it was untalented, I said information technology was terrible. And if yous want to know why information technology's terrible, I'll tell you lot."
Image
An afternoon-long tutorial followed, educational activity him, by Mr. Sondheim's account, more most the craft than nigh songwriters learn in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Adapt a good play into a musical; adapt a flawed play into a musical; adapt a story from another medium into a musical; and, finally, write a musical from your own original story. This the young Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater work with serious composition study under Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, as he put it, "that art is piece of work and not inspiration, that invention comes with craft." Mr. Sondheim would later study independently with Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim's beginning professional show business job was not in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s television set one-act, "Topper," about a fussbudget banker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts. (Much later, Mr. Sondheim wrote a whodunit film script, "The Last of Sheila," with the actor Anthony Perkins; it was produced in 1973 and directed by Herbert Ross.) Past the '50s he had become a connoisseur of word games and puzzles, and an inventor of elaborate games. From 1968 to 1969, he created cryptic crosswords for New York mag.
His affinity for theatrical misdirection and mystery was acknowledged by his friend, the playwright Anthony Shaffer, who based the cunningly vengeful cuckold in his play "Sleuth" partly on Mr. Sondheim. (The play was once tentatively titled "Who's Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?")
Breaking Into Broadway
Mr. Sondheim was in his early on 20s when he wrote his first professional bear witness, a musical chosen "Sat Night," which was an adaptation of "Front Porch in Flatbush," a play by Philip One thousand. and Julius J. Epstein. He got the job, to write both words and music, after the composer Frank Loesser turned it downwardly. The bear witness was scheduled to be presented in 1955, but the producer, Lemuel Ayers, died earlier he had completed raising the money for it, and the product came to a halt. The show was non presented until 1997, past a minor company in London; it afterward appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the 2nd Stage Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was loath to accept either of his first Broadway gigs, "W Side Story" and "Gypsy," considering he felt he was a composer, not but a lyricist — "I relish writing music much more than lyrics," he confessed in "Finishing the Lid." Just he agreed to both on the advice of Hammerstein, who told him that he would do good from working with the likes of Bernstein; Laurents (who wrote the book), and the director Jerome Robbins, in the outset case, and from writing for a star like Ethel Merman in the 2d, even though it was she who had wanted a more than experienced Broadway hand, Jule Styne, every bit the composer.
But one time after "Gypsy" would Mr. Sondheim write lyrics for another composer: an unhappy collaboration with Richard Rodgers, "Practise I Hear a Waltz?," based on Laurents's play "The Fourth dimension of the Cuckoo."
Image
Mr. Sondheim was asked to have the job by Laurents and past Mary Rodgers, Richard's elder daughter, whom he had met every bit a teenager at the Hammersteins' and for whom he had complicated feelings over many years. Withal, the ii men proved antagonistic as writing partners — years later Mr. Sondheim was quoted every bit saying that Hammerstein was "a homo of express talent and space soul" and Rodgers the contrary — and though the show ran for 220 performances in 1965, it never had a Broadway revival, and neither human considered information technology a success.
The period of Mr. Sondheim'due south greatest work began when Harold Prince became his manager. They were sometime friends, having been introduced by Ms. Rodgers in the tardily 1940s or early '50s, and Mr. Prince had been the producer of "West Side Story." He had proved his chops as a director as well, with musical successes like "She Loves Me" (1963) and "Cabaret" (1966).
Mr. Prince would direct v Sondheim musicals in the 1970s — "Company," "Follies," "A Little Night Music," "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd'' — and though not all were commercially successful, they were all innovative, the product of 2 supremely talented artists whose individually administrative visions were, for the most part, complementary. As Mr. Prince naturally saw a show'south big picture, its look and its stride, Mr. Sondheim, who had inherited the Rodgers and Hammerstein conventionalities that the songs are critical elements of the play, pushed the thought further — non merely integrating the words and music just imbuing the songs with the concerns of a playwright; that is, providing singers with the material to deepen their character portrayals, and in rehearsals concentrating on their delivery and wording.
The partnership foundered on "Merrily We Roll Forth," a show that was hampered in role by the youth of its cast members, who had to play not but young characters but also the disillusioned adults they become, and by Mr. Prince'due south best-selling failure to detect an advisable expect for the evidence as a whole.
"I never knew how to straight it because I work so much from 'What is it going to look like?' " Mr. Prince told Ms. Secrest for her Sondheim biography. "That becomes the motor of the evidence. I never could figure it out."
"Merrily" has had several lives since and then, Off Broadway, in regional theater and overseas, as producers and directors have tried to solve its problems and showcase what is generally acknowledged to exist a vivid and poignant score.
A Younger Collaborator
In any example, the ii men parted creative visitor for more than than two decades, not working together once more until they hammered out a version of a much-revised musical about a pair of entrepreneurial American brothers in the early on 20th century that in other incarnations, before and afterwards, was variously titled "Gold," "Wise Guys" and "Road Show." Under Mr. Prince, it was called "Bounciness," and it was produced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Center in Washington.
During Mr. Prince's absence from his creative life, Mr. Sondheim teamed upward with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the about cerebral works of Mr. Sondheim'south career. These included "Into the Woods," which reimagined familiar children'due south fairy tales into darker adult fables; "Passion," a nearly operatic meditation on the nature of dearest; and "Sunday in the Park With George," a work whose kickoff human activity ingeniously creates the creative process of the painter Georges Seurat as he produces his masterpiece, "A Dominicus Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," and whose 2d act jumps ahead a century to illustrate how a contemporary artist makes fine art in a more consumer-conscious historic period.
With no dancing and a slim plot, there was little of musical theater convention in the prove, but, as Frank Rich wrote in The Times, it was startlingly original and deeply satisfying. "It'southward anyone's guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted by 'Dominicus in the Park,' " Mr. Rich wrote. "What I do know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine accept created an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching work."
Image
It was one of Mr. Sondheim's nearly critically admired shows, running for 604 performances. And many critics and other Sondheim-ophiles plant in it his most personal argument, as if he had used Seurat'southward view of the artist'due south life every bit a surrogate for his own. In the bear witness'due south signature song, "Finishing the Hat," faced with the loss of the woman he loves considering his devotion to painting has superseded his devotion to her, Seurat offers a deplorable but forceful paean to the joy of bringing original beauty into the world. It ends:
And when the woman that you lot wanted goes,
You lot tin say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't await for you knows
That, however y'all live,
There'southward a part of you always standing past,
Mapping out the heaven,
Finishing a hat
Starting on a chapeau
Finishing a hat
Look, I fabricated a chapeau
Where in that location never was a hat.
William McDonald and Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html
0 Response to "But Then Again Suden Ii Lyrics"
Post a Comment