![]() “Gypsy,” with music by Jule Styne, told the backstage story of the ultimate stage mother and the daughter who grew up to be Gypsy Rose Lee. “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, transplanted Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to the streets and gangs of modern-day New York. “If you think of a theater lyric as a short story, as I do, then every line has the weight of a paragraph,” he wrote in his 2010 book, “Finishing the Hat,” the first volume of his collection of lyrics and comments.Įarly in his career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for two shows considered to be classics of the American stage, “West Side Story” (1957) and “Gypsy” (1959). Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and more intellectual place. ![]() All these truisms, he wrote, were “in the service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters.” Together they led to stunning lines like: “It’s a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension.” He offered the three principles necessary for a songwriter in his first volume of collected lyrics - Content Dictates Form, Less Is More, and God Is in the Details. “The opposite of left is right/The opposite of right is wrong/So anyone who’s left is wrong, right?” he wrote in “Anyone Can Whistle.” In “Company,” he penned the lines: “Good things get better/Bad gets worse/Wait - I think I meant that in reverse.” 23Ī supreme wordsmith - and an avid player of word games - Sondheim’s joy of language shone through. Currently, Berkeley Playhouse is presenting Sondheim’s fairy-tale-flavored “Into the Woods” through Dec. His works are vastly popular among regional and community theater troupes, and continue to appear on stages in the Bay Area and across the country. A New York magazine cover asked “Is Sondheim God?” The Guardian newspaper once offered this question: “Is Stephen Sondheim the Shakespeare of musical theatre?”īut Sondheim’s stature reached way beyond the frontline theater worlds of New York and London. To theater fans, Sondheim’s sophistication and brilliance made him an icon. Frank Sinatra, who had a hit with Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” once complained: “He could make me a lot happier if he’d write more songs for saloon singers like me.” He was sometimes criticized as a composer of unhummable songs, a badge that didn’t bother Sondheim. Sondheim’s music and lyrics gave his shows a dark, dramatic edge, whereas before him, the dominant tone of musicals was frothy and comic. President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Sondheim in 2015. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Six of Sondheim’s musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize (“Sunday in the Park”), an Academy Award (for the song “Sooner or Later” from the film “Dick Tracy”), five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. We knew this day was coming soon, but a day to be marked. Today’s a sad day for American musical theater. He was discerning and generous encouraging and a perfectionist. “He loved theater, story and song, and the making of it all. “I met Stephen Sondheim several times, frequently at a show - midtown, downtown, uptown,” said Pam MacKinnon, a Tony Award-winning director and artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. “His profound insight into human nature defined his work, and he and Shakespeare are TheatreWorks’ most-produced artists.” “A genius of extraordinary vision, Stephen Sondheim changed the American musical forever, creating dramas that soared on his complex but unforgettable songs,” said Robert Kelley, founder and artistic director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, who retired in 2020 after 50 years at the helm, and who directed 18 Sondheim works during his career. Aaron Tveit wrote: “We are so lucky to have what you’ve given the world.” ![]() “We shall be singing your songs forever,” wrote Lea Salonga. Tributes quickly came on social media and from other sources as performers, theater directors and writers alike saluted a giant of the theater. The artist refused to repeat himself, finding inspiration for his shows in such diverse subjects as an Ingmar Bergman movie (“A Little Night Music”), the opening of Japan to the West (“Pacific Overtures”), French painter Georges Seurat (“Sunday in the Park With George”), Grimm’s fairy tales (“Into the Woods”) and even the killers of American presidents (“Assassins”), among others.
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