{"id":1058222,"date":"2021-11-26T20:28:28","date_gmt":"2021-11-27T01:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1058222"},"modified":"2021-11-26T20:28:31","modified_gmt":"2021-11-27T01:28:31","slug":"towering-musical-theater-master-broadways-west-side-story-writer-stephen-sondheim-dies-at-91","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/towering-musical-theater-master-broadways-west-side-story-writer-stephen-sondheim-dies-at-91\/","title":{"rendered":"Towering Musical Theater Master, Broadway&#039;s &#039;West Side Story&#039; Writer, Stephen Sondheim Dies at 91"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">28<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Ftowering-musical-theater-master-broadways-west-side-story-writer-stephen-sondheim-dies-at-91%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1058222&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/StephenSondheim1-640x335-1.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p class=\"subheading\">NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter who reshaped the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century with his intelligent, intricately rhymed lyrics, his use of evocative melodies and his willingness to tackle unusual subjects, has died. He was 91.<\/p>\n<p>Sondheim\u2019s death was announced by Rick Miramontez, president of DKC\/O&amp;M. Sondheim\u2019s Texas-based attorney, Rick Pappas, <a class=\"x5l\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/11\/26\/theater\/stephen-sondheim-dead.html?smtyp=cur&amp;smid=tw-nytimes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener external\">told The New York Times <\/a>the composer died Friday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"D-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"gmxrevmore\" class=\"H\"><\/figure>\n<p>Sondheim influenced several generations of theater songwriters, particularly with such landmark musicals as \u201cCompany,\u201d \u201cFollies\u201d and \u201cSweeney Todd,\u201d which are considered among his best work. His most famous ballad, \u201cSend in the Clowns,\u201d has been recorded hundreds of times, including by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins.<\/p>\n<p>The artist refused to repeat himself, finding inspiration for his shows in such diverse subjects as an Ingmar Bergman movie (\u201cA Little Night Music\u201d), the opening of Japan to the West (\u201cPacific Overtures\u201d), French painter Georges Seurat (\u201cSunday in the Park With George\u201d), Grimm\u2019s fairy tales (\u201cInto the Woods\u201d) and even the killers of American presidents (\u201cAssassins\u201d), among others.<\/p>\n<p>Tributes quickly flooded social media as performers and writers alike saluted a giant of the theater. \u201cWe shall be singing your songs forever,\u201d wrote Lea Salonga. Aaron Tveit wrote: \u201cWe are so lucky to have what you\u2019ve given the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B2\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cThe theater has lost one of its greatest geniuses and the world has lost one of its greatest and most original writers. Sadly, there is now a giant in the sky,\u201d producer Cameron Mackintosh wrote in tribute. Music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire tweeted: \u201cFor those of us who love new musical theater: we live in a world that Sondheim built.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Six of Sondheim\u2019s musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize (\u201cSunday in the Park\u201d), an Academy Award (for the song \u201cSooner or Later\u201d from the film \u201cDick Tracy\u201d), five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.<\/p>\n<p>Sondheim\u2019s music and lyrics gave his shows a dark, dramatic edge, whereas before him, the dominant tone of musicals was frothy and comic. He was sometimes criticized as a composer of unhummable songs, a badge that didn\u2019t bother Sondheim. Frank Sinatra, who had a hit with Sondheim\u2019s \u201cSend in the Clowns,\u201d once complained: \u201cHe could make me a lot happier if he\u2019d write more songs for saloon singers like me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To theater fans, Sondheim\u2019s sophistication and brilliance made him an icon. A Broadway theater was named after him. A New York magazine cover asked \u201cIs Sondheim God?\u201d The Guardian newspaper once offered this question: \u201cIs Stephen Sondheim the Shakespeare of musical theatre?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A supreme wordsmith \u2014 and an avid player of word games \u2014 Sondheim\u2019s joy of language shone through. \u201cThe opposite of left is right\/The opposite of right is wrong\/So anyone who\u2019s left is wrong, right?\u201d he wrote in \u201cAnyone Can Whistle.\u201d In \u201cCompany,\u201d he penned the lines: \u201cGood things get better\/Bad gets worse\/Wait \u2014 I think I meant that in reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B3\" class=\"a8d adSo\"><\/figure>\n<p>He offered the three principles necessary for a songwriter in his first volume of collected lyrics \u2014 Content Dictates Form, Less Is More, and God Is in the Details. All these truisms, he wrote, were \u201cin the service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters.\u201d Together they led to stunning lines like: \u201cIt\u2019s a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and more intellectual place. \u201cIf you think of a theater lyric as a short story, as I do, then every line has the weight of a paragraph,\u201d he wrote in his 2010 book, \u201cFinishing the Hat,\u201d the first volume of his collection of lyrics and comments.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"D-ROS-B2\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<p>Early in his career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for two shows considered to be classics of the American stage, \u201cWest Side Story\u201d (1957) and \u201cGypsy\u201d (1959). \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d with music by Leonard Bernstein, transplanted Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d to the streets and gangs of modern-day New York. \u201cGypsy,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>It was not until 1962 that Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics for a Broadway show, and it turned out to be a smash \u2014 the bawdy \u201cA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,\u201d starring Zero Mostel as a wily slave in ancient Rome yearning to be free.<\/p>\n<p>Yet his next show, \u201cAnyone Can Whistle\u201d (1964), flopped, running only nine performances but achieving cult status after its cast recording was released. Sondheim\u2019s 1965 lyric collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers \u2014 \u201cDo I Hear a Waltz?\u201d \u2014 also turned out to be problematic. The musical, based on the play \u201cThe Time of the Cuckoo,\u201d ran for six months but was an unhappy experience for both men, who did not get along.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B4\" class=\"a8d adSo\"><\/figure>\n<p>It was \u201cCompany,\u201d which opened on Broadway in April 1970, that cemented Sondheim\u2019s reputation. The episodic adventures of a bachelor (played by Dean Jones) with an inability to commit to a relationship was hailed as capturing the obsessive nature of striving, self-centered New Yorkers. The show, produced and directed by Hal Prince, won Sondheim his first Tony for best score. \u201cThe Ladies Who Lunch\u201d became a standard for Elaine Stritch.<\/p>\n<p>The following year, Sondheim wrote the score for \u201cFollies,\u201d a look at the shattered hopes and disappointed dreams of women who had appeared in lavish Ziegfeld-style revues. The music and lyrics paid homage to great composers of the past such as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and the Gershwins.<\/p>\n<p>In 1973, \u201cA Little Night Music,\u201d starring Glynis Johns and Len Cariou, opened. Based on Bergman\u2019s \u201cSmiles of a Summer Night,\u201d this rueful romance of middle-age lovers contains the song \u201cSend in the Clowns,\u201d which gained popularity outside the show. A revival in 2009 starred Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones was nominated for a best revival Tony.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPacific Overtures,\u201d with a book by John Weidman, followed in 1976. The musical, also produced and directed by Prince, was not a financial success, but it demonstrated Sondheim\u2019s commitment to offbeat material, filtering its tale of the westernization of Japan through a hybrid American-Kabuki style.<\/p>\n<p>In 1979, Sondheim and Prince collaborated on what many believe to be Sondheim\u2019s masterpiece, the bloody yet often darkly funny \u201cSweeney Todd.\u201d An ambitious work, it starred Cariou in the title role as a murderous barber whose customers end up in meat pies baked by Todd\u2019s willing accomplice, played by Angela Lansbury.<\/p>\n<p>The Sondheim-Prince partnership collapsed two years later, after \u201cMerrily We Roll Along,\u201d a musical that traced a friendship backward from its characters\u2019 compromised middle age to their idealistic youth. The show, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, only ran two weeks on Broadway. But again, as with \u201cAnyone Can Whistle,\u201d its original cast recording helped \u201cMerrily We Roll Along\u201d to become a favorite among musical-theater buffs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSunday in the Park,\u201d written with James Lapine, may be Sondheim\u2019s most personal show. A tale of uncompromising artistic creation, it told the story of artist Georges Seurat, played by Mandy Patinkin. The painter submerges everything in his life, including his relationship with his model (Bernadette Peters), for his art.) It was most recently revived on Broadway in 2017 with Jake Gyllenhaal.)<\/p>\n<p>Three years after \u201cSunday\u201d debuted, Sondheim collaborated again with Lapine, this time on the fairy-tale musical \u201cInto the Woods.\u201d The show starred Peters as a glamorous witch and dealt primarily with the turbulent relationships between parents and children, using such famous fairy-tale characters as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel. It was most recently revived in the summer of 2012 in Central Park by The Public Theater.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAssassins\u201d opened off-Broadway in 1991 and it looked at the men and women who wanted to kill presidents, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. The show received mostly negative reviews in its original incarnation, but many of those critics reversed themselves 13 years later when the show was done on Broadway and won a Tony for best musical revival.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPassion\u201d was another severe look at obsession, this time a desperate woman, played by Donna Murphy, in love with a handsome soldier. Despite winning the best-musical Tony in 1994, the show barely managed a six-month run.<\/p>\n<p>A new version of \u201cThe Frogs,\u201d with additional songs by Sondheim and a revised book by Nathan Lane (who also starred in the production), played Lincoln Center during the summer of 2004. The show, based on the Aristophanes comedy, originally had been done 20 years earlier in the Yale University swimming pool.<\/p>\n<p>One of his more troubled shows was \u201cRoad Show,\u201d which reunited Sondheim and Weidman and spent years being worked on. This tale of the Mizner brothers, whose get-rich schemes in the early part of the 20th century finally made it to the Public Theater in 2008 after going through several different titles, directors and casts.<\/p>\n<p>He had been working on a new musical with \u201cVenus in Fur\u201d playwright David Ives, who called his collaborator a genius. \u201cNot only are his musicals brilliant, but I can\u2019t think of another theater person who has so chronicled a whole age so eloquently,\u201d Ives said in 2013. \u201cHe is the spirit of the age in a certain way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, into a wealthy family, the only son of dress manufacturer Herbert Sondheim and Helen Fox Sondheim. At 10, his parents divorced and Sondheim\u2019s mother bought a house in Doylestown, Pa., where one of their Bucks County neighbors was lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, whose son, James, was Sondheim\u2019s roommate at boarding school. It was Oscar Hammerstein who became the young man\u2019s professional mentor and a good friend.<\/p>\n<p>He had a solitary childhood, one that involved verbal abuse from his chilly mother. He received a letter in his 40s from her telling him that she regretted giving birth to him. He continued to support her financially and to see her occasionally but didn\u2019t attend her funeral.<\/p>\n<p>Sondheim attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in music. After graduation, he received a two-year fellowship to study with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt.<\/p>\n<p>One of Sondheim\u2019s first jobs was writing scripts for the television show \u201cTopper,\u201d which ran for two years (1953-1955). At the same time, Sondheim wrote his first musical, \u201cSaturday Night,\u201d the story of a group of young people in Brooklyn in 1920s. It was to have opened on Broadway in 1955, but its producer died just as the musical was about to go into production, and the show was scrapped. \u201cSaturday Night\u201d finally arrived in New York in 1997 in a small, off-Broadway production.<\/p>\n<p>Sondheim wrote infrequently for the movies. He collaborated with actor Anthony Perkins on the script for the 1973 murder mystery \u201cThe Last of Sheila,\u201d and besides his work on \u201cDick Tracy\u201d (1990), wrote scores for such movies as Alain Resnais\u2019 \u201cStavisky\u201d (1974) and Warren Beatty\u2019s \u201cReds\u201d (1981).<\/p>\n<p>Over the years, there have been many Broadway revivals of Sondheim shows, especially \u201cGypsy,\u201d which had reincarnations starring Angela Lansbury (1974), Tyne Daly (1989) and Peters (2003). But there also were productions of \u201cA Funny Thing,\u201d one with Phil Silvers in 1972 and another starring Nathan Lane in 1996; \u201cInto the Woods\u201d with Vanessa Williams in 2002; and even of Sondheim\u2019s less successful shows such as \u201cAssassins\u201d and \u201cPacific Overtures,\u201d both in 2004. \u201cSweeney Todd\u201d has been produced in opera houses around the world. A reimagined \u201cWest Side Story\u201d opened on Broadway in 2020 and a scrambled \u201cCompany\u201d opened on Broadway in 2021 with the genders of the actors switched.<\/p>\n<p>Sondheim\u2019s songs have been used extensively in revues, the best-known being \u201cSide by Side by Sondheim\u201d (1976) on Broadway and \u201cPutting It Together,\u201d off-Broadway with Julie Andrews in 1992 and on Broadway with Carol Burnett in 1999. The New York Philharmonic put on a star-studded \u201cCompany\u201d in 2011 with Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Colbert. Tunes from his musicals have lately popped up everywhere from \u201cMarriage Story\u201d to \u201cThe Morning Show.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>An HBO documentary directed by Lapine, \u201cSix by Sondheim,\u201d aired in 2013 and revealed that he liked to compose lying down and sometimes enjoyed a cocktail to loosen up as he wrote. He even revealed that he really only fell in love after reaching 60, first with the dramatist Peter Jones and then in his last years with Jeff Romley.<\/p>\n<p>In September 2010, the Henry Miller Theatre was renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. \u201cI\u2019m deeply embarrassed. I\u2019m thrilled, but deeply embarrassed,\u201d he said as the sun fell over dozens of clapping admirers in Times Square. Then he revealed his perfectionist streak: \u201cI\u2019ve always hated my last name. It just doesn\u2019t sing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter who reshaped the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century with his intelligent, intricately rhymed lyrics, his use &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1058222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1058222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1058222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1058222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1058222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1058222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}