Rick Pender, founding editor of Everything Sondheim, has created a brand new, detailed and comprehensive reference of well, everything Sondheim! The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia is a detailed and comprehensive reference devoted to musical theater’s most prolific and admired composer and lyricist. Entries cover Sondheim’s numerous collaborators—from composers and directors to designers and orchestras—key songs—such as […]

In 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat down with Library of Congress Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz for three days, pouring over the manuscripts of many of his shows. He had agreed to bequeath his manuscripts to the library and Horowitz stood in for future researchers who might have questions about minute details revealed on those pages […]

Editor’s note: Since the printing of this article, Sondheim is reportedly no longer collaborating with David Ives on the project.  Back in the summer of 2016 a report that Stephen Sondheim’s new musical had received a secret reading at The Public Theater generated speculation in the theater community that we could be witnessing a new […]

Isn’t it rich? His career arc stretches from writing the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy when he was in his late twenties to mentoring Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel Miranda in his seventies and eighties. His oeuvre encompasses the very best of modern musical theater: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily […]

At 11 years old and in the wake of his parents’ bitter divorce, Manhattan native Stephen Sondheim was shuffled off to live with his mother in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. This dark period in the burgeoning musician’s life changed course when he befriended Jimmy Hammerstein, the son of the legendary Broadway composer (and soon-to-be mentor to Sondheim), […]