“The Road You Didn’t Take,” a song which falls early in the first act of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies, is sung by the character Benjamin (Ben) Stone and is the first solo of the main characters in the show. In the scene which leads into the song, Ben is with his old friend […]

Sunday in the Park With George is all about ‘the art of making art’. But nowhere is the frailty, fragility and impossibility of making art more accurately depicted than in the lyrics of the song ‘Beautiful’. This stunning and often overlooked song is one of Sondheim’s most overtly poetic and fragmented, a minimalist and expressive […]

There was no love lost between Alan Jay Lerner and Stephen Sondheim. At least, it seems that way. The older lyricist and librettist known for his successful collaborations with composer Frederick Loewe on shows like My Fair Lady and Camelot, also managed to write a “history” of the artform he toiled in over his career, […]

Time collapses. Sondheim’s favorite.   Or so he told me at a masterclass back in 2010 when I was an eager young doctoral student at UCLA. I was writing a dissertation (now a book!) about how song and dance in musical theater can warp time, enabling marginalized and semi-marginalized fans to imagine new ways of being […]

The story of how Stephen Sondheim replaced the opening number of A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM — trading “Love Is in the Air” for “Comedy Tonight” toward the end of the show’s out-of-town tryout has been often told and I’m not going to belabor it here, except to say that […]

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 […]