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 […]
Keeping Good Company: The Prince-Sondheim Partnership
“We had the same priorities. We wanted to take the audience where we wanted to go, not where they wanted to go.” This is Harold Prince’s description of his collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, and it explains why, in a 12 year period beginning in 1970 with Company and ending in 1981 with Merrily We Roll […]
Interviewing Sondheim
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 […]
Everything We Know (and Don’t Know) about Sondheim’s Surrealist Collaboration with David Ives
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 […]
The Ups and Downs of ‘Send in the Clowns’
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 […]
A Gender-Bending Company
Stephen Sondheim and Company director Marianne Elliott discuss the new production. Since the original 1970 Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company won six Tony Awards, the musical comedy about life, love and marriage has been staged as written time after time through the years. Director Marianne Elliott’s revival is a game changer. […]
Nicely Done, Schmuck
The following article first appeared in The Sondheim Review in Summer 2010 as part of the Following Sondheim series which focused on Sondheim’s impact on the next generation of musical writers. Since the dawn of time, Man has told tales of horror and devastation. Perhaps they serve as a warning. Perhaps they draw a community […]
“Some Kind of Obsession”
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), […]
Sondheim’s Emotional Striptease
The orchestra plays as the lights slowly rise. The music is military, heavy with marching drums. Two figures are in a bed making love; they are nude. The music builds to a crescendo matching the lovemaking. The couple is attractive, as are their voices—his baritone to her soprano. Thus starts the musical Passion. The two […]
Send in the Clones
The following article first appeared in The Sondheim Review in Spring 2010 as part of the Following Sondheim series which focused on Sondheim’s impact on the next generation of musical writers. Click here to read Stephen Flaherty’s companion piece, More to Hear. I suspect that if you swabbed the inside of most theatrical lyricists’ mouths […]