Stephen Sondheim, the award-winning composer-lyricist who took the Broadway musical to a higher level of emotional complexity than his predecessors in shows such as “Company,” “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd,” has died at his home in Roxbury, Conn.
“Sondheim changed musical theater,” the late Gary Gardner, the former chair of the Ray Bolger Program in Musical Theater at UCLA, told The Times in 2010. “After the great book musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, we had a period of diminishing creativity. Then we ran into rock music [with ‘Hair’], and it’s like, ‘Oh, no.’ Suddenly, with ‘Company,’ we have a new savior.”
Sondheim and Prince went on to collaborate on “Follies”, “A Little Night Music”, “Pacific Overtures”, “Sweeney Todd” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” which closed after only 16 performances but came to be regarded as an overlooked triumph. “To sing a song of Sondheim’s is a singer’s reward,” Barbra Streisand said on stage at a star-studded 75th birthday tribute to Sondheim at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005.
An only child, Sondheim was born in New York City on March 22, 1930. His father was a successful dress manufacturer and his mother the chief designer. Sondheim spent his early years living in the landmark San Remo apartment building on Central Park West. After his father left, Sondheim says in Meryle Secrest’s 1998 biography “Stephen Sondheim: A Life,” his mother “substituted me for him. And she used me the way she had used him, to come on to and to berate, beat up on. What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time.”
“I thought it was terrific, so I asked [Hammerstein] to read it as if he were a producer and didn’t know me,” Sondheim told Newsweek. “The next day he called me over and said, ‘It’s the worst thing I ever read in my life, and if you want to know why I’ll tell you.’ In 1953, Sondheim landed his first professional job, via his Hammerstein connection: writing scripts for the TV sit-com “Topper” in Hollywood for five months.
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