Lyric genius11/9/2022 ![]() ![]() (It was most recently revived on Broadway in 2017 with Jake Gyllenhaal.) The painter submerges everything in his life, including his relationship with his model (Bernadette Peters), for his art. A tale of uncompromising artistic creation, it told the story of artist Georges Seurat, played by Mandy Patinkin. “Sunday in the Park,” written with James Lapine, may be Sondheim’s most personal show. But again, as with “Anyone Can Whistle,” its original cast recording helped “Merrily We Roll Along” to become a favorite among musical-theater buffs. Kaufman and Moss Hart, only ran two weeks on Broadway. The Sondheim-Prince partnership collapsed two years later, after “Merrily We Roll Along,” a musical that traced a friendship backward from its characters’ compromised middle age to their idealistic youth. In 1979, Sondheim and Prince collaborated on what many believe to be Sondheim’s masterpiece, the bloody yet often darkly funny “Sweeney Todd.” An ambitious work, it starred Cariou in the title role as a murderous barber whose customers end up in meat pies baked by Todd’s willing accomplice, played by Angela Lansbury. The actors are, from left, Kevin Gray, Ernest Ababa, and Tony Marino. The musical, also produced and directed by Prince, was not a financial success, but it demonstrated Sondheim’s commitment to offbeat material, filtering its tale of the westernization of Japan through a hybrid American-Kabuki style.Ĭomposer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim (left) is shown with cast members of ‘Pacific Overtures’ after the closing performance of the revival musical at New York’s Church of the Heavenly Rest at York Theater, on Sunday, April 14, 1984. “Pacific Overtures,” with a book by John Weidman, followed in 1976. A revival in 2009 starred Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones was nominated for a best revival Tony. ![]() Based on Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night,” this rueful romance of middle-age lovers contains the song “Send in the Clowns,” which gained popularity outside the show. In 1973, “A Little Night Music,” starring Glynis Johns and Len Cariou, opened. The music and lyrics paid homage to great composers of the past such as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and the Gershwins. The following year, Sondheim wrote the score for “Follies,” a look at the shattered hopes and disappointed dreams of women who had appeared in lavish Ziegfeld-style revues. “The Ladies Who Lunch” became a standard for Elaine Stritch. The show, produced and directed by Hal Prince, won Sondheim his first Tony for best score. 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. It was “Company,” which opened on Broadway in April 1970, that cemented Sondheim’s reputation. The musical, based on the play “The Time of the Cuckoo,” ran for six months but was an unhappy experience for both men, who did not get along. Sondheim’s 1965 lyric collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers - “Do I Hear a Waltz?” - also turned out to be problematic. Yet his next show, “Anyone Can Whistle” (1964), flopped, running only nine performances but achieving cult status after its cast recording was released. It was not until 1962 that Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics for a Broadway show, and it turned out to be a smash - the bawdy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” starring Zero Mostel as a wily slave in ancient Rome yearning to be free. “Gypsy,” 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. ![]() “West Side Story” transplanted Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to the streets and gangs of modern-day New York. “He is the spirit of the age in a certain way.”Įarly in his career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for two shows considered to be classics of the American stage, “West Side Story” (1957) and “Gypsy” (1959). ![]() “Not only are his musicals brilliant, but I can’t think of another theater person who has so chronicled a whole age so eloquently,” Ives said in 2013. He had been working on a new musical with “Venus in Fur” playwright David Ives, who called his collaborator a genius. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Six of Sondheim’s musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize (“Sunday in the Park”), an Academy Award (for the song “Sooner or Later” from the film “Dick Tracy”), five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. ![]()
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