The world will miss the genius of Stephen Sondheim, because not many (pronounced "zero") people have had his talent for writing words and music that make people sing and dance and shell out money for tickets to see others sing and dance.
As you heard over the weekend, Sondheim died Friday, aged 91. He was a New Yorker from birth and over the course of his life, he won all the awards in his field, from the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2015) on down the line.
Before Sondheim, musicals ran the course of so many shows, the old "boy-meets-girl, girl dumps boy but later finds the love of her life was back home all along so they get together again for good and all is well" sort of thing.
In works such as “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, “Company”, “Gypsy”, “Sunday in the Park with George”, and “West Side Story, " he took the audience to more realistic places, changing the course of Broadway and movies and making it possible for modern shows such as "A Chorus Line", "Hadestown", "Hamilton" and so forth. Before Sondheim stretched the genre, a rap musical about America's first Secretary of the Treasury would not have been on anyone's mind.
He wrote his first musical at age 15, an age where the most creative writing most of us are doing is fake sick notes for school. After college, he got his feet wet in show business by writing scripts for "Topper," a barely-remembered TV sitcom about a guy who lives in a house haunted by the ghosts of a young couple and a St. Bernard dog who were swept away in an avalanche. The high point of the show is that the invisible dog drank visible martinis.
Everyone has to start somewhere, you know.
Guided into more tony endeavors by family friend Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s "West Side Story," which opened in 1957, and next he wrote the lyrics for Jule Styne's music for "Gypsy."
Given the chance to do both the lyrics and the music for a show, he turned out "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," which was based on Roman comedies from long long ago. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical. That play ran for 964 performances on Broadway, and it looked like Sondheim had the magic touch.
His next effort was called "Anyone Can Whistle," and no one can whistle a song from it because it closed after nine performances.
But did he quit? He did not. He hit again with "Company", "Follies", "A Little Night Music", "Sweeney Todd", "Sunday In The Park With George", "Passion" and many revues featuring new presentations of his songs.
And for those who think that such a creative life was nurtured in the loving bosom of a fond mother, remember this: Sondheim's father left his mother for another woman, and his mother took out her wrath on young Stephen, first packing him off to military school and a Quaker boarding school. Later in his life, he received a letter from his mother in which she wrote that the one regret she had in her life was giving birth to him.
She died in 1992. He did not attend the funeral.
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