Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who helped American musical theater evolve past pure leisure and attain new inventive heights with works corresponding to “West Side Story,” “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd,” died early Friday at his residence in Roxbury, Connecticut, on the age of 91, the New York Times reported.
Sondheim, whose eight lifetime Tony Awards surpassed the overall of every other composer, began early, studying the artwork of musical theater when he was simply a youngster from “The Sound of Music” lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.
In a tweet Friday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio mentioned of Sondheim: “One of the brightest lights of Broadway is dark tonight. May he rest in peace.”
Actor and singer Anna Kendrick referred to as Sondheim’s loss of life “a devastating loss.” “Performing his work has been among the greatest privileges of my career,” Kendrick added in a tweet.
“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, has referred to as him musical theater’s biggest lyricist.
Sondheim’s most profitable musicals included “Into the Woods,” which opened on Broadway in 1987 and used youngsters’s fairy tales to untangle grownup obsessions, the 1979 thriller “Sweeney Todd” a couple of murderous barber in London whose victims are served as meat pies, and 1962’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” a vaudeville-style comedy set in historic Rome.
“I love the theater as much as music, and the whole idea of getting across to an audience and making them laugh, making them cry – just making them feel – is paramount to me,” Sondheim mentioned in a 2013 interview with National Public Radio.
Several of Sondheim’s hit musicals have been changed into motion pictures, together with the 2014 movie “Into the Woods,” starring Meryl Streep, and the 2007 “Sweeney Todd” with Johnny Depp. A brand new movie model of “West Side Story,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s music, opens subsequent month.
His songs have been celebrated for his or her sharp wit and perception into fashionable life and for giving voice to advanced characters, however few of them made the pop charts.
‘Clowns’ hit
He had successful, nevertheless, with the Grammy-winning “Send in the Clowns” from his 1973 musical “A Little Night Music.” It was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Judy Collins, amongst others.
One of Sondheim’s biggest triumphs was his Pulitzer Prize for the 1984 musical “Sunday in the Park with George,” about Nineteenth-century French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. As Sondheim collected accolades, New York City’s Broadway theater business underwent many adjustments. It had a key function in American tradition by way of the Fifties, with many Broadway songs making the pop charts, however misplaced significance as rock music gained a maintain on the general public beginning within the Sixties. Increasingly, musicals borrowed materials from tv and films, as an alternative of the opposite manner round, composer Mark N. Grant wrote in his e book “The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical.”
Former US President Barack Obama, proper, presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to composer Stephen Sondheim throughout a ceremony within the East Room of the White House, on Nov 24, 2015 in Washington. (AP)
Sondheim shared the view that Broadway had skilled decline, expressing it repeatedly in interviews.“There are so many forms of entertainment, theater is becoming more marginalised,” he instructed British newspaper The Times in 2012.
But Broadway musicals additionally turned extra inventive and Sondheim performed a key function of their evolution, critics mentioned. He explored such weighty matters as political assassinations in “Assassins,” the human want for household and the pull of dysfunctional relationships in “Into the Woods,” social inequality in “Sweeney Todd,” and Western imperialism in “Pacific Overtures.”
He additionally developed new strategies for presenting a play. Instead of telling a narrative from starting to finish, he would bounce back and forth in time to discover a single theme. It was referred to as the “concept musical.”Broadway audiences have been launched to Sondheim with “West Side Story” in 1957. The story a couple of love affair between a Puerto Rican woman, Maria, and a white boy, Tony, in working-class Manhattan was changed into an Oscar-winning movie in 1961. The central characters expressed their infatuation within the songs “Maria,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight.”
Conflict with mom
Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, in New York City to prosperous Jewish dad and mom who labored in trend. He described his early childhood as a lonely one, with servants as his primary firm.
After his dad and mom break up up when he was 10 years previous, Sondheim moved together with his mom to rural Pennsylvania, the place she purchased a farm. He later mentioned his mom took out her wrath over the divorce on him. He discovered a surrogate household within the close by family of Hammerstein and his spouse, Dorothy.
Hammerstein, who together with associate Richard Rodgers created the basic musicals “Oklahoma!” and “The Sound of Music,” taught the teenage Sondheim tips on how to write musical theater. After Sondheim turned well-known, he mentored others on Broadway. When Miranda started work on a rap musical about American founding father Alexander Hamilton, Sondheim inspired and critiqued him. The play turned a smash hit on Broadway in 2015.
In field workplace success, Sondheim fell in need of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer behind “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats” with whom Sondheim shared a birthday.
Sondheim pushed audiences, which generally resulted in field workplace flops.
Some of his least commercially profitable performs have been lauded by critics. Those included the 1976 “Pacific Overtures,” which depicted Japan throughout an age of Western colonialism, and his 1990 off-Broadway manufacturing “Assassins” about real-life figures who every got down to kill an American president.
Sondheim had many followers within the educational world. In 1994, a quarterly journal referred to as the Sondheim Review was based to look at his work, 5 years after Oxford University in England named him a visiting professor of drama.
His devotees celebrated the acerbic irony of his lyrics, which they described as commenting on every thing from the boundaries of America’s melting pot to the draw back of marriage.
These strains from “The Ladies Who Lunch” in his 1970 musical “Company” contained a typical slice of Sondheim’s wit: “Here’s to the girls who play wife/Aren’t they too much?/Keeping house but clutching a copy of ‘LIFE’/Just to keep in touch.”
Sondheim, who was homosexual, didn’t stay with a romantic associate till age 61, in line with a 2000 profile in The New York Times Magazine, by which he mentioned his romantic relationships have been hardly ever intense or long-lasting.