Then he revealed his perfectionist streak: "I've always hated my last name. I'm thrilled, but deeply embarrassed," he said as the sun fell over dozens of clapping admirers in Times Square. In September 2010, the Henry Miller Theatre was renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. He also revealed that he really only fell in love after reaching 60, first with the dramatist Peter Jones and then in his last years with Jeff Romley. "Saturday Night" finally arrived in New York in 1997 in a small, off-Broadway production.Īn HBO documentary directed by collaborator James Lapine, "Six by Sondheim," aired in 2013 and revealed that he liked to compose lying down and sometimes enjoyed a cocktail to loosen up as he wrote.
It was to have opened on Broadway in 1955, but its producer died just as the musical was about to go into production, and the show was scrapped. At the same time, Sondheim wrote his first musical, "Saturday Night," the story of a group of young people in Brooklyn in the 1920s. One of Sondheim's first jobs was writing scripts for the television show "Topper," which ran from 1953 to 1955. After graduation, he received a two-year fellowship to study with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Sondheim attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in music.
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It was Oscar Hammerstein who became the young man's professional mentor and a good friend. One of their Bucks County neighbors was lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, whose son, James, was Sondheim's roommate at boarding school. At 10, his parents divorced and Sondheim's mother bought a house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, into a wealthy family, the only son of dress manufacturer Herbert Sondheim and Helen Fox Sondheim. All these truisms, he wrote, were "in the service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters." Together they led to stunning lines like: "It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension."
He offered the three principles necessary for a songwriter in his first volume of collected lyrics - Content Dictates Form, Less Is More, and God Is in the Details. Frank Sinatra, who had a hit with Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," once complained: "He could make me a lot happier if he'd write more songs for saloon singers like me." He was sometimes criticized as a composer of unhummable songs, a badge that didn't bother Sondheim. Sondheim's music and lyrics gave his shows a dark, dramatic edge, a change from the largely frothy and comic musicals that came before him. "Put simply, Stephen reinvented the American musical. We transcend them," said former President Barack Obama at the Medal of Freedom ceremony in 2015. "Stephen's music is so beautiful, his lyrics so precise, that even as he exposes the imperfections of everyday life, he transcends them. President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim at the White House on November 24, 2015.
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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