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Stephen Joshua Sondheim ( / ˈsɒndhaɪm /; March 22, 1930 – November 26, 2021) was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical. [1]
- Company
Company is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen...
- Sunday in The Park With George
Sunday in the Park with George is a 1984 musical with music...
- Gypsy
Gypsy: A Musical Fable is a musical with music by Jule...
- James Lapine
James Elliot Lapine (born January 10, 1949) is an American...
- Anyone Can Whistle
Anyone Can Whistle is a musical with music and lyrics by...
- Merrily We Roll Along
Merrily We Roll Along is a 1981 American musical with music...
- Pacific Overtures
Pacific Overtures is a musical with music and lyrics by...
- Do I Hear a Waltz
Background. Laurents originally conceived the production as...
- Works
Stephen Sondheim circa 1970. Stephen Sondheim was an...
- Company
Apr 10, 2024 · Stephen Sondheim (born March 22, 1930, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 26, 2021, Roxbury, Connecticut) was an American composer and lyricist whose brilliance in matching words and music in dramatic situations broke new ground for Broadway musical theater. Precocious as a child, Sondheim showed an early musical aptitude among other wide ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nov 26, 2021 · Published Nov. 26, 2021 Updated March 2, 2023. Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history’s songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American ...
- Who Was Stephen Sondheim?
- Early Life and Musical Interests
- Learning from Oscar Hammerstein
- Theater Beginnings: 'West Side Story' and 'A Funny Thing Happened'
- Broadway Hits: 'Company' and 'Sweeney Todd'
- More Successes: 'Sunday in The Park' and 'Into The Woods'
- Later Works and Revivals: 'Passion' to 'Follies'
- Awards
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
After early practice at songwriting, Stephen Sondheim's knowledge of musical theater was influenced by master lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who served as a mentor. Sondheim's contributions to West Side Story and Gypsy in the 1950s brought him recognition as a rising star of Broadway. Known for the startling complexity of his lyricism and music, hi...
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City. His parents, Herbert and Janet (née Fox) Sondheim, worked in New York's garment industry; his father was a dress manufacturer and his mother was a designer. They divorced in 1942 and Sondheim moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, with his mother. He began studying piano and organ at...
In Pennsylvania, Sondheim became friends with the son of Broadway lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave the young Sondheim advice and tutelage in musical theater, and served as a surrogate father during a time of tumult. In his teens, Sondheim had penned a satire about his school, the musical By George!, which he thought his mentor w...
In the early 1950s, Stephen Sondheim moved to Los Angeles, California, and wrote scripts for the television series Topper and The Last Word. Returning to New York, he composed background music for the play The Girls of Summer in 1956. An acquaintance with director Arthur Laurents brought Sondheim into contact with composer Leonard Bernstein and cho...
Sondheim won several more Tony Awards in the 1970s for his collaborations with producer/director Harold Prince, including the musicals Company (1970), a meditation on contemporary marriage and commitment; Follies (1971), an homage to the Ziegfeld Follies and early Broadway; A Little Night Music (1973), a period comedy-drama that included the hit so...
In the 1980s, Sondheim collaborated several times with playwright/director James Lapine. Their Sunday in the Park with George, which opened in 1984, was inspired by the iconic painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, and 1987's Into the Woods was a collage of plots from classic fairy tales. (The latter was eventually made into a 20...
Sondheim continued to combine various musical genres with sharp lyrical writing and unexpected subject matter in the 1990s, though some of his work of that decade received less critical and popular acclaim. Assassins (1990) told the tales of nine presidential assassins in American history; and Passion, a 1994 collaboration with Lapine, was a melodr...
Sondheim claimed eight Tony Awards, a record for a composer, as well as eight Grammy Awards. He shared the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Lapine for Sunday in the Park with George, and won an Academy Award for the song "Sooner or Later," one of five tracks written for the 1990 film Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna. Sondheim was ho...
Learn about the life and works of Stephen Sondheim, the American lyricist and composer who wrote musicals such as West Side Story, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods. Find out how he collaborated with mentors like Oscar Hammerstein and Harold Prince, and won multiple awards and accolades.
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- Staff Editorial Team And Contributors
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Nov 27, 2021 · Legendary US composer and songwriter Stephen Sondheim has died aged 91. His lawyer told the New York Times that Sondheim passed away on Friday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was a titan ...
Nov 27, 2021 · Legendary US composer and songwriter Stephen Sondheim passed away on Friday at his home in Connecticut. He wrote the scores and lyrics for some of Broadway's best known shows, including West Side Story, Company and A Little Night Music.
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