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. Sondheim's death was announced by his Texas-based attorney, Rick Pappas, who told The New York Times the composer died Friday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. Sondheim, the songwriter who reshaped the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century, has died at age 91. 7, 1985, file photo, Lee Remick, left, poses for a photo with Stephen Sondheim, right, during the finale and curtain call at "Follies" party at Avery Fischer Hall in Lincoln Center, in New York. 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,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, transplanted Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to the streets and gangs of modern-day New York. “If you think of a theater lyric as a short story, as I do, then every line has the weight of a paragraph,” he wrote in his 2010 book, “Finishing the Hat,” the first volume of his collection of lyrics and comments.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). Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and more intellectual place. 4, 1993, file photo shows the Kennedy Center Honors recipients of 1993: founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem Arthur Mitchell, from left, entertainer Johnny Carson, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sitting from left, conductor Georg Solti and singer Marion Williams posing for a portrait wearing their medals following a dinner in their honor at the State Department in Washington, D.C.
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