Stephen Sondheim

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Saturday Night  Stephen Sondheim

A few years before he burst onto Broadway with a stunning debut (as the lyricist for West Side Story), a certain young maverick was at work on his very first musical--though it would remain buried for almost a half century. Stephen Sondheim was only in his mid-20s when he wrote the music and lyrics in 1954 for Saturday Night, based on a play by Julius and Philip Epstein called Front Porch in Flatbush, a romantic comedy set in the Brooklyn of 1929. It's fascinating to detect in embryo traces of the Sondheim still to evolve: in the twists of imagery drawn from the stock market or in the rapid-fire, saucy tone that might easily fit into "Gee, Officer Krupke," as well as in the quietly yearning harmonies of the show's loveliest ballad, "So Many People." There's also a sweet innocence here (Sondheim has called it his "baby picture"), emanating from an era when being dateless on a Saturday night could be presented as one of life's major challenges. Although a few gems like "What More Do I Need?" had separately made it into circulation, the show received its very belated premiere in London, but the original 1998 cast recording that resulted left out four songs, such as "Gracious Living Fantasy," in which the Wall Street gofer hero Gene (played with guileless charm by Stephen Sondheim) imagines making it in high society. Moreover, Sondheim himself supervised the session for this recording (Nonesuch's first Sondheim cast album), made with the cast of the show's New York premiere, which was in early 2000 at Second Stage Theater. Saturday Night turns on its ensemble, which in this production is endearingly fresh and doe-eyed. Sure, it's a portrait of the artist as a very young man, but is not to be overlooked as a mere piece of juvenilia. --Thomas May

West Side Story: The Original Sound Track Recording (1961 Film Soundtrack)    Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, Marni Nixon

Leonard Bernstein's musical update of Romeo and Juliet, with a young Stephen Sondheim's brilliant lyrics, had already galvanized Broadway with its vivid reinvention as a parable of racial intolerance and generational conflict. But director Robert Wise's lavish widescreen presentation broke fresh ground by taking the story to its most impressionable audience, the teenagers who could identify directly with Tony and Maria, and opened up Jerome Robbins's kinetic choreography through bravura camera work. The original soundtrack album was not merely a huge seller but a unique touchstone for an otherwise rock-oriented audience, and its release on CD benefits from an expanded program untenable in its initial LP release, as well as a 20-bit digital transfer. With Richard Beymer, Marni Nixon (Hollywood's vocal doppelgänger of choice, here standing in for Natalie Wood), and Rita Moreno dominating, the show's bounty of terrific songs and exciting instrumental pieces remains an ear-filling treat, mixing operatic passions, tart social commentary, and high comedy. From "Tonight" to "One Hand, One Heart," "America" to "Here Come the Jets," this is a landmark in American musical theatre and film beautifully realized on disc. --Sam Sutherland

Stephen Sondheim : A Life by Meryle Secrest

America's foremost musical-theater composer also proves to be a fascinatingly complex and conflicted human being in this meticulous biography by the always-capable Meryle Secrest (Being Bernard Berenson, etc.). Stephen Sondheim himself was interviewed for the book, as were many of his closest friends, and the author makes perceptive use of this material. Born in 1930, Sondheim was a successful Broadway lyricist (West Side Story and Gypsy) before he was 30. But the scars from a miserable childhood remained: he was inclined to be distant, hypercritical of those less intelligent than he, and terrified of serious emotional commitment. Critics sometimes found those qualities in the series of groundbreaking musicals he created with director Hal Prince--Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd, to name four--but they agreed that he brought new intellectual ambition and artistic adventurousness to the musical theater. Secrest does a fine job of delineating Sondheim's career in terms of what it tells us about the state of American theater, as when he shifted to a partnership with writer-director James Lapine and worked in the nonprofit sector for such musicals as Sunday in the Park with George and Assassins. She also does well in selecting revealing quotes to depict the composer's struggle to accept his homosexuality and a rage at his overbearing mother so deep that he didn't even attend her funeral. Sondheim the man and Sondheim the visionary artist get nearly equal time in an intriguing portrait.

The Sondheim Reference Guide

This extensive resource site by Michael H. Hutchins offers the shows, the songs, the recordings.  It offers a chronology of Sondheim's career, and short biographies on people that have been involved in Sondheim's work.

Stephen Sondheim Biography

From John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Excerpt:

Stephen Sondheim is the father of the modern American musical. He took the classic form bequeathed to him by Rodgers and Hammerstein and reinvented it to reflect and analyze the anxious mood of this country throughout the last three decades without losing any of the brio and originality that has made the American musical perhaps the most cherished product of our popular culture...

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