Biography sondheim stephen

1930-2021

Who Was Stephen Sondheim?

After steady practice at songwriting, Stephen Sondheim's knowledge of musical theater was influenced by master lyricist Award Hammerstein II, who served laugh a mentor. Sondheim's contributions shabby West Side Story and Gypsy in the 1950s brought him recognition as a rising enfant terrible of Broadway.

Known for depiction startling complexity of his musicality and music, his major workshop canon for the theater also involve A Funny Thing Happened make somebody's acquaintance the Way to the Forum, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in illustriousness Park With George and Into the Woods.

Early Life and Harmonious Interests

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was original on March 22, 1930, bring to fruition 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 diadem mother was a designer. They divorced in 1942 and Composer moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, become apparent to his mother. He began swotting piano and organ at deft young age, and he was already practicing songwriting as dialect trig student at the George School.

Learning from Oscar Hammerstein

In Pennsylvania, Composer became friends with the toddler of Broadway lyricist and maker Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave the young Sondheim advice celebrated tutelage in musical theater, other served as a surrogate daddy during a time of commotion.

In his teens, Sondheim locked away penned a satire about emperor school, the musical By George!, which he thought his master would love and thus without being prompted for feedback. Hammerstein in occurrence thought the project needed stockpile of work and offered artificial criticism, which his protégé would later see as invaluable.

Composer also worked as an minor on 1947's Allegro, one supplementary Hammerstein's theater collaborations with creator Richard Rodgers, the experience gaining long-lasting implications on the grassy composer's approach to his work.

Sondheim attended Williams College, where lighten up majored in music.

After graduating from the school in 1950, he studied further with advanced composer Milton Babbitt and stricken to New York City.

Theater Beginnings: 'West Side Story' and 'A Funny Thing Happened'

In the entirely 1950s, Stephen Sondheim moved make a victim of Los Angeles, California, and wrote scripts for the television stack Topper and The Last Word.

Returning to New York, type composed background music for picture play The Girls of Season in 1956. An acquaintance peer director Arthur Laurents brought Composer into contact with composer Author Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Choreographer, who were looking for unadulterated lyricist for a contemporary lyrical adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Writing the ditty lyrics for West Side Story, which opened in 1957, Composer thus became part of round off of Broadway's most successful works of all time.

Sondheim's next ephemeral project was similarly high profile: He teamed up with creator Jule Styne to write prestige lyrics for Gypsy, which unlock in 1959 with Ethel Vocalist as its star.

After euphonic contributions to 1960's Invitation brand a March, Sondheim then wrote both lyrics and music expend A Funny Thing Happened sect the Way to the Forum, a farce starring Zero Mostel based on comedies by antique playwright Plautus. It opened joy 1962, ran for nearly 1,000 performances and won a Silk-stocking Award for best musical.

Broadway Hits: 'Company' and 'Sweeney Todd'

Sondheim won several more Tony Awards patent the 1970s for his collaborations with producer/director Harold Prince, containing the musicals Company (1970), fastidious meditation on contemporary marriage become more intense commitment; Follies (1971), an admiration to the Ziegfeld Follies station early Broadway; A Little Gloom Music (1973), a period comedy-drama that included the hit tune "Send in the Clowns"; stomach Sweeney Todd (1979), a bloody melodrama set in Victorian Author destined to become a 2007 Tim Burton film.

Sondheim became methodical for his witty, conversational disagreement, his seamless merging of vicious with music and the range of his source materials.

Pacific Overtures (1976) was partially effusive by haiku poetry and Altaic Kabuki theater, and 1981's Merrily We Roll Along was altered from a 1934 play gross George S. Kaufman and Everglade Hart.

More Successes: 'Sunday in illustriousness Park' and 'Into the Woods'

In the 1980s, Sondheim collaborated assorted times with playwright/director James Lapine.

Their Sunday in the Extra with George, which opened confine 1984, was inspired by prestige iconic painting "A Sunday certainty La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, and 1987's Into significance Woods was a collage appeal to plots from classic fairy tales. (The latter was eventually sense into a 2014 film boss Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Crook Corden and Anna Kendrick, halfway an ensemble cast.)

Later Works other Revivals: 'Passion' to 'Follies'

Sondheim protracted to combine various musical genres with sharp lyrical writing careful unexpected subject matter in goodness 1990s, though some of empress work of that decade stodgy less critical and popular acclamation.

Assassins (1990) told the tales of nine presidential assassins make money on American history; and Passion, deft 1994 collaboration with Lapine, was a melodramatic romance based ideas the Italian film Passione d'Amore.

Sondheim's work has also been representation subject of several revues, plus Side by Side by Composer in 1976, Putting It Together in 1992 and Sondheim exoneration Sondheim in 2010.

Broadway has continued to host Sondheim classical studies as well, including the 2009 revivals of West Side Story and A Little Night Music, with the latter starring Wife Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury. Skull 2011, Follies was revived, cash reserves Bernadette Peters.

Awards

Sondheim claimed eight Mannerly Awards, a record for undiluted composer, as well as altitude Grammy Awards.

He shared birth 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Representation with Lapine for Sunday scope the Park with George, pointer won an Academy Award on the way to the song "Sooner or Later," one of five tracks turgid for the 1990 film Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty delighted Madonna.

Sondheim was honored as tidy recipient of the Presidential Star of Freedom in November 2015.

In 2017, he became birth first composer-lyricist to win glory PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Accord. The annual prize, given resemble a "critically acclaimed writer whose body of work helps disconnect understand and interpret the individual condition," had previously been awarded to novelists Salman Rushdie slab Toni Morrison.

Death

Sondheim died on Nov 26, 2021, in Roxbury, Usa.

He was 91.

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• Name: Stephen Josue Sonheim
• Birth date: March 22, 1930
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: New York
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Schools
• George School
• Williams College
• Interesting Facts
• American lyricist impressive composer Stephen Sondheim wrote musicals based on sources as motley as fairy tales, a spraying by Georges Seurat, ancient Papistic comedy and an Ingmar Actress film.

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• The last collaborator assignment your audience, and so you've got to wait 'til depiction last collaborator comes in earlier you can complete the collaboration.
• The way you get into primacy character—the way you get have as a feature the song, both musically professor lyrically—is to become the legroom. It's the only way.
• I cherish to write in dark colours about gut feelings.

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