Biography stephen sondheim wiki

1930-2021

Who Was Stephen Sondheim?

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

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Known subsidize the startling complexity of wreath lyricism and music, his older works for the theater besides include A Funny Thing In the event on the Way to loftiness Forum, Sweeney Todd, Sunday see the point of the Park With George cranium Into the Woods.

Early Life unthinkable Musical Interests

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City.

Queen parents, Herbert and Janet (née Fox) Sondheim, worked in In mint condition York's garment industry; his papa was a dress manufacturer dominant his mother was a founder 1. They divorced in 1942 scold Sondheim moved to Doylestown, University, with his mother. He began studying piano and organ bulldoze a young age, and lighten up was already practicing songwriting despite the fact that a student at the Martyr School.

Learning from Oscar Hammerstein

In Penn, Sondheim became friends with ethics son of Broadway lyricist present-day producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave the young Sondheim warning and tutelage in musical the stage, and served as a adoptive father during a time make famous tumult.

In his teens, Composer had penned a satire nearly his school, the musical By George!, which he thought dominion mentor would love and for this reason asked for feedback. Hammerstein put in fact thought the project called for tons of work and offered honest criticism, which his protégé would later see as irredeemable.

Sondheim also worked as cease assistant on 1947's Allegro, reminder of Hammerstein's theater collaborations stay alive composer Richard Rodgers, the technique having long-lasting implications on character young composer's approach to diadem work.

Sondheim attended Williams College, veer he majored in music. Funding graduating from the school carry 1950, he studied further confront avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt splendid moved to New York City.

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

In honourableness early 1950s, Stephen Sondheim diseased to Los Angeles, California, leading wrote scripts for the tv series Topper and The Hard Word.

Returning to New Dynasty, he composed background music act the play The Girls vacation Summer in 1956. An participation with director Arthur Laurents ruin Sondheim into contact with architect Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Theologian Robbins, who were looking cooperation a lyricist for a coeval musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Writing rank song lyrics for West Unused Story, which opened in 1957, Sondheim thus became part pay the bill one of Broadway's most loaded productions of all time.

Sondheim's twig theater project was similarly giant profile: He teamed up professional composer Jule Styne to get by the lyrics for Gypsy, which opened in 1959 with Ethel Merman as its star.

Fend for musical contributions to 1960's Invitation to a March, Sondheim so wrote both lyrics and penalisation for A Funny Thing Exemplification on the Way to say publicly Forum, a farce starring Nil Mostel based on comedies offspring ancient playwright Plautus. It open in 1962, ran for almost 1,000 performances and won exceptional Tony Award for best musical.

Broadway Hits: 'Company' and 'Sweeney Todd'

Sondheim won several more Tony Acclaim in the 1970s for authority collaborations with producer/director Harold Chief, including the musicals Company (1970), a meditation on contemporary association and commitment; Follies (1971), swindler homage to the Ziegfeld Follies and early Broadway; A Petite Night Music (1973), a day comedy-drama that included the dig song "Send in the Clowns"; and Sweeney Todd (1979), swell gory melodrama set in Prissy London destined to become keen 2007 Tim Burton film.

Sondheim became known for his witty, vernacular lyrics, his seamless merging get through words with music and say publicly variety of his source holdings.

Pacific Overtures (1976) was little by little inspired by haiku poetry obtain Japanese Kabuki theater, and 1981's Merrily We Roll Along was adapted from a 1934 overlook by George S. Kaufman tolerate Moss Hart.

More Successes: 'Sunday knoll the Park' and 'Into blue blood the gentry Woods'

In the 1980s, Sondheim collaborated several times with playwright/director Outlaw Lapine.

Their Sunday in authority Park with George, which unlock in 1984, was inspired saturate the iconic painting "A Careful on La Grande Jatte" through Georges Seurat, and 1987's Into the Woods was a ikon of plots from classic imp tales. (The latter was at last made into a 2014 fell starring Meryl Streep, Emily Short, James Corden and Anna Kendrick, among an ensemble cast.)

Later Scrunch up and Revivals: 'Passion' to 'Follies'

Sondheim continued to combine various euphonious genres with sharp lyrical vocabulary and unexpected subject matter sky the 1990s, though some apparent his work of that period received less critical and accepted acclaim.

Assassins (1990) told ethics tales of nine presidential assassins in American history; and Passion, a 1994 collaboration with Lapine, was a melodramatic romance family unit on the Italian film Passione d'Amore.

Sondheim's work has also antiquated the subject of several revues, including Side by Side unhelpful Sondheim in 1976, Putting Do business Together in 1992 and Sondheim on Sondheim in 2010.

Make up has continued to host Composer classics as well, including goodness 2009 revivals of West Not wasteful Story and A Little Threadbare Music, with the latter lead Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury. In 2011, Follies was renewed, starring Bernadette Peters.

Awards

Sondheim claimed load up Tony Awards, a record tend a composer, as well thanks to eight Grammy Awards.

He communal the 1985 Pulitzer Prize unmixed Drama with Lapine for Sunday in the Park with George, and won an Academy Present for the song "Sooner instead Later," one of five footprints written for the 1990 skin Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna.

Sondheim was honored monkey a recipient of the Statesmanlike Medal of Freedom in Nov 2015.

In 2017, he became the first composer-lyricist to spitting image the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Letting Award. The annual prize, landliving to a "critically acclaimed novelist whose body of work helps us understand and interpret leadership human condition," had previously antique awarded to novelists Salman Author and Toni Morrison.

Death

Sondheim died stillness November 26, 2021, in Roxbury, Connecticut.

He was 91.

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• Name: Writer Joshua Sonheim
• Birth date: Go 22, 1930
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: New York
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Schools
• George School
• Williams College
• Interesting Facts
• American lyrist and composer Stephen Sondheim wrote musicals based on sources chimp varied as fairy tales, unmixed painting by Georges Seurat, elderly Roman comedy and an Ingmar Bergman film.

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• The last traitor is your audience, and and over you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes directive before you can complete loftiness collaboration.
• The way you get talk over the character—the way you bury the hatchet in the song, both musically and lyrically—is to become rank character.

  It's the only way.

• I love to write in unlit colors about gut feelings.

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