Stephen Sondheim once joked that an album of his chart-topping songs would have to be titled Sondheim’s Greatest Hit, since he had only one, “Send In the Clowns.” Hal Prince, the legendary producer and director, has had a few more. Prince of Broadway, the revue that finally had its Broadway opening (Aug. 24, 2017) after […]
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Keeping Good Company: The Prince-Sondheim Partnership
“We had the same priorities. We wanted to take the audience where we wanted to go, not where they wanted to go.” This is Harold Prince’s description of his collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, and it explains why, in a 12 year period beginning in 1970 with Company and ending in 1981 with Merrily We Roll […]
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
By Rick Pender Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street was Stephen Sondheim’s tenth Broadway production. It is generally considered his masterpiece, a melodic and theatrically bold work that’s been produced in theaters large and small and numerous opera houses. The original 1979 Broadway production won eight Tony Awards including recognition as the season’s […]
Pacific Overtures
By Rick Pender Sondheim’s ninth musical, Pacific Overtures (1976), is considered by many to be his most unusual. It was his fourth collaboration with Hal Prince as director and producer. Prince introduced Sondheim to young playwright John Weidman, who had advanced the idea of a dramatic play about 19th-century Japan, chronicling the 1853 arrival of […]
Interviewing Sondheim
In 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat down with Library of Congress Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz for three days, pouring over the manuscripts of many of his shows. He had agreed to bequeath his manuscripts to the library and Horowitz stood in for future researchers who might have questions about minute details revealed on those pages […]
Follies
By Rick Pender Follies, Sondheim’s seventh Broadway production, began as The Girls Upstairs, a collaboration with bookwriter James Goldman about some young women in a Ziegfeld-like extravaganza and the stage-boy Johnnies who courted them. With Hal Prince as the show’s producer and director, it evolved into Follies, a more profound drama about past and present […]
Company
By Rick Pender Company, Sondheim’s sixth Broadway musical, was his breakthrough to serious credibility. It received 14 Tony Award nominations, a record at the time. It’s a minimally plotted collection of songs and stories (more like a revue than a traditional musical) about a single man, his married friends, and several girlfriends. Robert wrestles with […]
The Ups and Downs of ‘Send in the Clowns’
Isn’t it rich? His career arc stretches from writing the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy when he was in his late twenties to mentoring Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel Miranda in his seventies and eighties. His oeuvre encompasses the very best of modern musical theater: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily […]
A Gender-Bending Company
Stephen Sondheim and Company director Marianne Elliott discuss the new production. Since the original 1970 Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company won six Tony Awards, the musical comedy about life, love and marriage has been staged as written time after time through the years. Director Marianne Elliott’s revival is a game changer. […]
Sondheim Bibliography
Introducing the Sondheim bibliography! Want to learn more on Sondheim? This section will be regularly updated with new reviews and summaries from the wealth of books about Sondheim, his works and his partners. Reviews written by Andrew Milner. Finishing the Hat (2010, Knopf) The first volume of this long-awaited two book set collects Sondheim’s lyrics from Saturday […]