78 Facts About Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist.

Stephen Sondheim was known for his frequent collaborations with Hal Prince and James Lapine on the Broadway stage.

Stephen Sondheim began his career by writing the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy.

Stephen Sondheim transitioned to writing both music and lyrics for the theater, with his best-known works including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods.

Stephen Sondheim was born on March 22,1930, into a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Etta Janet and Herbert Stephen Sondheim.

When he lived in New York City, Stephen Sondheim attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

Stephen Sondheim's mother sent him to New York Military Academy in 1940.

When she died in 1992, Stephen Sondheim did not attend her funeral.

Stephen Sondheim had been estranged from her for nearly 20 years.

When Stephen Sondheim was about ten years old, he formed a close friendship with James Hammerstein, son of lyricist and playwright Oscar Hammerstein II, who were neighbors in Bucks County.

Stephen Sondheim met Hal Prince, who later directed many of his shows, at the opening of South Pacific, Hammerstein's musical with Richard Rodgers.

The comic musical Stephen Sondheim wrote at George School, By George, was a success among his peers and buoyed his self-esteem.

Hammerstein designed a course of sorts for Stephen Sondheim on constructing a musical.

Stephen Sondheim had the young composer write four musicals, each with one of the following conditions:.

Stephen Sondheim later recalled that Hammerstein had given him a portrait of himself.

Stephen Sondheim began attending Williams College, a liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, whose theater program attracted him.

Stephen Sondheim told Secrest that Kern had the ability "to develop a single motif through tiny variations into a long and never boring line and his maximum development of the minimum of material".

Stephen Sondheim said of Babbitt, "I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts with all his serious artillery".

At Williams, Sondheim wrote a musical adaption of Beggar on Horseback that had three performances.

Stephen Sondheim devoured 1940s and 1950s films, and called cinema his "basic language"; his film knowledge got him through The $64,000 Question contestant tryouts.

At age 22, Stephen Sondheim had finished the four shows Hammerstein requested.

Stephen Sondheim saw a familiar face, Arthur Laurents, who had seen one of the auditions of Saturday Night, and they began talking.

Stephen Sondheim said that although he was not a big fan of Sondheim's music, he enjoyed the lyrics from Saturday Night and he could audition for Bernstein.

The next day, Stephen Sondheim met and played for Bernstein, who said he would let him know.

Stephen Sondheim expressed dissatisfaction with his lyrics, saying they did not always fit the characters and were sometimes too consciously poetic.

Stephen Sondheim later said he wished "someone stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth because it would have been nice to get that extra percentage".

Stephen Sondheim was interested in the idea and called a friend, Larry Gelbart, to co-write the script.

Stephen Sondheim agreed; Gypsy opened on May 21,1959, and ran for 702 performances.

The first Broadway production for which Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which opened in 1962 and ran for 964 performances.

Stephen Sondheim then decided to work only when he could write both music and lyrics.

Stephen Sondheim asked author and playwright James Goldman to join him as bookwriter for a new musical.

That year Goldman and Stephen Sondheim hit a creative wall on The Girls Upstairs, and Goldman asked Stephen Sondheim about writing a TV musical.

Stephen Sondheim was invited to Robbins's house in the hope that Guare would convince him to write the lyrics for a musical version of The Exception and the Rule; according to Robbins, Bernstein would not work without Stephen Sondheim.

Guare said that working with Stephen Sondheim was like being with an old college roommate, and he depended on him to "decode and decipher their crazy way of working"; Bernstein worked only after midnight, and Robbins only in the early morning.

Eighteen years later, Stephen Sondheim refused Bernstein's and Robbins's request to retry the show.

Stephen Sondheim lived in a Turtle Bay, Manhattan brownstone from his writing of Gypsy in 1959.

The first Stephen Sondheim show with Prince as director was 1970's Company.

Mistakenly given the working title Bunuel by the New York Post and other outlets, Stephen Sondheim clarified in 2017 that the show still had no title.

Nathan Lane and Bernadette Peters were involved in a reading of this new work, and Stephen Sondheim discussed adapting the Bunuel films in the final interview before his death.

On February 1,2011, Stephen Sondheim joined former Salt Lake Tribune theater critic Nancy Melich before an audience of 1,200 at Kingsbury Hall.

On March 13,2008, A Salon With Stephen Sondheim was hosted by the Academy for New Musical Theatre in Hollywood.

Stephen Sondheim is credited with introducing cryptic crosswords, a British invention, to American audiences through a series of cryptic crossword puzzles he created for New York magazine in 1968 and 1969.

Stephen Sondheim was "legendary" in theater circles for "concocting puzzles, scavenger hunts and murder-mystery games," inspiring the central character of Anthony Shaffer's 1970 play Sleuth.

Stephen Sondheim contributed to Reds, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Stavisky, and The Birdcage.

Stephen Sondheim collaborated with Company librettist George Furth to write the play Getting Away with Murder in 1996; the Broadway production closed after 31 previews and only 17 performances.

Later, Stephen Sondheim wrote and apologized to Guettel for being "not very encouraging" when he was actually trying to be "constructive".

Stephen Sondheim mentored a fledgling Jonathan Larson, attending Larson's workshop for his Superbia.

Around 2008, Stephen Sondheim approached Lin-Manuel Miranda to work with him translating West Side Story lyrics into Spanish for an upcoming Broadway revival.

Stephen Sondheim was originally wary of the project, saying he was "worried that an evening of rap might get monotonous".

Stephen Sondheim provided a voice cameo for the 2021 film adaptation of Tick, Tick.

Stephen Sondheim worked on a revised text of the message and voiced it himself after Bradley Whitford, who portrays him, was unavailable to rerecord the line.

Stephen Sondheim makes a posthumous cameo appearance as himself in the 2022 Netflix film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

Stephen Sondheim agreed, and resisted a later offer from Prince and Hugh Wheeler to create a musical version starring Angela Lansbury.

In 1975, Perkins said he and Stephen Sondheim were working on another script, The Chorus Girl Murder Case: "It's a sort of stew based on all those Bob Hope wartime comedies, plus a little Lady of Burlesque and a little Orson Welles magic show, all cooked into a Last of Sheila-type plot".

Stephen Sondheim later said other inspirations were They Got Me Covered, The Ipcress File, and Cloak and Dagger.

In November 1979, Stephen Sondheim said they had finished it, but the film was never made.

In 1991, Stephen Sondheim worked with Terrence McNally on a musical, All Together Now.

Stephen Sondheim worked with William Goldman on Singing Out Loud, a musical film, in 1992, penning the song "Water Under the Bridge".

Nathan Lane said that he once approached Stephen Sondheim about creating a musical based on the film Being There with Lane starring as the central character of Chance.

Stephen Sondheim declined on the basis that the central character is essentially a cipher, whom an audience would not accept expressing himself through song.

Stephen Sondheim received an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards, and eight Grammy Awards.

Stephen Sondheim received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park with George and was honored with the Kennedy Center Honors, Lifetime Achievement.

Stephen Sondheim received the Hutchinson Prize for Music Composition and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2013, Stephen Sondheim was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture In November 2015, Stephen Sondheim was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House.

Stephen Sondheim founded Young Playwrights Inc in 1981 to introduce young people to writing for the theater, and was the organization's executive vice-president.

The first award, to Stephen Sondheim, was presented at an April 27,2009, benefit with performances by Bernadette Peters, Michael Cerveris, Will Gartshore, and Eleasha Gamble.

In 2010, The Daily Telegraph wrote that Stephen Sondheim was "almost certainly" the only living composer with a quarterly journal published in his name; The Stephen Sondheim Review, founded in 1994, chronicled and promoted his work.

Stephen Sondheim's work is referenced in television such as The Morning Show, where Jennifer Aniston and Billy Crudup sing "Not While I'm Around".

The concert included Stephen Sondheim's music, performed by some of the original performers.

Stephen Sondheim took the stage during an encore of his song, "Old Friends".

Stephen Sondheim is known for complex polyphony in his vocals, such as the five minor characters who make up a Greek chorus in 1973's A Little Night Music.

Stephen Sondheim's works have acquired a cult following with queer audiences, and his songs have been adopted as life scores for successive generations of gays, and have often had a primary role in AIDS fundraising events.

Stephen Sondheim jokingly told the New York Times in 1966: "I've never found anybody I could work with as quickly as myself, or with less argument", although he described himself as "naturally a collaborative animal".

Stephen Sondheim opened up about being gay when he was about 40.

Stephen Sondheim rarely discussed his personal life, though he said in 2013 that he had not been in love before he turned 60, when he entered into a roughly eight-year relationship with dramatist Peter Jones.

Stephen Sondheim married Jeffrey Scott Romley, a digital technologist, in 2017; they lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Connecticut.

Stephen Sondheim died of cardiovascular disease at his home in Roxbury on November 26,2021, at the age of 91.

Collaborator and friend Jeremy Sams said Stephen Sondheim "died in the arms of his husband Jeff".