“People have never been neutral about the work of Stephen Sondheim,” New York Times drama critic Frank Rich observed in 1987. Sondheim seldom enjoyed the kind of blockbuster success that routinely smiled upon such composers as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jerry Herman. Though he is revered by many in the theater, Mr. There’s something else there’s another layer to it.” He added: “When you go back to it, it’s like an onion. “I find all of his work really, really compelling,” Veloudos told the Globe in 2015. Sondheim’s “Gypsy” launched the 2017/2018 season, and his “Road Show” was produced in January 2018. Sondheim had delivered with eloquent precision in countless interviews and onstage conversations.Īt Lyric Stage Company of Boston, where producing artistic director Spiro Veloudos forged a reputation as an astute interpreter of his work, Mr. Sondheim followed up the book with 2011’s “Look, I Made a Hat.” Taken in tandem, the books opened a remarkably illuminating window onto his creative process, adding to the insights Mr. The book was a compendium of his lyrics interwoven with an explication of his songwriting technique its title is derived from a song in “Sunday in the Park with George” that distills the all-consuming demands of creating art - and the personal price it can exact. His paramount goal, however, was always clarity, “without which nothing else matters,” he wrote in his 2010 book “Finishing the Hat.” Sondheim’s scores were invariably characterized by subtlety and intricacy. As he chronicled character journeys in song, Mr. Sondheim brought that sensibility to his composing: a Sondheim song somehow seemed to both construct and deconstruct the riddle of human behavior. Sondheim’s hands, even well-known fairy tales took on shadowy new depths (1987’s “Into the Woods”).Ī devotee and deviser of crossword puzzles, Mr. Who else would write a musical about a vengeful barber whose victims are turned into meat pies (“Sweeney Todd”), or attempt to dissect the tangled psyches of presidential killers (“Assassins”), or build a show around the complex topic of Western imperialism in 19th-century Japan (“Pacific Overtures,” which had its tryout in 1975 at Boston’s Shubert Theater)? In Mr.
Sondheim ranged widely from show to show, both in terms of subject matter and musical idiom. Like an actor determined to avoid being typecast, Mr.
It was at the Colonial that audiences first heard “I’m Still Here,” a now-classic anthem of showbiz survival. A year later another Sondheim masterwork, “Follies,” tried out at the Colonial Theatre. In 1970, “Company” had its pre-Broadway tryout at the Shubert Theater, launching what would prove to be the most consequential decade of Mr. Sondheim turned to Boston theaters at key points in his career. “He changed the game.”Ī 1950 graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Mr. “Every lyricist and theater composer writing today is influenced by Sondheim,” Willie Reale, the lyricist of the musical “Johnny Baseball,” told the Globe in 2013. Sondheim said his paramount goal, however, was always clarity, “without which nothing else matters,” he wrote in his 2010 book “Finishing the Hat.” H LORREN AU JR/KRT
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