Word: sondheimer
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What does matter to Sondheim is work. Says he: "The point of being in the theater is to try one idea after another, maybe realize your first was the best, but be able to know -- which just about no other art form can allow." For Woods -- a sort of Fractured Fairy Tales in which Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack of Beanstalk fame and other beloved characters all meet in the same forest at the same time and blunder into one another's stories -- Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine started sketching ideas soon after the premiere of their first collaboration, Sunday...
...Sondheim's fascination with the theater reaches back to a day in 1939 when his father took Stephen, 9, to see a Broadway musical, Very Warm for May. He recalls, "The curtain went up and revealed a piano. A butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling." That moment, a few months before his parents' divorce, was one of the few distinctly happy ones from a latchkey childhood: "I did not have an unhappy time, because it literally did not occur to me that other people had a family life...
...recalls. "She would telephone his apartment to see if I answered, then hang up. I was a substitute for him, and she took out all her anger and craziness on me. From her I get my tendency to hysteria. It was not a great relationship." It never improved: Sondheim has helped his mother financially but has gone through long periods of not speaking to her, and regales friends with darkly comic tales of her attempts to rile him -- making mementos of his shows, for example, but pointedly omitting the flops. Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers and one of Sondheim...
...couple of years after the divorce, however, Sondheim's mother made a doting gesture that transformed his life. Stephen, then 12, had made a new friend named Jamie Hammerstein, son of Oscar, the lyricist of Very Warm for May, and was invited to the family farm in Doylestown, Pa., for a weekend. The weekend turned into a summer and, not long after, Mrs. Sondheim bought a house in Doylestown so Stephen could live there year-round. She continued to commute to Manhattan, often stayed there during the week and on weekends typically brought along guests. But as Jamie Hammerstein recalls...
...next mentor was Avant-Garde Composer Milton Babbitt. Sondheim, straight out of Williams, talked Babbitt into taking him on as a private pupil in structure and theory. He paid with money from a fellowship and stretched the funds by living in bohemian disorder in his father's dining room. Next he tried to break into show business. A few painful years of struggle -- scraping up auditions that led to more auditions, writing and rewriting a show that never got staged because the producer died, going out to Hollywood to write scripts for the TV sitcom Topper -- ended in triumph when...