Word: sondheims
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When Stephen Sondheim was a freshman pursuing mathematics at Williams College, he enrolled in a music course. Most of the class, he recalls, loathed it. "The professor, Robert Barrow, was cold and dogmatic. I thought he was the best thing I had ever encountered, because he took all the romance away from art. Instead of the muse coming at midnight and humming Some Enchanted Evening into your ear, music was constructed. It wasn't what other people wanted to hear, but it turned me into a music major...
...through with emotion. His latest, Into the Woods, which opened last month and promptly became Broadway's newest musical hit, with advance sales climbing to $2.5 million, embraces every experience from birth to death, from delirious infatuation to parting regret. Yet to acerbic critics and ardent fans alike -- and Sondheim, at 57, is surely the most controversial major figure in the American theater -- his own dispassionate characterization evokes the distinctive flavor of the work that has brought him five Tonys, a record six New York Drama Critics Circle awards for best musical and a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday...
...brings to show business, customarily a craft of schmaltz and charm, one of the keenest analytic minds around. Sondheim was the kind of boy whose favorite school subject is Latin, and he grew into the sort of man who browses through dictionaries for entertainment. His love of concocting puzzles, scavenger hunts and murder-mystery games, legendary in theater circles, inspired the premise and central character of Anthony Shaffer's thriller, Sleuth, and led Sondheim and a longtime friend, Actor Anthony Perkins, to turn out their own Hollywood chiller, The Last of Sheila. Equally methodical for the stage, Sondheim does...
...Sondheim's intellectuality is reflected in his choice of subjects, far weightier than the heft of the average straight play on Broadway, let alone the merry moonshine of past musicals: the birth of pointillist painting (Sunday in the Park); Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures, 1977); a murderous barber with a Marxist-sounding class grievance and a woman companion who cooks his victims in pies (Sweeney Todd, 1979); the impossibility of marriage (Company, 1970); and the decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence (Follies, 1971). Like...
Follies is now the West End's most profitable show and appears to be headed back to Broadway. Combined with the 3 million-copy sales of Barbra Streisand's 1985Broadway Album, featuring Sondheim songs, and the annuity represented by his copyrights, notably West Side Story and Forum, the new hits yield fortune as well as fame. Money does not seem to mean much to Sondheim -- "I turn it over to my accountants and do what they tell me to" -- and, for a man who acknowledges he sometimes makes more than $1 million a year, he does not seem to believe...