Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91

 

 

"Mr. Sondheim liked to think of himself less as a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit one who wrote very short plays and set them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambivalence, were often impossibly clever but rarely only clever; his language was sometimes erudite but seldom purple. He was a world-class rhyming gymnast, not just at the ends of lines but within them — one of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in “Sweeney Todd” was “shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd” — and he upheld the highest standards for acceptable wordplay, or at least tried to.

With the exception perhaps of “Forum,” Mr. Sondheim’s shows had hefty ambitions in subject matter, form or both. “Company,” which was built from vignettes featuring several couples and their mutual single male friend, was a bittersweet reflection on marriage. “Pacific Overtures” told the story of the modernization of Japan from the Japanese perspective. “Sweeney Todd,” a bloody tale about a vengeful barber in 19th-century London, approached Grand Guignol in tone and opera in staging and scoring. “The Frogs,” which was first performed in the Yale University swimming pool in 1974 (with Meryl Streep in the cast) before it was revised for Broadway in 2004, blended the Greek comedy of Aristophanes with present-day political commentary."

read obit by Bruce Weber

Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91 - The New York Times: o.