The following year, Sondheim wrote the score for "Follies," a look at the shattered hopes and disappointed dreams of women who had appeared in lavish Ziegfeld-style revues. "The Ladies Who Lunch" became a standard for Elaine Stritch. The show, produced and directed by Hal Prince, won Sondheim his first Tony for best score. The episodic adventures of a bachelor (played by Dean Jones) with an inability to commit to a relationship was hailed as capturing the obsessive nature of striving, self-centered New Yorkers. It was "Company," which opened on Broadway in April 1970, that cemented Sondheim's reputation. The musical, based on the play "The Time of the Cuckoo," ran for six months but was an unhappy experience for both men, who did not get along. Sondheim's 1965 lyric collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers - "Do I Hear a Waltz?" - also turned out to be problematic. Yet his next show, "Anyone Can Whistle" (1964), flopped, running only nine performances but achieving cult status after its cast recording was released.
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It was not until 1962 that Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics for a Broadway show, and it turned out to be a smash - the bawdy "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," starring Zero Mostel as a wily slave in ancient Rome yearning to be free. "Gypsy," with music by Jule Styne, told the backstage story of the ultimate stage mother and the daughter who grew up to be Gypsy Rose Lee. "West Side Story," with music by Leonard Bernstein, transplanted Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" to the streets and gangs of modern-day New York. "If you think of a theater lyric as a short story, as I do, then every line has the weight of a paragraph," he wrote in his 2010 book, "Finishing the Hat," the first volume of his collection of lyrics and comments.Įarly in his career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for two shows considered to be classics of the American stage, "West Side Story" (1957) and "Gypsy" (1959). Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and more intellectual place. All these truisms, he wrote, were "in the service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters." Together they led to stunning lines like: "It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension." He offered the three principles necessary for a songwriter in his first volume of collected lyrics - Content Dictates Form, Less Is More, and God Is in the Details.
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"The opposite of left is right/The opposite of right is wrong/So anyone who's left is wrong, right?" he wrote in "Anyone Can Whistle." In "Company," he penned the lines: "Good things get better/Bad gets worse/Wait - I think I meant that in reverse." A New York magazine cover asked "Is Sondheim God?" The Guardian newspaper once offered this question: "Is Stephen Sondheim the Shakespeare of musical theatre?"Ī supreme wordsmith - and an avid player of word games - Sondheim's joy of language shone through. To theater fans, Sondheim's sophistication and brilliance made him an icon. Frank Sinatra, who had a hit with Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," once complained: "He could make me a lot happier if he'd write more songs for saloon singers like me." He was sometimes criticized as a composer of unhummable songs, a badge that didn't bother Sondheim.
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Sondheim's music and lyrics gave his shows a dark, dramatic edge, whereas before him, the dominant tone of musicals was frothy and comic. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Six of Sondheim's musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize ("Sunday in the Park"), an Academy Award (for the song "Sooner or Later" from the film "Dick Tracy"), five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor.
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Sadly, there is now a giant in the sky," producer Cameron Mackintosh wrote in tribute. "The theater has lost one of its greatest geniuses and the world has lost one of its greatest and most original writers. Aaron Tveit wrote: "We are so lucky to have what you've given the world." "We shall be singing your songs forever," wrote Lea Salonga. Tributes quickly flooded social media as performers and writers alike saluted a giant of the theater. The artist refused to repeat himself, finding inspiration for his shows in such diverse subjects as an Ingmar Bergman movie ("A Little Night Music"), the opening of Japan to the West ("Pacific Overtures"), French painter Georges Seurat ("Sunday in the Park With George"), Grimm's fairy tales ("Into the Woods") and even the killers of American presidents ("Assassins"), among others. His most famous ballad, "Send in the Clowns," has been recorded hundreds of times, including by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins. Sondheim influenced several generations of theater songwriters, particularly with such landmark musicals as "Company," "Follies" and "Sweeney Todd," which are considered among his best work.