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2020 Broadway revival. West Side Story is a musical conceived by Jerome Robbins with music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents . Inspired by William Shakespeare 's play Romeo and Juliet, the story is set in the mid-1950s in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, then a multiracial, blue ...
Nov 26, 2021 · Stephen Sondheim Reflected on 'Company' and 'West Side Story' in Final Interview - The New York Times. Days Before Dying, Stephen Sondheim Reflected: ‘I’ve Been Lucky’. In an interview on...
The West Side Story creative team: lyricist Stephen Sondheim, book writer Arthur Laurents, co-producer Hal Prince, co-producer Robert Griffith, composer Leonard Bernstein, and diretor/choreographer Jerome Robbins. WEST SIDE STORY was Stephen Sondheim’s first foray on a Broadway stage in 1957. He was just 27 when it opened.
6 days ago · After returning to New York City, he wrote incidental music for the play The Girls of Summer (1956). He made his first significant mark on Broadway, though, as the lyricist for Leonard Bernstein ’s West Side Story, which opened in 1957. He then wrote the lyrics for Gypsy (1959; music by Jule Styne ).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Who Was Stephen Sondheim?
- Early Life and Musical Interests
- Learning from Oscar Hammerstein
- Theater Beginnings: 'West Side Story' and 'A Funny Thing Happened'
- Broadway Hits: 'Company' and 'Sweeney Todd'
- More Successes: 'Sunday in The Park' and 'Into The Woods'
- Later Works and Revivals: 'Passion' to 'Follies'
- Awards
After early practice at songwriting, Stephen Sondheim's knowledge of musical theater was influenced by master lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who served as a mentor. Sondheim's contributions to West Side Story and Gypsy in the 1950s brought him recognition as a rising star of Broadway. Known for the startling complexity of his lyricism and music, hi...
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City. His parents, Herbert and Janet (née Fox) Sondheim, worked in New York's garment industry; his father was a dress manufacturer and his mother was a designer. They divorced in 1942 and Sondheim moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, with his mother. He began studying piano and organ at...
In Pennsylvania, Sondheim became friends with the son of Broadway lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave the young Sondheim advice and tutelage in musical theater, and served as a surrogate father during a time of tumult. In his teens, Sondheim had penned a satire about his school, the musical By George!, which he thought his mentor w...
In the early 1950s, Stephen Sondheim moved to Los Angeles, California, and wrote scripts for the television series Topper and The Last Word. Returning to New York, he composed background music for the play The Girls of Summer in 1956. An acquaintance with director Arthur Laurents brought Sondheim into contact with composer Leonard Bernstein and cho...
Sondheim won several more Tony Awards in the 1970s for his collaborations with producer/director Harold Prince, including the musicals Company (1970), a meditation on contemporary marriage and commitment; Follies (1971), an homage to the Ziegfeld Follies and early Broadway; A Little Night Music (1973), a period comedy-drama that included the hit so...
In the 1980s, Sondheim collaborated several times with playwright/director James Lapine. Their Sunday in the Park with George, which opened in 1984, was inspired by the iconic painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, and 1987's Into the Woods was a collage of plots from classic fairy tales. (The latter was eventually made into a 20...
Sondheim continued to combine various musical genres with sharp lyrical writing and unexpected subject matter in the 1990s, though some of his work of that decade received less critical and popular acclaim. Assassins (1990) told the tales of nine presidential assassins in American history; and Passion, a 1994 collaboration with Lapine, was a melodr...
Sondheim claimed eight Tony Awards, a record for a composer, as well as eight Grammy Awards. He shared the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Lapine for Sunday in the Park with George, and won an Academy Award for the song "Sooner or Later," one of five tracks written for the 1990 film Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna. Sondheim was ho...
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Photo by Jerry Jackson. Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for Saturday Night (1954), A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), The Frogs (1974), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday In The ...
Dec 3, 2021 · Sondheim said he was working on music for a different show, and not looking for another job, when he was asked to be the lyricist on the original 1957 Broadway musical for "West Side Story," a Romeo and Juliet story set in the slums of old Manhattan's Upper West Side. Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in a scene from the movie "West...Show more ---
