Sondheim: a Life - Softcover

Secrest, Meryle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385334125 ISBN 13: 9780385334129

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

A full-scale portrait of the distinguished composer-lyricist draws on personal interviews with Sondheim to describe his troubled childhood, early struggles, rise to the pinnacle of Broadway musical theater, collaboration with Hal Prince, and original theatrical works. Reprint.

About this title

Review:

America's foremost musical-theatre composer also proves to be a fascinatingly complex and conflicted human being in this meticulous biography by the always capable Meryle Secrest ( Being Bernard Berenson, Leonard Bernstein etc). Stephen Sondheim himself was interviewed for the book, as were many of his closest friends, and the author makes perceptive use of this material. Born in 1930, Sondheim was a successful Broadway lyricist ( West Side Story and Gypsy) before he was 30. But the scars from a miserable childhood remained: he was inclined to be distant, hypercritical of those less intelligent than he and terrified of serious emotional commitment. Critics sometimes found those qualities in the series of groundbreaking musicals he created with director Hal Prince-- Company, Follies, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, to name but four--but they agreed that he brought new intellectual ambition and artistic adventurousness to the musical theater. Secrest does a fine job of delineating Sondheim's career in terms of what it tells us about the state of American theater, as when he shifted to a partnership with writer-director James Lapine and worked in the non-profit sector for such musicals as Sunday in the Park with George and Assassins. She also does well in selecting revealing quotes to depict the composer's struggle to accept his homosexuality and a rage at his overbearing mother so deep that he didn't even attend her funeral. Sondheim the man and Sondheim the visionary artist get nearly equal time in an intriguing portrait.

Synopsis:

A portrait of the composer-lyricist draws on personal interviews with Sondheim to describe his troubled childhood, early struggles, rise to the pinnacle of Broadway musical theater, collaboration with Hal Prince, and original theatrical works.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0385334125
• ISBN 13: 9780385334129
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 461