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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. “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.
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Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and more intellectual place. “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. 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.