STEPHEN SONDHEIM
(22 March 1930 - 26 November 2021)
Born in New York City to Etta and Herbert Sondheim, Jewish clothing manufacturers, Stephen Sondheim, who has died aged 91, wrote his first musical, By George, at his Pennsylvanian preparatory school. He befriended James, the son of the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who was a great influence on him. After meeting the writer-producer Arthur Laurents and the composer Leonard Bernstein, he wrote the lyrics for West Side Story in 1957, which led to Gypsy (1959) with Ethel Merman and then the first show for which he wrote both music and lyrics, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a smash hit. Later with Company he hit the jackpot and, with Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Passion and Sunday in the Park with George, the last winning a Pulitzer Prize, he changed the face of the Broadway musical.
Sadly, the cinema has not served Sondheim particularly well. West Side Story was filmed by Robert Wise in 1961, but it was a very stagey movie, although it did win ten Oscars, an all-time record for a musical. Now Steven Spielberg seems to have made an even better job of it with his 2021 remake. The film of Gypsy (1962) was enjoyable enough but it needed Ethel Merman, if only as a permanent record of her blazing stage performance as Mama Rose. A Funny Thing Happened... was filmed by Richard Lester in 1966 but the comedy, based on the stories from Plautus, did not transfer well from stage to screen, even with such great comic actors as Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford and Buster Keaton. Harold Prince's film of A Little Night Music (1977) failed to capture the essence of the stage show, with Elizabeth Taylor miscast as Desiree. Even supported by Diana Rigg, Len Cariou and Hermione Gingold, the film just died the death. The TV recording of Sweeney Todd in 1982 with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou, from the original stage cast, is just perfect and better than Tim Burton's 2007 film version with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. There had been another TV version with Patti Lupone and George Hearn in 2001.
The National Theatre staging of Follies (2017) was streamed to cinemas, allowing movie audiences worldwide to enjoy this great production. What is arguably the best film version of any Sondheim show is Into the Woods (2014) with Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and James Corden. There have been many other television versions of Sondheim shows including Into the Woods in the productions from San Diego and the American Playhouse television series. Bette Midler played Mama Rose in a complete TV version of Gypsy in 1993 and Imelda Staunton's wonderful performance of Rose at London's Savoy was recorded on DVD in 2015. Pacific Overtures, Passion and Company were all filmed for television, while Merrily We Roll Along survives in a recording of the Harold Pinter Theatre's London production with a film version currently in production courtesy of Richard Linklater.
Even with the passing of Stephen Sondheim there is still plenty to look forward to, starting with Spielberg's West Side Story, then Follies, currently in pre-production under the aegis of Dominic Cooke. And let us not forget the other contributions Sondheim made to the cinema. He wrote music for Warren Beatty's Reds and songs for the same director's Dick Tracy and he wrote the score for Alain Resnais' Stavisky. Finally, over 400 compositions by Stephen Sondheim have been included in films and television programmes. With new movies on the way, perhaps cinema will look again at his body of work and begin filming more of his theatre projects. And just two weeks before he died, Netflix released tick, tick…Boom! in which he was played on screen by Bradley Whitford. You just can't have too much of Sondheim, you know.
MICHAEL DARVELL