Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021): The Last Giant, Seen From Our Seats

Born in Manhattan on March 22, 1930, Sondheim was mentored as a boy by Oscar Hammerstein II, who read his first complete show, called it the worst thing he had ever read, and then spent the afternoon explaining why. He wrote the lyrics to West Side Story (1957), with music by Leonard Bernstein, a book by Arthur Laurents and direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins, and to Gypsy (1959), with music by Jule Styne, before his first Broadway score, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). His run with the director Hal Prince, from Company (1970) through Merrily We Roll Along (1981), included Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd. He then wrote Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woodsand Passion with James Lapine, and Assassins with John Weidman. NBC counted eight Tony Awards, more than any other composer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in 1985 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Playbill wrote that “theatre observers came to generally, and somewhat mournfully, acknowledge that in him, the theatre had seen its last giant

Many of the 40-plus posts mention Sondheim in passing: as a lyricist in a concert program, a name in a Chip Deffaa column, a joke in a revue. These are the ones that dealt with his work most directly, in order.

Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021)

Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd and Company (2004–2006). In an unsigned December 2004 review, Pacific Overtures was “a stunning if also vexing example of the concept musical,” in a Roundabout staging by Amon Miyamoto that was “vivid and dull, stimulating and enervating, classy and trashy, but above all else musically brilliant and challenging.” The critic concluded that it was “a maddening mixture of the pretentious and the sublime that won’t necessarily gain new converts but will more than satisfy the already initiated.” Barry Gordin and Patrick Christiano, reprinting their Dan’s Papers review in 2005, saw “a chilling spell” cast by John Doyle’s stripped-downSweeney Todd, whose re-orchestrations “rendered Sondheim’s sumptuous score even more moving.” In an unsigned review of Doyle’s Company in 2006, the show“does not appear terribly dated despite its noticeably 1970s style smirks and smarts and prominent pessimism.”

Early Sondheim, and the Prince partnership (2014–2016). Darryl Reilly’s review of Saturday Night, Sondheim’s first score, praised “the thrill of hearing unknown Sondheim songs for the first time that clearly have his signature.” The lyrics, he wrote, “uncannily foreshadow the texture of his future shows.” Reilly also covered the 92nd Street Y’s tribute to Sondheim and Prince in January 2015, titled “A Good Thing Going: The Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince Collaboration,” which noted the two had been“friends since 1949.” Its host and writer, David Loud, quipped about Merrily, and the evening quoted Sondheim onDo I Hear a Waltz?, his 1965 show with Richard Rodgers:“That was a dead show.” Reilly’s May 2016 review of the Encores! Do I Hear a Waltz? called it a “lackluster 1965 flop musical,” saying Sondheim’s lyrics “contain his characteristic acidic wit.” He closed by quoting Sondheim’s own verdict: “Not a bad show, merely a dead one.”

Into the Woods (2015, 2022). Victor Gluck called Fiasco Theater’s pared-down 2015 Into the Woods “the best musical revival in town” and “the most inventive, cleverest and wittiest revival in town.” In July 2022, reviewing the Encores! transfer to Broadway, he wrote that it “appears to have become the most popular musical by the late Stephen Sondheim” and found Lear deBessonet’s staging “always engrossing and entertaining.”

Pacific Overtures again (2017). Gluck’s review of Doyle’s version with George Takei saw “the musical look like a series of Japanese prints, its very sparseness revealing a beauty of its own,” but “a challenging evening in the theater, not for those looking for light entertainment.” Joel Benjamin’s January 2017 review of the New York City Opera Candide, for which Sondheim wrote some of the lyrics, thought that “Bernstein’s music is so overwhelmingly brilliant and perfect in its own right that no libretto or lyrics can adequately complement it.” He also had a “creeping sensation” that the production was “under-rehearsed and misdirected.”

Merrily We Roll Along and Wordplay (2019). David Kaufman’s review of Fiasco Theater’s Merrily, directed by Noah Brody with Ben Steinfeld in the cast, called it“Stephen Sondheim’s most autobiographical and intimate musical” and “one of the strongest versions of Merrily yet.”Of the score, he said, “Sondheim defies the usual criticism that his lyrics excel his music.” He was less pleased with the singers, whose voices were “uniformly strong, but never pretty.” Reilly’s review of 92Y’s “Sondheim: Wordplay”praised a concert, hosted by Jack Feldman and Ted Chapin, focused on “Stephen Sondheim’s monumental command of lyric writing.” In March 2020, Benjamin said Ivo van Hove’s Broadway West Side Story, for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics, “succeeds and fails in equal measure.”

The last revivals (2021–2022). Gluck’s November 2021 review of Assassins called it “an admirable attempt to stage it somewhat differently than before, but without solving all of the problems inherent in the powerful material.” Three weeks after the death, Gluck’s review of Marianne Elliott’sCompany said Sondheim “rejiggered his wise and witty lyrics” for the gender-swapped revival. He added: “One of the reasons that Stephen Sondheim musicals do so well in revival is that they are sturdy enough to work in various formats.” The March 2022 MasterVoices concert of Anyone Can Whistle, Gluck wrote, had “no way of knowing that it would prove to be a memorial to the late Mr. Sondheim rather than a tribute.”

Later tributes (2023–2025). Joseph Pisano’s review ofGutenberg! The Musical! opened with the line “Whatever wisdom human beings possess about each other might be best represented through Stephen Sondheim’s collected works.” Gluck wrote of MasterVoices’ The Frogs in November 2023, a concert version directed by Ted Sperling and narrated by Nathan Lane, that “Why this Stephen Sondheim score is not better known or revived more often remains a mystery.” His September 2024 review ofForbidden Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song, Gerard Alessandrini’s revue built around Sondheim revivals, found it “not as witty or pungent as some of the previous ones.” InJanuary 2025, writing about Audra McDonald’s Gypsy, Gluck observed that each of her songs was “a little one act play, something lyricist Sondheim was to perfect elsewhere in his later scores.”

In Chip Deffaa’s words. In a March 2025 column on a high-school Sweeney Todd, Chip Deffaa recalled the 1979 original: “Sondheim was a genius, and his best work had a profundity I rarely found in Broadway musicals.” Sondheim was “one of very few people I’ve known in life who absolutely inspired awe in me; when I first met him, I was tongue-tied.” Benjamin’s 2018 review of the New York Popssingled out Jason Robert Brown’s arrangement of “Sunday”from Sunday in the Park with George: “the emotional high point was the rich arrangement by Jason Robert Brown.”Jack Quinn’s October 2025 Pops review described a“Children Will Listen” that Steven Reineke called “a lullaby for grown-ups.”

Sondheim is survived by his husband, Jeffrey Romley, whom he married in 2017. TheaterScene’s coverage of him is collected on the Stephen Sondheim tag page.