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The musical, based on the play “The Time of the Cuckoo,” ran for six months but was an unhappy experience for both men, who did not get along. Sondheim’s 1965 lyric collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers - “Do I Hear a Waltz?” - also turned out to be problematic. Yet his next show, “Anyone Can Whistle” (1964), flopped, running only nine performances but achieving cult status after its cast recording was released. 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. “Gypsy,” with music by Jule Styne, told the backstage story of the ultimate stage mother and the daughter who grew up to be Gypsy Rose Lee. “West Side Story” transplanted Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” to the streets and gangs of modern-day New York. “He is the spirit of the age in a certain way.”Įarly in his career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for two shows considered to be classics of the American stage, “West Side Story” (1957) and “Gypsy” (1959). “Not only are his musicals brilliant, but I can’t think of another theater person who has so chronicled a whole age so eloquently,” Ives said in 2013. He had been working on a new musical with “Venus in Fur” playwright David Ives, who called his collaborator a genius. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
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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.
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To the rest of us, Sondheim was genius, whether with the simple lament, “The sun comes up/I think about you/The coffee cup/I think about you,” or the slightly paranoid, “Be careful the things you say/Children will listen,” or the sublime “Marry me a little/Do it with a will/Make a few demands/I’m able to fulfill.” “Some lines of this lyric are respectably sharp and crisp, but some melt in the mouth as gracelessly as peanut butter and are impossible to comprehend, such as ‘For a small fee in America,’ which smashes the l’s and the f’s together, making it sound like ‘For a smafee,'” he wrote in his autobiographical self-critique, which took two volumes. President Barack Obama, right, presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to composer Stephen Sondheim during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, on, Nov.