One of Sondheim’s greatest triumphs was his Pulitzer Prize for the 1984 musicalSunday in the Park with George,about 19th-century French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat.

As Sondheim collected accolades,New York City’s Broadway theatre industry underwent many changes. It had a key role in American culture through the 1950s,with many Broadway songs making the pop charts,but lost significance as rock music gained a hold on the public starting in the 1960s. Increasingly,musicals borrowed material from television and movies,instead of the other way around,composer Mark N. Grant wrote in his bookThe Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical.

Sondheim shared the view that Broadway had experienced decline,expressing it repeatedly in interviews. “There are so many forms of entertainment,theatre is becoming more marginalised,” he told British newspaperThe Times in 2012.

But Broadway musicals also became more artistic and Sondheim played a key role in their evolution,critics said. He explored such weighty topics as political assassinations inAssassins,the human need for family and the pull of dysfunctional relationships inInto the Woods,social inequality inSweeney Todd,and Western imperialism inPacific Overtures.

He also developed new methods for presenting a play. Instead of telling a story from beginning to end,he would jump backwards and forwards in time to explore a single theme. It was called the “concept musical”.

Broadway audiences were introduced to Sondheim in 1957 whenWest Side Story became an American classic. The story about a love affair between a Puerto Rican girl,Maria,and a white boy,Tony,in working-class Manhattan was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1961. The central characters expressed their infatuation in the songsMaria,Somewhereand Tonight.

Sondheim was born on March 22,1930,in New York City to affluent Jewish parents who worked in fashion. He described his early childhood as a lonely one,with servants as his main company.

After his parents split up when he was 10 years old,Sondheim moved with his mother to rural Pennsylvania,where she bought a farm. He later said his mother took out her wrath over the divorce on him. He found a surrogate family in the nearby household of Hammerstein and his wife,Dorothy.

Hammerstein,who along with partner Richard Rodgers created the classic musicalsOklahoma! andThe Sound of Music, taught the teenage Sondheim how to write musical theatre.

During a visit to Melbourne in 2012,Sondheim toldThe Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald’s Lawrence Money that Hammerstein became a kind of foster dad. “If Hammerstein had been a plumber,” Sondheim said,“I would have been a plumber.”

“A big loss to music but at least the theatre taps wouldn’t drip,” Money wrote.

Sondheim loved words,loved playing with words.

Money wrote at the time:“It tickles his funnybone that ‘Stephen Sondheim’ is an anagram for ‘He pens demon hits’. And although he delights in the clever use of a well-turned rhyme,he kind-of likes the condensed lingo in the Twitter era.”

“It’s fun. I know it denies the richness of the language in full,but I wish the two could co-exist. Certainly the perceived wisdom is that the language is deteriorating because of this shorthand. It may be true - but people are still writing books,” Sondheim told him.

After Sondheim became famous,he mentored others on Broadway. When Miranda began work on a rap musical about American founding father Alexander Hamilton,Sondheim encouraged and critiqued him. The play became a smash hit on Broadway in 2015. In box office success,Sondheim fell short of Andrew Lloyd Webber,the composer behindThe Phantom of the Opera andCats, with whom Sondheim shared a birthday.

Sondheim pushed audiences’ boundaries,which sometimes resulted in box office flops. Some of his least commercially successful plays were lauded by critics. Those included the 1976Pacific Overtures,which depicted Japan during an age of Western colonialism,and his 1990 off-Broadway productionAssassins about real-life figures who each set out to kill an American president.

Sondheim had many fans in the academic world. In 1994,a quarterly magazine called theSondheim Review was founded to examine his work,five years after Oxford University in England named him a visiting professor of drama. His devotees celebrated the acerbic irony of his lyrics,which they described as commenting on everything from the limits of America’s melting pot to the downside of marriage.

These lines fromThe Ladies Who Lunch in his 1970 musicalCompany contained a typical slice of Sondheim’s wit:“Here’s to the girls who play wife/Aren’t they too much?/Keeping house but clutching a copy of ‘LIFE’/Just to keep in touch”.

Sondheim,who was gay,did not live with a romantic partner until age 61,according to a 2000 profile inThe New York Times Magazine,in which he said his romantic relationships were rarely intense or long-lasting.

Reuters

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