STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Short, shrewd biography of the legendary composer/lyricist.

Much has been written about Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), most prominently Meryle Secrest’s more-or-less-authorized 1998 biography. It’s characteristic of Okrent’s ability to go beyond the usual that he found there a revealing, previously unremarked comment by Judy Prince, wife of Sondheim’s longtime director/producer Hal, and herself one of the composer’s closest friends. After hearing songs from Sweeney Todd, his blood-soaked masterpiece about a vengeance-driven barber, she exclaimed, “It’s the story of your life!” A thirst for revenge is one of several dark personality traits that Okrent (Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, 2010) discerns in a portrait refreshingly unlike the generally worshipful treatment accorded the man who revolutionized the American musical. Not that Okrent isn’t a “Sondhead,” as he affectionately terms Cult of Sondheim members, and his coverage of such storied productions as Company, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, and Assassins is cogent. What stands out, however, are his thoughtful exegeses of Sondheim’s work as it expressed lifelong personal conflicts. Okrent identifies two paradigmatic songs: “Someone in a Tree” from Pacific Overtures “is the effort of a young boy trying to connect,” while “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park With George “is the effort of a mature artist trying to create” who bemoans that others don’t understand why this is more important than any human connection. The subtitle is apt: A perfectionist to the point of cruelty to collaborators, Sondheim dedicated his life to the agonies of creation and was profoundly uncomfortable with intimacy. In his final decades, when his creative abilities faltered but he was happily in love with a man 50 years his junior, his longtime librettist James Lapine saw “the reservoir of anger inside of him dissipate.” But for five decades, in more than a dozen shows that expanded the horizons of musical theater, work was Sondheim’s salvation. “The difference between Sweeney and me,” he told an interviewer, “is that I turned it into art.”

An indispensable supplement to our understanding of a musical theater giant.