Stephen Sondheim - Biography
Stephen Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930, the son of a wealthy New York dress manufacturer. But, when his parents divorced, his mother moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania and young Stephen found himself in the right place at the right time. A neighbour of his mother's, Oscar Hammerstein II, was working on a new musical called Oklahoma! and it didn't take long for the adolescent boy to realise that he, too, was intrigued by musical theatre. Although he subsequently studied composition with Milton Babbitt, he chose to apply what he
learned he all-or-nothing commercial hothouse of Broadway. Like Hammerstein, he has written the occasional pop song (with Jule Styne for Tony Bennett) and dabbled in films (Stavisky, Reds, Dick Tracy), but, like Hammerstein, he has always come back to the theatre. His initial success came as a somewhat reluctant lyricist to Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story (1957) and Jule Styne on Gypsy (1959). Exciting and adventurous as those shows were in their day, and for all their enduring popularity, Sondheim's philosophy since is encapsulated in one of his song titles: "I Never Do Anything Twice". His first score as composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962) - a show so funny few people spotted how experimental it was: it's still the only successful musical farce. In the following three decades, critics detected a Sondheim style - a fondness for the harmonic language of Ravel and Debussy; a reliance on vamps and skewed harmonies to destabilise the melody; a tendency to densely literate lyrics. But, all that said, it's the versatility that still impresses: you couldn't swap a song from the exuberantly explosive pit-band score of Anyone Can Whistle (1964) with one of the Orientally influenced musical scenes in Pacific Overtures (1976); you couldn't mistake the neurotic pop score of Company (1970) for the elegantly ever-waltzing A Little Night Music (1973). Sondheim hit his stride in the Seventies, forming a unique
partnership of hyphenates with Hal Prince: a composer-lyricist and a producer-director working together to re-invent the musical. Some were plotless (Company), some characterless (Pacific Overtures), one went backwards (Merrily We Roll Along). But, as his onetime choreographer Michael Bennett put it, before you can break the rules, you have to know what they are - and Sondheim knows America's cultural heritage better then anybody. Follies (1971) is an
In class, Jonathan studied the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook. Among his musical influences were JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, the Beatles, Prince, and the Police, but the writer he admired most was Stephen Sondheim, to whom he wrote during his last year in college. The distinguished composer-lyricist answered him and became an adviser to the young songwriter.
Stephen Sondheim was born in New York on March 22, 1930. His mother was a fashion designer, and his father a dress manufacturer. At age ten, Sondheim’s parents divorced, and he moved to rural Pennsylvania with his mother shortly after (“Stephen Sondheim- Academy of Achievement”). In Pennsylvania, Stephen befriended his neighbor, James Hammerstein, as well as James’ parents Dorothy and Oscar. The Hammersteins would become like a second family to Stephen. He especially admired Oscar, a musical theatre giant, saying of the man, “I wanted to be whatever Oscar was… if Oscar had been a geologist, I would have become one too” (“The World of the Play: Stephen Sondheim”). Sondheim, mentored by Hammerstein, went on to study music and, eventually, became one of the most distinguished composers in musical theatre (“The World”). Stephen Sondheim’s writing redefined American musical theatre and inspired creativity among others in his field. He has worked on some of the most iconic modern musicals and continues to make meaningful contributions to the world of musical theatre (Miranda).
... John, Fred Ebb, and Greg Lawrence. "Chicago on Broadway." Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003. 119-40. Google Books. Web. 1 May 2014.
Born in Massapequa, New York in 1954, Seinfeld soon discovered the attention that making jokes could garner him, and he admits to having been a class clown throughout his education. After college, Seinfeld starting touring the nation's comedy clubs and college campuses with his odd brand of observational humor. Seinfeld would notice something from society, someone who talked too close to another person for example, and h...
Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, where he was reared. His father was an architect, as his grandfather had been. Though the family's fortune was eroded during the Depression-his father went without an architectural commission from 1929 to 1940-they were well-to-do. Kurt attended Shortridge High School, where he was the editor of the nations oldest daily high school paper, the Echo. (((high school quote)))
John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. As a boy, he grew up in a farming community, and worked on ranches. At the age of fourteen, he decided that he wanted to become a writer. He went to Stanford University, but w...
Musical theatre is a type of theatrical performance combining music, dance, acting and spoken dialogue. Written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, ‘West Side Story’ is a classic American musical based on William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The through-composed score and lyrics are used to portray different characters and their cultures, the rivalry between the Jets and Sharks, and the emotions felt as the story progresses. This essay will be exploring the music and how effective the score is in realising the world and characters of the musical. Furthermore, it will discuss how Bernstein and Sondheim relate characters’ diverse ethnicities to particular musical ideas and motifs.
William Carlos Williams once said, “It is not what you say that matters, but the manner in which you say it.”(Examiner) This is a view he often incorporated into his poetry. Williams’ purpose through writing poetry was not to teach a moral, but to convey that simple things can be beautiful. Although many of Williams’ poems show this beauty in simplicity, a few good examples are The Red Wheel Barrow, The Great Figure, and Young Sycamore.
Based on a series of Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods (1987) focuses on fairy tale characters such as Cinderella, Jack and Little Red Riding Hood’s wish of life fulfillment. Numerous fairy tales are intertwined with one new tale in attempt to carry the childhood stories into an adult realm without ridding of their child-based sensibilities. (Knapp, 2009.) Little Red’s song, “I know things now” is performed after she escapes the wolf’s belly. It is a reflection song on what she has learnt from the experience of speaking to strangers. Sondheim cleverly integrates musical devises such as key, modulation, pitch, accompaniment, dynamics, motif and rhythm alongside language and literary devices to contribute to the development and growth of the character and story.
Israel Isidore Baline was born in the Russian village of Tyumen on May 11th, 1888. His family left in the mid 1890s to escape the persecution of the Jewish community and settled in New York City (biography.com). Israel dropped out of school at age thirteen (Kenrick 143). Baline was a street singer as a teen and in 1906 he got a job as a singing waiter in Chinatown (biography.com). The first song he ever had published was called “Marie From Sunny Italy” (biography.com). He wrote it in 1907 with Nick Nicholson writing the music. Baline’s name was misspelled on the sheet music as “I. Berlin” (biography.com). He decided to keep it and changed his name to Irving Berlin (biography.com) . It was in this way that the legend was born.
For many years, American musical theatre was defined as being mere entertainment for the people. It ranged from operetta, burlesque, vaudeville, and more. If there is one towering figure in the history of American Musical Theater, that person is Oscar Hammerstein II. He was a lyricist-librettist, as well as a distinguished poet and director. For over forty years, as the theatre’s forms of entertainment shifted, he helped merge everything into the art form known today as the musical. Born twenty-three years after Hammerstein, came Alan Jay Lerner. Idolizing Hammerstein’s work, he would grow to become another distinguished lyricist-librettist in musical theatre history. In this paper, we will look deeper at who these lyricists are and their writing style. Then we will examine one of each of their works and factors that fueled their creation.
Stephen Kings childhood plays a big role in his future career as a writer. Stephen King was brought into the world on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland ("Stephen King." ). He was his parents only natural-born child. King had one adopted brother, David who was two years older, and his parents, Donald Edwin King and Ruth P...
Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, New York on October 17, 1915 (“Blooms Notes” 8). Miller and his family lived in upscale Harlem for the first fourteen years of his life (8). Then after a terrible stock market crash that affected the family heavily, they moved to Brooklyn, New York (8). He attended the University of Michigan where he studied playwriting (8). Besides writing plays he wrote radio scripts, and worked as a steamfitter in World War II (Gioia and Kennedy 1763). He began writing plays around 1936, but “It was the next play that secured his
Although usually considered an American genre, musical films from Japan, Italy, France, Great Britain, and Germany have contributed to the development of the type. In Germany and the Soviet Union, Grigori Alexandrov was a Stalin favorite with four Hollywood style musicals. In France, Jacques Demy took his inspiration directly from it. However, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in which all the dialogue was sung, was essentially French. On the other hand, Rene Clair’s musical comedies of the early 1930s influenced the development of the Hollywood musical with their use of related action and songs. At the end of the 1960s, the musical became a rare phenomenon, though there was a limited revival of the genre in the 1970s with Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and former dance choreographer Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and All That Jazz.
Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. He was the son of a Methodist minister, named Reverend Townley Crane. As a boy Crane was often ill and this sense of helplessness is believed to have led to his realistic, cold, hard style of writing he became famous four. As far as his education went, Crane went through a lengthy course of schooling over the years. During his academic career he attended Pennington Seminar...