Stephen Sondheim

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Stephen Sondheim

Author : Meryle Secrest
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2011-10-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780307946850

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Stephen Sondheim by Meryle Secrest Pdf

In the first full-scale life of the most important composer-lyricist at work in musical theatre today, Meryle Secrest, the biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright and Leonard Bernstein, draws on her extended conversations with Stephen Sondheim as well as on her interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers to bring us not only the artist--as a master of modernist compositional style--but also the private man. Beginning with his early childhood on New York's prosperous Upper West Side, Secrest describes how Sondheim was taught to play the piano by his father, a successful dress manufacturer and amateur musician. She writes about Sondheim's early ambition to become a concert pianist, about the effect on him of his parents' divorce when he was ten, about his years in military and private schools. She writes about his feelings of loneliness and abandonment, about the refuge he found in the home of Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein, and his determination to become just like Oscar. Secrest describes the years when Sondheim was struggling to gain a foothold in the theatre, his attempts at scriptwriting (in his early twenties in Rome on the set of Beat the Devil with Bogart and Huston, and later in Hollywood as a co-writer with George Oppenheimer for the TV series Topper), living the Hollywood life. Here is Sondheim's ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical, from his chance meeting with play- wright Arthur Laurents, which led to his first success-- as co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story--to his collaboration with Laurents on Gypsy, to his first full Broadway score, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And Secrest writes about his first big success as composer, lyricist, writer in the 1960s with Company, an innovative and sophisticated musical that examined marriage à la mode. It was the start of an almost-twenty-year collaboration with producer and director Hal Prince that resulted in such shows as Follies, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and A Little Night Music. We see Sondheim at work with composers, producers, directors, co-writers, actors, the greats of his time and ours, among them Leonard Bernstein, Ethel Merman, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Robbins, Zero Mostel, Bernadette Peters, and Lee Remick (with whom it was said he was in love, and she with him), as Secrest vividly re-creates the energy, the passion, the despair, the excitement, the genius, that went into the making of show after Sondheim show. A biography that is sure to become the standard work on Sondheim's life and art.

Look, I Made a Hat

Author : Stephen Sondheim
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 481 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2011-11-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780307593412

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Look, I Made a Hat by Stephen Sondheim Pdf

The second volume of Sondheim's collected lyrics is both a remarkable glimpse into the brilliant mind of a legend, and a continuation of the acclaimed and best-selling Finishing the Hat. Picking up where he left off in Finishing the Hat, Sondheim gives us all the lyrics, along with excluded songs and early drafts, of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins and Passion. Here, too, is an in-depth look at the evolution of Wise Guys, which subsequently was transformed into Bounce and eventually became Road Show. Sondheim takes us through his contributions to both television and film, some of which may surprise you, and covers plenty of never-before-seen material from unproduced projects as well. There are abundant anecdotes about his many collaborations, and readers are treated to rare personal material in this volume, as Sondheim includes songs culled from commissions, parodies and personal special occasions—such as a hilarious song for Leonard Bernstein’s seventieth birthday. As he did in the previous volume, Sondheim richly annotates his lyrics with invaluable advice on songwriting, discussions of theater history and the state of the industry today, and exacting dissections of his work, both the successes and the failures. Filled with even more behind-the-scenes photographs and illustrations from Sondheim’s original manuscripts, Look, I Made a Hat is fascinating, devourable and essential reading for any fan of the theater or this great man’s work.

Putting It Together

Author : James Lapine
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2021-08-03
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780374720223

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Putting It Together by James Lapine Pdf

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iconic musical Sunday in the Park with George Putting It Together chronicles the two-year odyssey of creating the iconic Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George. In 1982, James Lapine, at the beginning of his career as a playwright and director, met Stephen Sondheim, nineteen years his senior and already a legendary Broadway composer and lyricist. Shortly thereafter, the two decided to write a musical inspired by Georges Seurat’s nineteenth-century painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Through conversations between Lapine and Sondheim, as well as most of the production team, and with a treasure trove of personal photographs, sketches, script notes, and sheet music, the two Broadway icons lift the curtain on their beloved musical. Putting It Together is a deeply personal remembrance of their collaboration and friend - ship and the highs and lows of that journey, one that resulted in the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning classic.

The Almost Unknown Stephen Sondheim

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2016-12-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781540000132

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The Almost Unknown Stephen Sondheim by Anonim Pdf

(P/V/G Composer Collection). The "Almost Unknown" in the title of this collection refers to the fact that some of the songs, though never before published, have been recorded, and might be known to the most knowledgeable of Sondheim connoisseurs. However, it is safe to say that the songs in this landmark collection are among the least known of Sondheim's creations. This book includes contents by show or film title as well as by song title, an introduction about Sondheim, a preface by the editor, and detailed notes about each work and the show it came from. The piano/vocal editions were all personally approved by Sondheim.

Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

Author : Robert L. McLaughlin
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2016-08-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781496808561

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Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical by Robert L. McLaughlin Pdf

From West Side Story in 1957 to Road Show in 2008, the musicals of Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) and his collaborators have challenged the conventions of American musical theater and expanded the possibilities of what musical plays can do, how they work, and what they mean. Sondheim's brilliant array of work, including such musicals as Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods, established him as the preeminent composer/lyricist of his, if not all, time. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical places Sondheim's work in two contexts: the exhaustion of the musical play and the postmodernism that, by the 1960s, deeply influenced all the American arts. Sondheim's musicals are central to the transition from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that had dominated Broadway stages for twenty years to a new postmodern musical. This new style reclaimed many of the self-aware, performative techniques of the 1930s musical comedy to develop its themes of the breakdown of narrative knowledge and the fragmentation of identity. In his most recent work, Sondheim, who was famously mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, stretches toward a twenty-first-century musical that seeks to break out of the self-referring web of language. Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical offers close readings of all of Sondheim's musicals and finds in them critiques of the operation of power, questioning of conventional systems of knowledge, and explorations of contemporary identity.

The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia

Author : Rick Pender
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 654 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2021-04-15
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781538115879

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The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia by Rick Pender Pdf

Praise from Jesse Green, New York Times Chief Theater Critic, Arts, in the 2023 Holiday Gift Guide: “From A (the director George Abbott) to Y ('You Could Drive a Person Crazy'), The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia, by Rick Pender, offers an astonishingly comprehensive look, in more than 130 entries, at the late master’s colleagues, songs, shows and methods." The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia is a wonderfully detailed and comprehensive reference devoted to musical theater’s most prolific and admired composer and lyricist. Entries cover Sondheim’s numerous collaborators, from composers and directors to designers and orchestras; key songs, such as his Academy Award winner “Sooner or Later” (Dick Tracy); and major works, including Assassins, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, and West Side Story. The encyclopedia also profiles the actors who originated roles and sang Sondheim’s songs for the first time, including Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Mandy Patinkin, and Bernadette Peters. Featuring a detailed biographical entry for Sondheim, a chronology of his career, a listing of his many awards, and discussions of his opinions on movies, opera, and more, this wide-ranging resource will attract musical theater enthusiasts again and again.

Sondheim: Lyrics

Author : Stephen Sondheim
Publisher : Everyman's Library
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2020-03-03
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781101908167

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Sondheim: Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Pdf

A beautiful Pocket Poets hardcover selection of the most memorable and beloved lyrics of Stephen Sondheim Legendary composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim made his Broadway debut with West Side Story in 1957 at the age of twenty-seven. His remarkable and wide-ranging career has spanned more than six decades since then, and he has accumulated accolades that include eight Tony Awards, an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, six Laurence Olivier Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Sondheim redefined musical theater with his groundbreaking work, combining words and music in ways that are by turns challenging, moving, witty, profound, and never less than exhilarating. This volume includes a selection of lyrics from across his career, drawn from shows including West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and more. The result is a delightful pocket-sized treasury of the very best of Sondheim.

Into the Woods

Author : Theatre Aquarius Archives (University of Guelph)
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:629698158

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Into the Woods by Theatre Aquarius Archives (University of Guelph) Pdf

Stephen Sondheim

Author : Joanne Gordon
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2014-04-23
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781135702106

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Stephen Sondheim by Joanne Gordon Pdf

Stephen Sondheim is an artist with many contradictory facets: he is an avant-garde composer and lyricist working in the populist art form, an apparently dry and acerbic critic who captures all the ambivalent pain of passion, an intellectual whose work contains some of the funniest bawdy lines on the Broadway stage. He has chosen to confront an audience that is usually looking for escapist literature with the very issues it has fled to the theatre to avoid. This collection of original essays takes particular pains to present Sondheim's diversity in a chronological plan that illustrates how each new work grew out of the previous one. Some of the topics covered are the evolution of Sondheim's female characters, who take us far beyond the usual sweet ingenues; the Roman farce antecedents of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the resemblances between Sondheim's chorus and the chorus in ancient Greek drama; Sondheim and the concept musical; and Sondheim's maturing philosophy. All students of the modern theatre and the modern musical will want to read this book.

The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia

Author : Rick Pender
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2023-09-13
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1538184184

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The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia by Rick Pender Pdf

The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia is the first reference volume devoted to the works of this prolific composer and lyricist. The encyclopedia's entries provide readers with detailed information about Sondheim's work and key figures in his career, including his apprenticeship, his early work with Leonard Bernstein, and his work on television.

Victorians on Broadway

Author : Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2020-06-24
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0813944317

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Victorians on Broadway by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Pdf

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway's debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.

Sondheim's Broadway Musicals

Author : Stephen Banfield
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Music
ISBN : 0472080830

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Sondheim's Broadway Musicals by Stephen Banfield Pdf

The first in-depth look at the work and career of one of the most important figures in the history of musical theater

Stephen Sondheim

Author : Meryle Secrest
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2011-10-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780307946843

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Stephen Sondheim by Meryle Secrest Pdf

The first and only full-scale and definitive biography of one of the the most important composer-lyricists in musical theater. A remarkable portrait of the man, the music, and the genius of Stephen Sondheim: star of his own fascinating life. Drawing on personal conversations with Sondheim himself, as well as interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers, Secrest offers new insight into the enigmatic and very private Stephen Sondheim. Here, we learn about his childhood on New York’s Upper West Side, his parents’ devastating divorce, and his ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical. Secrest vividly recreates the energy, passion, and despair that went into each beloved show, from Sondheim’s fabled collaboration with Hal Prince on Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music, to his disagreements with co-lyricist Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story.

Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Author : Stephen Citron
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2001-09-13
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780195357271

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Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber by Stephen Citron Pdf

The New York Times called Stephen Sondheim "the greatest and perhaps best known artist in the American musical theater," while two months earlier, the same paper referred to his contemporary, Andrew Lloyd-Webber as "the most commercially successful composer in history." Whatever their individual achievements might be, it is agreed by most critics that these two colossi have dominated world musical theater for the last quarter century and hold the key to the direction the musical stage will take in the future. Here in the third volume of Stephen Citron's distinguished series The Great Songwriters--in depth studies that illuminated the musical contributions, careers, and lives of Noel Coward and Cole Porter (Noel & Cole: The Sophisticates), and Oscar Hammerstein 2nd and Alan Jay Lerner, (The Wordsmiths)--this eminent musicologist has taken on our two leading contemporary contributors to the lyric stage. His aim has not been to compare or judge one's merits over the other, but to make the reader discover through their works and those of their contemporaries, the changes and path of that glorious artform we call Musical Theater. In his quest, Citron offers unique insight into each artist's working methods, analyzing their scores--including their early works and works-in-progress. As in Citron's previously critically acclaimed books in this series, great significance is given to the impact their youthful training and private lives have had upon their amazing creative output. Beginning with Sondheim's lyrics-only works, West Side Story, Gypsy, Do I Hear A Waltz? through his scores for Saturday Night, Company, Anyone Can Whistle, Follies, Pacific Overtures, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday In the Park, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion, all these milestones of musical theater have been explored. Lloyd-Webber's musical contribution from his early works, The Likes of Us and Joseph to Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, By Jeeves, The Phantom of the Opera, Song & Dance, Mass, Sunset Boulevard to Whistle Down the Wind are also thoroughly analyzed. The works of these two splendid artists are clarified for the casual or professional reader in context with their contemporaries. Complete with a quadruple chronology (Sondheim, Lloyd-Webber, US Theater, British Theater), copious quotations from their works, and many never before published illustrations, the future of the artform that is the crowning achievement of the 20th century is made eminently clear in this book. Sondheim & Lloyd-Webber is a must-read for anyone interested in the contemporary theater.

A Study Guide for Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods"

Author : Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher : Gale, Cengage Learning
Page : 34 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781410349798

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A Study Guide for Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" by Gale, Cengage Learning Pdf

A Study Guide for Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.