In memory of the late Stephen Sondheim, Michael Billington looks back on ten of the musical composer’s most celebrated works.
Sondheim is gone but his songs and shows, as Cameron Mackintosh said, will be performed forever. Fortunately there is a wealth of material – recordings, documentaries, books – that give us a good idea of his impact on the culture of his times. I here offer a list of 10 of the best that is highly selective and intensely subjective; but then each of us has our own store of Sondheim memories and favoured works.
1. Company
I hugely admired Marianne Elliott’s re-gendered version, currently playing in New York, but I’ve gone back to the original Columbia recording for a variety of reasons. One is that I stumbled into the Broadway show one late summer night in 1970 and can truthfully say that I had a life-changing experience. I had never realised a musical could jettison plot and still be compelling and, although recently married, I instinctively recognised its portrait of bachelor solitude: Hal Prince’s production also perfectly caught the neurotic frenzy of Manhattan life...Keep reading on The Guardian.
Sondheim is gone but his songs and shows, as Cameron Mackintosh said, will be performed forever. Fortunately there is a wealth of material – recordings, documentaries, books – that give us a good idea of his impact on the culture of his times. I here offer a list of 10 of the best that is highly selective and intensely subjective; but then each of us has our own store of Sondheim memories and favoured works.
1. Company
I hugely admired Marianne Elliott’s re-gendered version, currently playing in New York, but I’ve gone back to the original Columbia recording for a variety of reasons. One is that I stumbled into the Broadway show one late summer night in 1970 and can truthfully say that I had a life-changing experience. I had never realised a musical could jettison plot and still be compelling and, although recently married, I instinctively recognised its portrait of bachelor solitude: Hal Prince’s production also perfectly caught the neurotic frenzy of Manhattan life...Keep reading on The Guardian.