With his mother he moved to Doylestown, Penn., where they lived near Oscar Hammerstein II, a family friend who soon became his surrogate father. He was born Stephen Joshua Sondheim in Manhattan into a middle class family and sent off to a military school after his parents divorced. Sondheim was almost defined by his New York sensibility. Sondheim won countless Tonys but, more importantly, paved the way for musicals that dealt with sophisticated subject matter as directly as any straight drama. But critics and musical theater devotees thrilled to it. Such material was not always to mass-audience tastes. And, of course, “Sweeney Todd” was about a barber who killed his clients and baked them up in pies. “Company” dealt with a single man whose encounters with his married friends were less than encouraging “ Follies,” with the illusions of show business vs. Many of his musicals were sardonic and downbeat. His talent, evident from his early collaborations with Leonard Bernstein (“West Side Story”) and Jules Styne (“Gypsy”), became even more pronounced and sophisticated as he grew as a composer and conceiver of musical subjects. No one could deny Sondheim’s abilities as a lyricist - in that realm he easily rivaled the great Cole Porter. And while his critics claimed his songs lacked the whistle-ability factor of Richard Rodgers or even Lloyd Webber, his musicals continued to be revived, reappreciated and reappraised over the decades. Though he never achieved popular success on the order of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sondheim altered and broadened the boundaries of American musical theater with great daring and aplomb, basing his tuners on such disparate sources as the ancient Roman playwright Plautus (“A Funny Thing”), a film by Ingmar Bergman (“A Little Night Music”) and American political assassinations (“Assassins”).
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