His shows ranged from the vaudeville-inspired romp “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum”…
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: At the climax of most musicals, characters sing their hearts out about enchanted evenings or defying gravity or what I did for love.
MONDELLO: This is Bobby in “Company,” the musical that established the Sondheim template back in 1970 – not his first show but the first big hit in which his characters sing less to move the action forward than to offer a sort of psychological profile.
MONDELLO: The first act of this fairy tale show gives us fables like Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk more or less straight, basically what you expect of musical comedy.
A lover of brain teasers and games, Sondheim delighted in turning the Broadway musical into a playground for thinkers.
Here from an HBO special, Sondheim doubles the joke by stepping into the role of a producer in “Merrily We Roll Along” and growling the thing people kept telling him back when he was starting out.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM: It isn’t every day I hear a score this strong.
MONDELLO: When he finally hums what the character thinks is a hummable melody, it’s Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening.” That’s an in-joke because in real life, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein Jr.
MONDELLO: Though the things Sondheim was doing were hugely influential with other Broadway composers – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” for instance, couldn’t have been conceived without the building blocks Sondheim helped develop – audiences didn’t always get his shows.
MONDELLO: Not a day goes by that I haven’t felt I was living his lyrics – for a while, by not getting married; when I was low, by drinking to that and one for Mahler; by trying to keep a good thing going; by trying to never do anything twice.
MONDELLO: Across 18 major musicals, decades of mentoring, Stephen Sondheim followed that dictate – to become, in the words of one of his lesser-known lyrics, the best thing that ever has happened to Broadway.
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