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.
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.
The first – and in many ways, still the best – was this 1976 compilation that began at the John Dankworth-Cleo Laine festival at Wavendon and that had a triumphant London first night at the Mermaid in 1976.
But Sondheim claimed that the spectacle of a luxuriant tree dominating an otherwise white triptych taught him the cardinal lesson that, in art, less is more.
I’m on record as dubbing this, in 1980, “one of the two durable works of popular musical theatre written in my lifetime.” I should have added West Side Story but I stand by what I said since I’ve seen the show over the years work in countless spaces, big and small.
However you classify it – and Sondheim himself said it was close to a chamber opera, like Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia – it haunts you as tenaciously as the fevered Fosca does her object of desire.
I tend to cherish my original cast recordings of Sondheim shows – although here he was purely the lyricist, with Jule Styne writing the score and Arthur Laurents the book – but this is one occasion where the revival outstrips its predecessor.
We learn how Something’s Coming from West Side Story was written in one heady day with Leonard Bernstein and used baseball metaphors to convey Tony’s propulsive energy.
One was at Avery Fisher Hall in New York in March, where the stars turned out in force: Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters gave us the best of Sunday in the Park With George, Elaine Stritch proclaimed I’m Still Here and Michael Cerveris wielded the razor over George Hearn, a previous Sweeney Todd, in Pretty Women.
In the former category Dominic Symonds traces the connections between Oscar Hammerstein and Sondheim, showing how the palindromic structure of South Pacific – in which themes and songs are echoed and repeated – impacts on Into the Woods.
This is, arguably, the one truly necessary book on musical theatre.