Overview

Drawing on interviews with friends, family, collaborators and lovers, this biography of Stephen Sondheim looks to bring us not only the artist - as a master of modern compositional style - but also the private man.

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9780747544166

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Veteran biographer Secrest moves, logically, from Leonard Bernstein (1994) to one of his collaborators and friends - and one of the undoubted giants of the American theater - Stephen Sondheim. Like his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim has vehement detractors and vociferous defenders; Secrest is quite clearly in the latter group. Born in New York in 1930, Sondheim is the son of well-to-do German Jews. But when their marriage disintegrated while Stephen was still a child, the boy found himself a pawn in his mother's machinations. As Secrest makes clear, the scars from that experience stayed with Sondheim for a long time, occasionally finding their way into his creative work. Despite personal travails as a youth, Sondheim enjoyed a pretty nearly unbroken road to theatrical success, being virtually adopted by the Hammersteins, making his Broadway debut at 27 with the lyrics for West Side Story and not actually having a failure until his second show as sole composer-lyricist, the legendary Anyone Can Whistle. Secrest has had the great advantage of cooperation from her subject. More than any previous work on Sondheim, this book has the benefit of early reminiscences and access to its subject's apprentice work all the way back to his high-school years. Yet Sondheim remains a somewhat emotionally distant figure, not surprising since his guardedness seems to be one of his most prominent traits. Regrettably, although there is much material here to fascinate both Sondheim addicts and theater fans, Secrest fails to organize it coherently. Although there are some engaging stories about the creation of such classics as Company, Pacific Overtures, and Sunday in the Park with George, the book rambles with a ramshackle thrown-together feeling and with awkward run-on sentences. And not surprisingly given that her subject is still working hard at 68, Secrest's effort doesn't so much end as stop abruptly. Some genuine insights into one of our living masters, but a disappointingly disorganized work with a surfeit of dollar-book Freud and Jung. (Kirkus Reviews)

A notoriously secretive genius ('every time Steve writes a new score,' said Alex Cohen once, 'Broadway gets rebuilt') Sondheim allowed Secrest amazing access to his private life, and as a result the book can deal for the first time with his homosexual encounters, his deep hatred for a severely dotty mother whose funeral he refused to attend, and his utter dedication to pushing back the barriers of the Broadway musical across more than forty years. Even for those of us who have interviewed and written about him virtually all of our working lives will find much here that was unknonwn, so intensely reserved has Sondheim always been about whole areas of his private life. It didn't take a genius to work out that there was always something decidedly autobiographical about such songs as 'Anyone Can Whistle', 'Losing My Mind', Sorry-Grateful,' and 'Too Many Mornings', but now we have a more complete jigsaw. Secrest has done a stunningly detailed portrait of the greatest musical-man of our times. Review By SHERIDAN MORLEY (Kirkus UK)

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