On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide

Neil Patrick Harris (who played Robert in a New York Philharmonic staging in 2011) said Sondheim told him that Company is about “a boy becoming a man.

West Side Story’s true lost author was Peter Gennaro, who choreographed “America” and all of the Sharks’ steps in the “Dance at the Gym.” Jerome Robbins, apparently foreseeing how long the show’s art would prove, made Gennaro sign a contract including the line “You hereby assign to me any and all rights in, and to any and all choreographic material

Sondheim told me that, at dinner at the Chambord restaurant, Rodgers rolled up the lyric sheet and repeatedly banged it on the table in scorn—possibly because Mrs. Rodgers had detected in it a summation of her less than Happily Ever After with Dick. Sondheim had to rewrite that verse, though revivals reinstate the original.

Katharine Hepburn left her mark on the role in the film version, retitled Summertime (1955), the story beautifully opened up with location shooting in Venice itself.

Yes, Sondheim writes songs. But he writes, as well, “arias”: musical scenes that are more encompassing, more dramatically kinetic, than songs.

he felt crowded by all the gays on the scene, for, besides Sondheim and Laurents, the director, John Dexter, was gay, and Dexter’s assistant, Wakefield Poole, was gay. And the doctor called in to cure the show’s ailments in Boston, our old friend Herbert Ross, was gay-friendly. Rodgers definitely was not, though he had collaborated for over twenty

The parallels between play and musical are well observed, for Romeo meets Juliet at a ball, gets his close friend Mercutio killed through interference in a duel, and avenges him by killing Tybalt—and this is all in the musical. It does end differently: Maria survives. The authors were considering killing her as well, but Richard Rodgers advised the

Prince’s non-musical film, Something For Everyone (1970).

The odd confluence of Rose’s name and the use of “roses” in the lyric confused Jerome Robbins when he first heard it. “Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?” he famously asked.