On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide

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.

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

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.

1946 revue film The Ziegfeld Follies, “A Great Lady Has an Interview

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

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.

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.

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

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