Stephen Sondheim would have turned 95 today. In the three years and four months since his death, attention to the Broadway composer has only grown, with the opening of a new musical, a revival of five of his shows on Broadway, and a new Sondheim revue starting previews in a couple of days, as well as the publication of numerous books about Sondheim and his work. Below is a sample.

New Musical

Here We Are (The Shed, October 22, 2023 – January 21, 2024)

“O, isn’t this wonderful?!” Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) exclaims upon seeing her old friends at her door. It is the first line in Stephen Sondheim’s first new musical in two decades, produced two years after his death. Long-gestating, long-awaited, “Here We Are” can itself be considered wonderful just for existing, like an unexpected visit from an old friend.

But Marianne’s delight turns to confusion. Her friends are expecting brunch; they say that Marianne and her husband Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) invited them. The couple doesn’t remember doing this. ..

So launches the surreal, often comic series of events  in “Here We Are,”  a world-premiere production at The Shed directed by the much-esteemed Joe Mantello and performed by eleven of New York’s most exciting stage actors,  with a book by experienced playwright David Ives inspired by two of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s most acclaimed surrealist films — “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” — and a score by Sondheim of under a dozen songs marked by his characteristically clever lyrics.
How you react to “Here We Are” greatly depends on what you are expecting…..

Broadway Revues and Revivals

Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends (scheduled for Apr 08, 2025 – Jun 01, 2025)

Gypsy (Dec 19, 2024 – Present)

“Gypsy was my first chance to write lyrics for characters of considerable complexity,” Sondheim wrote in “Finishing the Hat.” And Rose was a “dramatist’s dream, the self-deluded protagonist who comes to a tragic/triumphant end.” 

Merrily We Roll Along (Oct 10, 2023 – Jul 07, 2024)

People will be watching “Merrily We Roll Along” in 2040, if all goes as planned. That’s the year that director Richard Linklater plans to release a movie adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim and George Furth musical that he started shooting in 2019; the idea is to film over two decades to show the actors as they actually age. 

Will the moviegoers of the future remember the 2023 Broadway production of “Merrily We Roll Along” as the turning point, when the much talked-about “flaws” were finally “fixed” in Sondheim’s famous 1981 flop, after many attempts over the years by many different hands?

That seems to be the current consensus about the first-ever Broadway revival of the show, now opened at the Hudson Theater. But my reaction on seeing it on Broadway is much the same as when I saw it during its Off-Broadway run nine months ago:  Director Maria Friedman doesn’t eliminate what’s off-putting about “Merrily We Roll Along”; instead she directs our attention to what’s best about it.

…Hollywood decadence as a subject is considerably less fresh or intriguing than the stories in the five musicals that Sondheim created in collaboration with director Harold Prince in the decade preceding “Merrily” — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd.” It was famously the failure of “Merrily” that ended this extraordinarily fruitful collaboration between the two. 

Sweeney Todd (Mar 26, 2023 – May 05, 2024)

….Debuting in 1979, with Len Cariou as the serial killer and Angela Lansbury as his pie-making accomplice, Sondheim and Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” has not yet stood the test of time to be so widely heralded as a masterpiece. But it seems to have passed another test for such a designation: The beauty, power and intelligence of Sondheim’s songs come through whatever the scale or interpretation.  The “Sweeney Todd” I’ve enjoyed the most was produced six years ago by Tooting Arts Club at Barrow Street Theater, which was transformed into a replica of Harrington’s, one of London’s oldest pie shows – complete with the meat pies (baked by President Obama’s White House pastry chef Bill Yosses…using chicken.)

Into the Woods (Aug 06, 2022 – Jan 08, 2023)

….“Into The Woods,” the musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine currently back on Broadway in a wonderfully cast concert staging directed by Lear deBessonet, has always reminded me of the Fractured Fairy Tales on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle animated TV series – comically irreverent takes on the world’s most familiar fables. That’s not all the musical has on offer, of course. There are some gorgeous songs with deliciously witty lyrics. There are also all the meant-to-be-profound moral lessons for grown-ups attached to the cleverly interconnected stories of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack (of Beanstalk fame) and Rapunzel – about how actions have consequences (“wishes come true, not free”), and how “happily” isn’t “ever after” in the real world (or at least certainly not in Act II.) 

But I suspect it’s the universal familiarity of the characters that has made “Into The Woods” one of Sondheim’s most popular and frequently produced musicals.

Into The Woods Wins Best Musical Theater Album Grammy 2023

Company (Dec 09, 2021 – Jul 31, 2022)

“Company” is perfectly timed, sadly. Opening less than two weeks after the death of Stephen Sondheim at the age of 91, in a season delayed by more than a year and a half by the worldwide pandemic, this fourth Broadway revival of his 1970 musical couldn’t help but be emotional, thrilling, overwhelming. 

It is also, as it turns out, sublimely entertaining. 

Lincoln Center adaptation

Deaf Broadway Signs Sondheim’s Company at Lincoln Center (August 2, 2023

Deaf Broadway, a theater company founded on Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday in 2020, tonight performed the musical “Company” at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park. How? They projected the filmed version of the live 2011 production at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall that featured a starry cast including Neil Patrick Harris and Patti LuPone, adding vivid captions, while eleven actors simultaneously performed the roles in American Sign Language. 

The result made for a fascinating evening of theater,

Books

How Sondheim Can Change Your Life (published Nov 14, 2024)

Composer Stephen Sondheim’s greatness lies “beyond the clever lyrics, beyond the complex music.” Sondheim can make you a better person:  

“The ambitions, dreams, disasters, and fixations of Sondheim’s characters can teach us how to get through our own lives—so that, like Petra’s vow in A Little Night Music, we’ll not have been dead when we die,” author Richard Schoch (pronounced Shook) argues

Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy (published September 19, 2023)

a handsome, readable book by Stephen M. Silverman, a longtime editor at People Magazine, who doesn’t pass up any opportunity for a little stargazing, if the stars are even a little bit relevant….The very existence of a book like this is an argument that, by the time Stephen Sondheim died in November, 2021 at the age of 91, he had become as celebrated as many of the famous people featured in it. One of the numerous sidebars is a full page about the popularity of Sondheim’s face on t-shirts and such tchotchkes as enamel pins….“Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy” offers far less about his life or his legacy than about his shows. Most of the fourteen chapters focus on the individual musicals (and one straight play) in which Sondheim was involved, starting with West Side Story, for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics when he was 27. 

Careful The Spell You Cast: How Stephen Sondheim Extended the Range of the American Musical (published February 9, 2023)

Stephen Sondheim was not a cynic; he was a romantic. That in a nutshell is the thesis Ben Francis puts forth in ..this compact critical analysis of Sondheim’s musicals…Francis argues that Sondheim’s musicals are based on a “rich and intriguing” paradox: The characters in them become disenchanted, consistently fail or betray each other. “Yet counterbalancing his seeming pessimism Sondheim maintains an idealistic viewpoint in his shows, in the aspirational Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition.”

Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim (published November 22, 2022)

Two and a half months after Sondheim’s death, the New Yorker published an article with an edited and condensed but still lengthy version of D.T. Max’s interviews with Sondheim, in Q&A format, under the title Stephen Sondheim’s Lessons for Every Artist.

It is a worthwhile, wide-ranging read, in which Sondheim talked about the origins and progress he was making with his Buñuel musical; about his technique as a composer; about what music he liked (classical and movie music; Puccini, not Verdi; the Beatles and Radiohead, not any other rock bands); about his parents (“My mother was entirely visual, my father played by ear. He would go to a Broadway show and come home and pick the tunes out on the piano. And when I was a tiny kid I would sit on the piano bench, and he would put my little hand on his right hand, and I would play the piano with him”); and about his view of death. (“I don’t mind dying. I just hate—I just don’t want it to be uncomfortable. And I don’t want it to be prolonged.”)

All of this is part of “Finale,” D.T. Max’s expansion of that article, hooked to the first anniversary of the composer’s death. It is an embarrassing book….