A new Sondheim biography reveals some shockers — and the dark side of genius

Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021, at 91, was a gut punch to musical theater fans. Showered with honors and tributes, he had begun to seem eternal, a cultural constant. Even his gnarliest shows enjoyed successful revivals — more acclaimed, and more profitable, than their original productions. His influence and mentorship shaped a new generation of theatrical composers that included Adam Guettel (“The Light in the Piazza”), Jason Robert Brown (“Parade”), Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home”), Jonathan Larson (“Rent”) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (“Hamilton”).

The most secular of Jews, Sondheim is now the subject of a biography in Yale University Press’ excellent Jewish Lives series. Its author, Daniel Okrent, was the New York Times’ first public editor and has written acclaimed books on topics such as immigration and Prohibition.

Okrent never met Sondheim, he tells us, but he had some near misses: He sat near the composer in the theater on more than one occasion and was even mistaken for him. For “Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy,” Okrent spent three years absorbing the literature, interviewing collaborators and friends, and probing the archives. He cites a particular debt to biographer Meryle Secrest’s extensive taped interviews, from the mid-1990s, with Sondheim and others.

The resulting volume is a brisk, engaging read that avoids hagiography. Okrent highlights the emotional frailties that coexisted with the brilliance and generosity. He seeks to liberate Sondheim’s reputation from the encrustation of myth and to demystify his relationships, while offering a succinct analysis of his achievements. That’s a tall order for a compact book, especially given its subject’s long, complicated life. Okrent’s failings are, unsurprisingly, primarily those of omission.

The general outlines of Sondheim’s story are well known. The precocious only child of two acrimoniously divorced parents, he benefited from the mentorship of his Bucks County, Pa., neighbor, Oscar Hammerstein II. Sondheim enjoyed early success, in the late 1950s, as the lyricist for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” but chafed at the limitations of the role. He vastly preferred writing music.

With a variety of collaborators, including Hal Prince, George Furth, John Weidman, Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine, he went on to forge a distinctive legacy as both a composer and lyricist. His shows, including “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Into the Woods,” mined the darkness and complexities of human relationships, deployed diverse forms of storytelling, and expanded the possibilities of the Broadway musical.

Okrent’s subtitle, “Art Isn’t Easy,” is a lyric from Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” The 1984 musical, inspired by the painter Georges Seurat’s 1886 pointillist masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” explored the rigors and rewards of the artistic process.

There are some surprises here. While Sondheim spoke about using alcohol as a creative lubricant, Okrent goes further. Quoting Lapine and others, he concludes that Sondheim was an unrepentant alcoholic, as well as a prolific user of marijuana and cocaine. He kept drinking, Okrent says, even after at least two heart attacks.

For years, Sondheim dated men casually, without commitment. Only late in life did he find two serious loves, the songwriter Peter Jones and then the producer Jeff Romley, 50 years his junior, whom he married. That union brought him contentment, Okrent says.

Okrent also takes seriously Sondheim’s “emotionally intimate” relationships with women. Among them were Mary Rodgers, daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, who chronicled her devotion in the memoir “Shy;” the actress Lee Remick, whom Okrent says Sondheim truly loved; and the producer-director Hal Prince’s wife, Judy, an artistic muse with whom he may have talked daily. Her disinclination (along with Romley’s) to cooperate with biographers leaves an unfortunate gap in the record.

One of the myths Okrent tackles involves Sondheim’s supposed rupture with Judy’s husband, whose vision had helped fuel shows such as “Company,” “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” After the spectacular failure, in 1981, of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Sondheim turned to new collaborators. But, according to Okrent, the friendship remained largely intact. (A final, years-long collaboration with Prince, on the musical “Bounce” — later called “Road Show” — never made it to Broadway.)

Okrent portrays Sondheim as witty and endearing, but also poorly groomed, remote, caustic, quick to anger — and, mostly, quick to forgive. One exception was the case of the prickly Arthur Laurents (librettist for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy”), a longtime friend and sometime foe whose request for a deathbed visit Sondheim spurned. By contrast, Sondheim was consistently accessible and encouraging to younger composers and lyricists even as his own artistic output sputtered.

One of his most embattled relationships was with his mother, known as Foxy. She famously bemoaned his birth in a cruel letter, which Okrent suggests Sondheim may have misquoted. But it was through her machinations that he met Hammerstein, a debt he repaid by supporting her financially through much of her life.

The biography’s brevity is necessarily limiting. While Okrent mentions that the recent Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” fetched high ticket prices, he doesn’t detail the reasons for its success. (Director Maria Friedman re-envisioned the show as a memory play, and cast the supremely likable Jonathan Groff as the corrupt composer Franklin Shepard, ruefully reflecting on his past.)

Okrent touches on Sondheim’s faltering efforts to complete his final musical, with David Ives, “Here We Are.” But he says nothing about its posthumous Off Broadway production, in 2023, which played to packed houses and mixed reviews — not quite the valedictory Sondheim would have wanted.

In Sondheim’s body of work, Okrent searches for the autobiographical resonances that Sondheim himself mostly disdained. He likens the composer to both the emotionally disengaged protagonist, Bobby, of “Company,” who struggles with ambivalence, and (more surprisingly) the vengeful barber Sweeney Todd, whose demons drove him to murder. Sondheim’s were instead tamed by his art, Okrent suggests, which shaped his “textured, contradictory, troubling, and gratifying life.”

Klein is a Philadelphia-based cultural critic and reporter.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: latimes.com