Sondheim is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize ( Sunday in the Park with George), an Academy Award (for Sooner or Later, as performed by Madonna in the film Dick Tracy) and multiple Tony and Grammy Awards. He changed the nature of musical theatre forever and has influenced subsequent generations of writers. Sondheim helped establish what is known as the “concept” musical, which sought to tell stories in fresh ways – Company (1970), Follies (1971) and Pacific Overtures (1976), for example. He followed with another smash hit with his lyrics for Gypsy in 1959. Sondheim, the baby of that creative team, was just 25 years old when he was hired to work on West Side Story. Laurents, born in 1918 (the same year as Bernstein), died on May, 2011.
Sondheim wrote the lyrics for the landmark musical West Side Story (1957) in collaboration with bisexual Leonard Bernstein’s music and gay Arthur Laurents’s book. Update: In 2017 Sondheim married Broadway singer/actor Jeffrey Romley, who survives him. Sondheim did not come out as a gay man until he was 40 and did not live with a partner (dramatist Peter Jones) until he was 61.
It should not be lost on my readers that Stephen Sondheim is a homosexual Broadway artist.
