Sondheim remains esteemed

By MISHA BERSON

SEATTLE — Stephen Sondheim does not give many interviews. Why should he?

Now 79, Sondheim long ago cemented his reputation as Broadway’s most esteemed living composer and lyricist and one of the American musical theater’s greatest visionaries.

From “West Side Story” to “A Little Night Music” to “Sweeney Todd” and on, the eight-time Tony Award honoree has redefined and expanded the sonic and dramatic vocabulary of the Broadway musical, busting genre boundaries and nearly erasing the border between “serious” modern music and show tunes.

Judging by his creative output, Sondheim has long thrived on taking left turns into left field.

The New York City native wrote his first musical when he was a precocious 15-year-old. And in his youth he was mentored by another Broadway innovator: lyricist-author Oscar Hammerstein II, who with composer Richard Rodgers, crafted such landmark musicals as “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific.”

Sondheim began his own Broadway career writing lyrics for scores by such leading composers as Leonard Bernstein for “West Side Story” and Jule Styne on “Gypsy.”

Later, he conceived and wrote lyrics and music for his unequaled trove of “concept” musicals — starting with a 1964 box-office flop, “Anyone Can Whistle,” followed by the 1970 hit, “Company.”

Sondheim’s shows (the most recent, “Road Show,” reached off-Broadway last spring) have been strikingly different from one another in theme, tone, setting, style.

Yet all challenged their savvy, far-reaching creator; his critics; and his loyal audience and cult of super-fans.

His artistic daring also strongly influenced a younger wave of stage composers — including “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson.

Sondheim is encouraged that “young people are still writing for theater, when they could be writing pop and rock tunes. It doesn’t matter if their shows are good or bad. They’re keeping the idiom alive.”

He’s also open to the current wave of edgy new revivals of his works.

Sondheim is a fan of a “chamber” version of “Sunday in the Park With George” and other productions that strip down his orchestral scores.

“I liked the two [English director] John Doyle did in New York [‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Company’],” he acknowledged. “I tend to write intimate musicals, so chamber versions are more appropriate than if I was writing splashy shows.”

Did he mind, though, that Doyle’s 2005 Broadway rendition of “Sweeney Todd” (starring a tuba-blowing Patti LuPone) had all the actors doubling as instrumentalists in what appeared to be an insane asylum?

“No, I found it fulfilling. I guess I’m more flexible about it. I just accepted the concept as a fever dream, from Sweeney’s point of view.

“You know, I thought of ‘Sweeney’ originally as an intimate piece, but Hal [director Harold Prince] refused to do the original show without making it big.”

Tim Burton’s recent “Sweeney Todd” film, with a singing Johnny Depp as the “demon barber of Fleet Street” also gets high marks from Sondheim.

“I think it’s the one movie [based on my shows] that worked, because Tim made it a film, not a recording of a stage musical.

“I’m very opinionated about movie musicals, when they’re adapted from live shows,” he continued. “You’ll sit still for a three-minute song in a theater. But in movies, a glance from someone’s eyes will tell you the whole story in a few seconds.”

As for the stage revivals replacing a full pit band with a combo, Sondheim said he’d love to go back to “full orchestrations. But theater in general is getting small, with this proliferation of one-man and one-woman shows. If you wrote a piece for 25 actors, a producer would laugh in your face.”

Indeed, a career such as Sondheim’s in today’s more corporatized Broadway, where shows are spun off hit movies or the songs of pop superstars, is unimaginable.

But Sondheim declined to assail such modern Broadway trends as the British invasion of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows, “jukebox” musicals and Disney’s live remakes of animated films.

“I’ve tried not to make pronunciations in public,” he stated. “With the British musicals, I thought it was a phase, and this too shall pass. We’ll move away from the jukebox shows, too. But it will take longer, because pop is so popular.”