Stephen Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, into a Jewish family in New York City. His father manufactured dresses designed by his mother. He died on November 26, 2021.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, the American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s net worth was $20 million.
The composer grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, after his parents divorced, on a farm near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. As the only child of well-to-do parents living in the San Remo at 145 Central Park West, he was described in Meryle Secrest’s.
When he lived in New York City, Sondheim attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. He spent several summers at Camp Androscoggin, and his mother sent him to New York Military Academy in 1940. From 1942 to 1943, he attended George School, a private Quaker preparatory school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he wrote his first musical, By George.
Stephen Sondheim Is Still Writing New Works
From 1946 to 1950, Sondheim attended Williams College. He graduated magna cum laude and received the Hubbard Hutchinson Prize, a two-year fellowship to study music. – November 26, 2021) was an American composer and lyricist. One of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, Sondheim, was praised for having “reinvented the American musical” with shows that tackled “unexpected themes that range far beyond the [genre’s] traditional subjects” with “music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication.”
His shows addressed “darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience,” with songs often tinged with “ambivalence” [5] about various aspects of life.
Songs by Stephen Sondheim:
Sondheim’s best-known works as composer and lyricist include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987). He was also known for writing the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959).
Stephen Sondheim biography
Sondheim’s accolades include eight Tony Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2008),[6] an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also had a theater named for him on Broadway and in the West End of London.
Sondheim wrote film music, contributing “Goodbye for Now” to Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981). He wrote five songs for 1990’s Dick Tracy, including “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man),” sung in the film by Madonna, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Film adaptations of Sondheim’s work include West Side Story (1961), Gypsy (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), A Little Night Music (1977), Gypsy (1993), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Into the Woods (2014), West Side Story (2021), and Merrily We Roll Along (TBA).
What is Stephen Sondheim best known for?
Walk around New York today, and you’ll see just how vital to the city, the country, the world Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, who died Friday at 91, remained for most of his extraordinary life.
Pass the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on 45th Street, and you’ll glimpse the marquee for the revival of his seminal 1970 musical “Company,” which currently stars Patti LuPone and opens in two weeks.
Downtown at Classic Stage Company in the East Village is his “Assassins,” a provocative show about presidential murderers that have been produced all over the US during heated election cycles ever since it debuted in 1990.
A Broadway house on 43rd Street, the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, is named for him.
Over at the Paris Theater near Central Park, you can watch Bradley Whitford play the man himself in the new movie “Tick, Tick… Boom!” an autobiography of “Rent” composer Jonathan Larson, who Sondheim inspired. The film is directed by “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who Sondheim also inspired. Take all that in.
And then on Monday, Steven Spielberg’s new film of “West Side Story,” which a young Sondheim wrote the lyrics for in 1957 — his first Broadway show! — will have its world premiere at Lincoln Center. A musical that has touched every generation since we first heard the words “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way,” the movie features the original film’s star Rita Moreno, now 89, alongside popular youngster Ansel Elgort, 27. Should the red carpet event go off as planned, a movie celebration will become a celebration of life.
At 91, Sondheim was deeply involved in all these red-hot projects; he never officially retired and actively wrote a new musical.
