Walk of Fame

Inducted: 2025

Long before Stephen Sondheim would be a Broadway composer described as brilliant, visionary and transformative, he was a disaffected pre-teen in Doylestown, Bucks County. His divorced, abusive mother moved him there from New York City’s Upper West Side and despite his lifelong hatred of her, she’d done him a good turn by moving.

His neighbors were the Hammersteins, and young Sondheim became a good friend of their son, James. Soon he would become close to James’ father, Oscar, the lyricist whose groundbreaking work had been changing Broadway.

Oscar Hammerstein II became Stephen Sondheim’s surrogate father and also his professional mentor. As an older teenager, Sondheim wrote a musical comedy called By George for his classmates at the private George School, which he was attending. He showed it to Hammerstein, who spent an entire afternoon pointing out and analyzing its weak spots. Sondheim later famously said that “in that afternoon I learned more about songwriting and the musical theater than most people learn in a lifetime.”

Sondheim spent the rest of his life improving on and expanding the thinking of Hammerstein and his contemporaries – that the American musical could be more than a slapdash of boy-meets-girl situations and songs. Sondheim’s canon, of some of Broadway’s bravest musicals in the last half of the 20th century, were marked by witty, sophisticated and challenging scores that tackled themes never before considered apt for a musical.
 
These included revenge, by a hair-cutter who slits his customers’ throats (Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street); fear of loneliness and commitment (Company); the process of creation and its afterlife (Sunday in the Park with George); the dark side of fairy tales (Into the Woods), and the vagaries that come with aging (Follies).

Not all Sondheim shows were outright successes – the 1981 flop Merrily We Roll Along found new life on Broadway 42 years later – but even the music from these has many fans. Two shows for which he wrote only the lyrics – West Side Story and Gypsy – are Broadway classics.
 
Sondheim died at age 91, of stomach cancer. His final years were celebrated with tributes from show business colleagues, and from fans who flocked to his show’s revivals. During his life, he won eight Tony Awards, eight Grammys, an Oscar and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

-Howard Shapiro