Stephen Sondheim – A Giant in the Sky

The measureless, omnipresent influence of Stephen Sondheim.

- By Mark Harris

WHAT IF STEPHEN Sondheim had never written a word, or a note of music, after his 30th birthday? What if, grief-stricken at the death of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1960, the young composer had simply decided that he had done his part for musical theater and was ready to try something new? Had that happened, we would still, today, more than six decades later, be memorializing a man who, via his lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story, made an indelible contribution to the history of American musical theater—specifically, to modernizing it, to darkening it, to helping it burst what were then thought to be the boundaries of its form.

Sondheim did not stop, of course. His writing for those two seminal shows was, in the context of his full body of work, a warm-up—a quick set of stretches before a career that would define and redefine an entire popular art. If it is true that, as Jack Nicholson remarked when Marlon Brando died, every other living actor just moved up one place, the image seems inadequate to mark Sondheim’s passing, at 91, after a long and astonishingly productive life. If anything, it means that the question of who America’s greatest living musical-theater artist is can finally lead to an interesting discussion, because for the first time in decades, the answer isn’t obvious. With Sondheim, there was no list of people waiting to move up one. He was his own list—and his measureless influence lives in the work of just about everyone who survives him.