The American composer and lyricist has died aged 91. Judi Herman remembers the man who was a game changer for musical theatre, but life-changing for her

It was in 1972 that Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company arrived in London. With apparently no storyline, save for the efforts of his friends to change the marital status of Bobby, the bachelor guy around whom these couples and girlfriend hopefuls revolve, it may have puzzled some. It certainly raised some eyebrows, but for most it raised the game. For me, a teenager wondering what to do next, it was a real game changer. My parents were invited to the opening night and when someone dropped out at the last minute, I got lucky and got the spare ticket.

Back then, there were plenty of Sondheim sceptics (there probably still are today), who declared that his musicals had no tunes you could hum – and indeed in a later show, Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim sends himself up in a typically witty number ‘It’s Not a Tune You Can Hum’. I left the theatre entranced and humming a head full of ear worms, to which I’ve added so many more as each eagerly awaited musical opened.

Eventually I managed to enrol on the Performance Arts BA at Middlesex University, where devising and directing shows, and writing lyrics, got me my degree and MA. That led to a whole lot of comedy cabaret shows and community plays, in collaboration with student composers and some big names, including Grieg and Dvorak, Weill, and even the songwriters of the Shangri-Las 1965 hit ‘Leader of the Pack’.

Although writing the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story brought the young Sondheim to prominence, even a casual canter through his career reveals first and foremost that he was a composer/lyricist par excellence. He usually worked with such long-time collaborators as George Furth, who wrote the book for Company; and the ideas for musicals had eclectic sources, from Grimms' Fairy Tales (Into the Woods, 1986) to 19th-century Japanese-American trade wars (Pacific Overtures, 1976) to Georges Seurat’s glorious pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Sunday in the Park with George, 1984).

This imagining of how the painting came into being (with book by James Lapine) features a fictional account of Seurat with his model and lover Dot (named for the small, distinct marks of pointillism) on the island in the Seine where he observes and captures in sketches (cleverly translated into musical sketches) the various Parisians featured in the painting. It also includes the song that reveals the internal workings and struggles of the artist’s mind as he works on the painting, 'Finishing the Hat', which gave Sondheim the title for his autobiography.

The original Broadway cast of West Side Story, 1957, singing ‘I Feel Pretty’ (L-R Elizabeth Taylor, Carmen Gutierrez, Marilyn Cooper, Carol Lawrence)

I will refer you to that beautifully written and revelatory work and to the many and detailed obituaries elsewhere for more on my hero and inspiration. For myself, Sunday in the Park was the show at the National Theatre, to which my husband Steve and I took our kids in 1991.Then aged seven and 10 and primed by listening to the music first, they sat through it, good as gold, absorbed as much by the onstage action as the promise of interval ice creams. It was the show to which I took a coachload of art students from Harrow College of Higher Education (where I taught Performing Arts in the 1980s), who'd also acquired ear worms from listening to the score as they created in studio themselves. Needless to say, they were entranced.

*A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, 1884 © Art Institute of Chicago*

The life-enhancing closing chorus of the first half, where the Sunday promenaders assume the poses in the painting and come together to sing 'Sunday', provides just one of my indelible, crystal-clear memories of Sondheim onstage. We are promised the much-anticipated and postponed London premiere of the recent acclaimed Broadway revival in 2022 – “Well, maybe next year…” as the line from Sondheim’s best known ear-worm ‘Send in the Clowns’ has it. Meanwhile, listen to his music, watch films of his shows and read his autobiography. Sondheim truly deserves the overused accolade of ‘legend’.

By Judi Herman