RIP Stephen Sondheim


For the first fifty or so years of my life I somehow managed to avoid knowing anything about Stephen Sondheim. Probably because I have an almost pathological dislike of musicals -- so if I'd heard anything about him at all, I'm afraid to say he would just have got lumped into the waste-basket of slushy, mawkish and soppy-ending trash that, based first on painful childhood experience and then on adult preference, I generally associate with the genre. 

Things changed when I found myself making a travel documentary one day with Amon Miyamoto, Japan's premier musical director. "Found myself" because it wasn't planned -- I'd been asked to set up and coordinate a shoot in the UK without knowing until the last minute who the presenter was going to be. So it was quite a shock when I found out who he was and what he did. But despite my initial concern that we might not hit it off too well, we got on like a house on fire: I still remember that week as one of the highlights of my career in TV production. And it was he who persuaded me that Stephen Sondheim was not only worth my attention, but someone whose work I should actively seek out.

The first production I saw was Sunday In The Park With George, and I was blown away. I couldn't believe the extraordinary inventiveness and cool intelligence of the lyrics, the subtle, unexpected harmonies and rhythms that are such a signature of his work: you can't miss a Sondheim melody. So from that moment on I made it a mission to go to every production of a Sondheim musical that came up, and I've yet to be disappointed -- my estimation of him even survived a collision with Disney in the film of Into The Woods, a fabulously clever and dark intermingling of childhood stories, forever made distinctively his. So farewell, dear friend of those who seek more than mere sentiment. Your name lives on forever... 

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