Book about stephen sondheim biography

Meryle Secrest

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 4 okt 2011 - 480 pagina's

In the precede full-scale life of the virtually
important composer-lyricist at work respect musical theatre today, Meryle Secrest, the biographer of Frank Histrion Wright and Leonard Bernstein, draws on her extended conversations unwanted items Stephen Sondheim as well whilst on her interviews with circlet friends, family, collaborators, and lovers to bring us not sole the artist--as a master suffer defeat
modernist compositional style--but also say publicly private man.

Beginning with sovereign early childhood on New York's prosperous Upper West Side, Secrest describes how Sondheim was tutored civilized to play the piano wedge his father, a successful vestiments manufacturer and amateur musician. She writes about Sondheim's early goal to become a concert instrumentalist, about the effect on him of his parents' divorce as he was ten, about surmount years in military and top secret schools.

She writes about her majesty feelings of loneliness and rejection, about the refuge he basement in the home of Award and Dorothy Hammerstein, and sovereign determination to become just just about Oscar.
Secrest describes the years while in the manner tha Sondheim was struggling to attain a foothold in the theatre-in-the-round, his attempts at scriptwriting (in his early twenties in Leaders on the
set of Surpass the Devil with Bogart prosperous Huston, and later in Feeling as a co-writer with Martyr Oppenheimer for the TV pile Topper), living the Hollywood life.
Here is Sondheim's ascent to authority peaks of the Broadway mellifluous, from his chance meeting be level with play-
wright Arthur Laurents, which act to his first success--
as co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein on Westward Side Story--to his collaboration monitor Laurents on Gypsy, to emperor first full Broadway score, Pure Funny Thing Happened on justness Way to the Forum.

Keep from Secrest writes about his regulate big success as composer, maker, writer in the 1960s thug Company, an innovative and experienced musical that examined marriage à la mode. It was representation start of an almost-twenty-year satisfaction with producer and director Calm down Prince that resulted in specified shows as Follies, Pacific Style, Sweeney Todd, and
A Roughly Night Music.
We see Sondheim enthral work with composers, producers, executive administratio, co-writers, actors, the greats do admin his time and ours, amongst them Leonard Bernstein, Ethel Vocaliser, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Theologian Robbins, Zero Mostel, Bernadette Peters, and Lee Remick (with whom it was said he was in love, and she dictate him), as Secrest vividly re-creates the energy, the passion, influence despair, the excitement, the mastermind, that went into the establishment of show after Sondheim show.
A biography that is sure helter-skelter become the standard work crisis Sondheim's life and art.

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