Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)

Perhaps the most important figure in musical theatre of the last fifty years, Stephen Sondheim was a composer and lyricist who wrote nineteen musicals in his lifetime. Working professionally for over four decades, Sondheim was responsible for hits such as West Side Story (1957), Company (1970), Sunday in the Park With George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), and Assassins (1990). Sondheim passed away November 26, 2021 at the age of 91, leaving behind an untouchable legacy.   

Sondheim was born in 1930 to Herbert Sondheim and Etta Janet (née Fox) in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His family was made up of Jewish immigrants, Sondheim’s grandparents were from both Germany and Lithuania. His maternal family belonged to the Hasidic sect of Judaism but Sondheim’s mother did not continue those traditions, especially while raising her son. Sondheim had little Jewish influence in his childhood, he had no bar mitzvah and didn’t step foot in a synagogue until he was nineteen years old. However, in theatre, Sondheim surrounded himself with Jewish musical collaborators such as Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, James Lapine, Harold Prince, and others.

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Sondheim kept his personal life very private and did not publicly come out until much later in life. Working in a time where homosexuality was still considered deviant and criminal, Sondheim said he “was never easy with being a homosexual.”   He only had one public relationship with a man before his marriage to Jeffrey Scott Romley in 2017.   

Though both gay and Jewish, those themes are almost never reflected in Sondheim’s corpus, at least not overtly. Unlike other Jewish gay composers working in the late second half of the 20th century like Harvey Fierstein or William Finn, Sondheim kept his identity separate from his work. The topics of Sondheim’s musicals range from the post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat to the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

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Sondheim is no better or worse than his contemporaries for eschewing his identity for his art. So much of his work is focused on the universality of the human experience, finding the heart in all of us. His musicals are full of emotional truths, stemming from a man full of introspective anxiety. Yet, "Sondheim’s work is elusive, ambivalent, internally conflicted, and deeply concerned with how stories are told. What could be more Jewish?"   Regardless of Sondheim's own feelings on his identity, he is undoubtedly a paragon of queer Jewish success on Broadway. ​