Shell sondheim biography

Summary: A biography with many good points per detail and a vast trove of anecdotes, plus many comments and recollections from Sondheim himself.
Excellent biography of the genius who is Stephen Sondheim.
Stephen Sondheim's musical theater scores frequently express amusing ambivalence, often move on to rueful regret and sometimes explode in caustic anger.

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. Today on FRESH AIR, one of our favorite interviews from our archive - Terry's conversation with comedian, actor and writer Steve Martin. He's also an accomplished bluegrass musician and has been posting occasional videos on social media playing banjo in the woods. Last month he visited CBS's "The Late Show" with Stephen Colbert in a special socially distanced comedy bit with Colbert sequestered inside his house and Martin with his guitar, strolling in a forest, determined to sing a song that Colbert is just as determined not to hear.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LATE SHOW")

STEPHEN COLBERT: So we go now live to Steve Martin

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Time and David Del Tredici (1937-2023)

It was always time with David. He bent it; he warped it; he turned it around back on itself; he lived outside of it; he could practically stop it with music; in life, he ran with it until he ran out of it.

The day in March 2019 that my memoir was published and offered up to the crickets I put all my handwritten diaries—over thirty years’ worth of scribbling—into banker’s boxes and sealed them up. I traded the false specificity of reportage for the even more subjective truth of memory. Now I must pour, as Ned Rorem and his teacher Virgil Thomson used to, through the index of my book to fix events in time. I recall reading the words that I wrote about David to him over the telephone and asking whether he thought they were okay before sending off the manuscript. (He did.)

So, on this March 2024 morning I tried to find my letters to David (and his to me) and discovered that I’d have to move two portable air conditioners, a box fan, and two suitcases to get to the file drawer in the storage closet in which letters from all the D’s in my l

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Backstory

Stephen Sondheim’s musical theater scores frequently express amusing ambivalence, often move on to rueful regret and sometimes explode in caustic anger. The listener is tempted to speculate about the personal sources of all that irony and melancholy.

Enter Meryle Secrest, probing gently but firmly into the artist’s personality as well as his work in her biography, “Stephen Sondheim: A Life.” She spent 50 hours interviewing Sondheim and communicated with a couple hundred of his friends and associates. Sondheim ventured out of his protective shell further than he has for any other interviewer.

Secrest offers a multitude of anecdotes about Sondheim’s shows--from his school efforts all the way through his recent nonmusical flop “Getting Away With Murder” (the premiere of which occurred at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, which Secrest places in La Jolla). Much of this material about his professional history, however, has been documented in other books and articles. An entire quarterly magazine, the Sondheim Review, is devoted to Sondheim’s oeuvre. There haven’t been nearly