Conversations with Sondheim

On his 70th birthday, the Broadway musical's last great artist takes measure of the theater and of himself. By FRANK RICH

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Photograph by Katy Grannan. SONGS I WISH I'D WRITTEN (AT LEAST IN PART) By Stephen Sondheim Sondheim compiled this list, organized by composer, of art songs, Hollywood standards and show tunes for a Library of Congress concert in his honor on May 22. Among the particularly Sondheimesque choices are those from Kelly, We Take the Town and The Yearling, all big-time theatrical fiascoes. Ager, Milton Hard Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah (1924), lyrics by Jack Yellen, Bob Bigelow, Charles Bates. Arlen, Harold Blues in the Night, from Blues in the Night (film, 1941), lyrics by Johnny Mercer; Buds Won't Bud, from Hooray for What! (1937), lyrics by E.Y. Harburg; The Eagle and Me, from Bloomer Girl (1944), lyrics by E.Y. Harburg; I Had Myself a True Love, from St. Louis Woman (1946), lyrics by Johnny Mercer; I Wonder What Became of Me, from St. Louis Woman (1946), lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Berlin, Irving Let's Face the Music and Dance, from Follow the Fleet (film, 1936); I Got Lost in His Arms, from Annie Get Your Gun (1946); You Can't Get a Man With a Gun, from Annie Get Your Gun (1946). Bernstein, Leonard Glitter and Be Gay, from Candide (1956), lyrics by Richard Wilbur. Bock, Jerry Ice Cream, from She Loves Me (1963), lyrics by Sheldon Harnick; Tell Me I Look Nice, cut from She Loves Me (1963), lyrics by Sheldon Harnick; When Did I Fall in Love, from Fiorello! (1959), lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. Burke, Johnny Sad Was the Day, from Donnybrook! (1961). Charlap, Moose I'll Never Go There Anymore, from Kelly (1965), lyrics by Eddie Lawrence. Coleman, Cy The Best Is Yet to Come (1959), lyrics by Carolyn Leigh; The Other Side of the Tracks, from Little Me (1962) lyrics by Carolyn Leigh; Real Live Girl, from Little Me (1962), lyrics by Carolyn Leigh; The Rules of the Road (1961), lyrics by Carolyn Leigh; When in Rome (I Do as the Romans Do) (1964), lyrics by Carolyn Leigh. Copland, Aaron (adapted by) Golden Willow Tree, from Old American Songs, Second Set (1954). Gallet, Luciano (arranged by) Bambalal (Song of the Northern Interior) (Pernambuco). Gershwin, George My Man's Gone Now, from Porgy and Bess (1935), lyrics by DuBose Heyward. Guettel, Adam The Riddle Song, from Floyd Collins (1994). Henderson, Ray Birth of the Blues, from George White's Scandals 1926, lyrics by B.G. DeSylva and Lew Brown. Jones, Peter Bluellow, from Peyton Place (1994). Jurmann, Walter and Kaper, Bronislau San Francisco, from San Francisco (film, 1936), lyrics by Gus Kahn. Kander, John Home, from 70, Girls, 70 (1971), lyrics by Fred Ebb. Karr, Harold Silverware, from We Take the Town (1962), lyrics by Matt Dubey. Kern, Jerome I Am So Eager, from Music in the Air (1932), lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; The Song Is You, from Music in the Air (1932), lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Kleban, Edward Better (1973). Leonard, Michael I'm All Smiles, from The Yearling (1965), lyrics by Herbert Martin. Loesser, Frank Make a Miracle, from Where's Charley? (1948). Martin, Hugh Ev'ry Time, from Best Foot Forward (1941), with Ralph Blane; Gotta Dance, from Look, Ma, I'm Dancin'! (1948); I Wanna Be Good 'n' Bad, from Make a Wish! (1951); The Trolley Song, from Meet Me in St. Louis (film, 1944), with Ralph Blane. Merrill, Bob On the Farm, from New Girl in Town (1957). Montsalvatge, Xavier Cancion de Cuna Para Dormir a un Negrito (Cradle Song for a Little Black Boy), from Cinco Canciones Negras (1958), lyrics by Ildefonso Pereda Valdes. Muir, Lewis F. Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (1912), lyrics by L. Wolfe Gilbert. Porter, Cole Every Time We Say Goodbye, from Seven Lively Arts (1944); Let's Be Buddies, from Panama Hattie (1940); Let's Not Talk About Love, from Let's Face It (1941). Rodgers, Richard What's the Use of Wond'rin', from Carousel (1945), lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; Why Can't I, from Spring Is Here (1929), lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Roy, William Charm, from Maggie (1953); What Every Woman Knows, from Maggie (1953). Schwartz, Arthur By Myself, from Between the Devil (1937), lyrics by Howard Dietz; He Had Refinement, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1951), lyrics by Dorothy Fields; There's No Holding Me, from Park Avenue (1946), lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Shire, David Travel, originally written for Cyrano, known from Starting Here, Starting Now (1977), lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. Strouse, Charles You've Got Possibilities, from It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman (1966), lyrics by Lee Adams. Styne, Jule When the Weather's Better, from Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Yeston, Maury New Words, from History Loves Company (1989).

n the old rehearsal snapshots from 1957, three of the four men who created "West Side Story" look as cool as the Jets and Sharks. The choreographer Jerome Robbins, the playwright Arthur Laurents and the composer Leonard Bernstein are all dressed in 50's hip. Only the true kid of the group, the 27-year-old lyricist making his Broadway debut, seems out of place. Stephen Sondheim is in a tie and a loud, boxy sports jacket, his hair slicked back, his grin forced -- a geek trying to cut it with the popular crowd.

Yet the appearance is deceiving. Perhaps even more than his collaborators, he was a rebel advancing a cause: a new, jarring, adult kind of Broadway musical. Like most Sondheim efforts to come -- among them the landmark shows "Company," "Follies," "Sweeney Todd" and "Sunday in the Park With George" -- West Side Story" wasn't the smash commercial hit of its season. It lost the Tony Award to "The Music Man." But it also upended the genteel conventions of an American art form then exemplified by "My Fair Lady." The future's possibilities seemed boundless, for both the musical theater and the four young artists retooling it.

Now that future has come -- and gone. Bernstein and Robbins are dead, having deserted Broadway long before their passing. Laurents is still a busy playwright at 82, but musicals aren't high on his agenda. That leaves Sondheim, who turns 70 on March 22. So obscure in 1957 that he wasn't even mentioned in The Times review of "West Side Story," he is now the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the American musical theater. But that is a somewhat empty distinction. Sondheim may be the last major creator of Broadway musicals, period, still actively devoted to the trade. He may have even outlived the genre itself, which was long ago exiled by rock music from center stage to niche status in American culture and is now barely a going concern.

Sondheim doesn't dispute that he is a dinosaur. "It's discouraging," he says, as he lists his vanished contemporaries and concludes that "only John and Freddie" -- Kander and Ebb, the songwriters of "Cabaret" and "Chicago" -- remain as active in musical theater as he is. Nor is the Broadway of 2000 the one of his youthful dreams. For nearly two decades, the Winter Garden, where "West Side Story" jump-started his career, has been monopolized by "Cats."

"You have two kinds of shows on Broadway -- revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles," says Sondheim. "You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is -- a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture."

Using his imminent birthday as an excuse, Sondheim and I are meeting for a series of conversations to take stock of his life, his career, the theater. He suggests we convene in the Turtle Bay town house he has lived in since 1960 but which he spent two years rebuilding after a devastating 1995 fire. Sondheim's arm was in a sling after a fall in London, and as he puts it: "I'm not particularly upbeat these days. The last year has not been good." A revue of his songs, "Putting It Together," was closing after only three months on Broadway. The recent Off Broadway workshop of his new musical, "Wise Guys," a project that he feels has consumed too much of the past decade, went awry and was, he says, "a waste of time."

I first met Sondheim just as his reputation was starting to skyrocket -- when he was 41 and I was 21 -- after he wrote me a letter about my college newspaper review of the Boston tryout of "Follies." He was the first professional writer to give me the courage to believe I might be one too. Long before that, he played a role in shaping my lifelong passion for theater, for "Gypsy" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" were formative events in my theatergoing childhood. "If Mama Was Married," a song from "Gypsy," was the first song I'd ever heard about being a child of divorce, which I had recently become, and it pointed me toward Sondheim before I knew his name.

Our initial real-life encounter led to a spotty acquaintanceship that was over well before my 14 seasons of reviewing theater for The Times, during which I had no contact with him at all. In those years, ending in 1993, my adoration of "Sunday in the Park" was offset by my unenthusiastic reviews of Sondheim's saddest Broadway failure, "Merrily We Roll Along," and one of his rare crowd-pleasers, "Into the Woods." When a book of my criticism was published after we had re-established contact, he told me, "I'd forgotten how rough you'd been about my shows." But he didn't seem cross about it; by this point, we shared too much else, including our alarm that Broadway was turning into a theme park. Sondheim thinks I was right to end my full-time engagement with the theater just before the Disney deluge, yet he hasn't moved on and never would. The man who wrote "I'm Still Here" may despair over Broadway, but it would never occur to him to leave it.

These days, the expansive, very "done" downstairs of Sondheim's house glitters more opulently than it did when I first saw it in the 70's, though the principal decoration is still antique games, now displayed in glass cases. The place feels so hermetically sealed that you would never know you were in midtown Manhattan. In another New York, the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins lived here. Until infirmity sent her to Connecticut, Katharine Hepburn was the next-door neighbor.

A cook bustles in the kitchen, popping in frequently to refill our glasses. Sondheim says he has always had "a large capacity for alcohol," and I don't dispute it. Our two major conversations run some five unflagging hours each, one over dinner, another sprawling through a lazy late-winter Saturday afternoon. Through it all, he seems as robust as ever, as boyish as when I first met him and not nearly as testy. But that could be a trick of time. I'm now almost a decade older than Sondheim was when we first met.

Now, as then, he is always careful to cloak emotions, as opposed to strong opinions, in the unsparing intelligence that might have led him to his second choice of career, research mathematics. ("I would have loved to work on Fermat's theorem.") He tries to be clinically objective about every subject. Sometimes he even seems to be standing outside looking at himself as an equation to be cracked.

His merciless powers of dissection extend to his own work. Quoting a lyric from "Tonight" -- The world was just an address" -- he cheerfully adds, "That's fine, if you like purple writing." He still cherishes the memory of a man walking out of "West Side Story" on its second night. "He wanted a musical -- meaning a place to relax before he has to go home and face his terrible dysfunctional family. Instead of which he got a lot of ballet dancers in color-coordinated sneakers snapping their fingers and pretending to be tough." Sondheim sympathizes with the guy rejecting his work: "His expectations had been defeated!"

Though he has outlived not only the traditional Broadway of his childhood but also the new, more urbane Broadway he ushered in for my generation, his tone is more regretful than angry. Even when at his most down or acerbic, his voice can abruptly jump a decibel level to express childlike enthusiasm for a movie ("Henry Fool") or a fellow composer ("Steve Reich is a personal hero to me") or a play (Charles Busch's "Tale of the Allergist's Wife" may be "the funniest evening I've ever had in the theater").

The only time he cut me off was when I began a question with the phrase, "When you grew up. . . ."

"I never grew up," he interjected, with a finality that foreclosed any follow-up.

This may explain how Sondheim has remained an artist and why, for all his sophistication, he can seem guileless, even nave. Over tea, dinner, nightcaps, he answered any question, whether speaking unsentimentally of the "very unpleasant, paranoid, suspicious" Robbins ("I can't even say that I miss Jerry -- I miss Jerry's impact on shows") or of other Broadway songwriters or his often-solitary personal life. He rarely went off the record.

At the time of our meetings, he was also, despite his recent setbacks, surprisingly sunny (for him) about the future. He was eager to revamp "Wise Guys" promptly for Broadway (its title, too, will change) with his collaborator, the playwright John Weidman. Hal Prince, Sondheim's key creative partner until they split after the 1981 debacle of "Merrily," is taking over the show's direction from the departed Sam Mendes. And though Sondheim doesn't think 70 is a big deal -- I don't want to spend the next six months being iconized" -- some special events this spring tickle him. In May, the New York Philharmonic will stage a three-nights-only concert performance of "Sweeney Todd" starring Bryn Terfel and Patti LuPone; he is pleased that Terfel is a "Sweeney" acolyte, though with typical sorry-grateful ambivalence he is also relieved that LuPone will stand up for its Broadway pedigree. The Museum of Television and Radio is saluting Sondheim for three months on both coasts, even unearthing kinescopes of TV scripts he wrote in the 50's. In Washington, a Library of Congress concert will include his 1974 adaptation of Aristophanes' "Frogs" as well as non-Sondheim material -- songs culled from a cheeky, revelatory list Sondheim drew up with the title "Songs I Wish I'd Written (At Least in Part)." (See above.)

Frank Rich was the chief drama critic of The Times from 1980 to 1993. He is now an Op-Ed columnist and senior writer for the magazine.

Sondheim has also taken heart from the New York premiere, at Off Broadway's Second Stage, of his novice professional effort, "Saturday Night," written before "West Side Story" and abandoned when its producer died. The show had been consigned to a trunk for nearly half a century, though the experience of writing it, and of its young author's first efforts to break into the theater, were at the core of "Merrily."

"I don't have any emotional reaction to 'Saturday Night' at all -- except fondness," Sondheim says. "It's not bad stuff for a 23-year-old. There are some things that embarrass me so much in the lyrics -- the missed accents, the obvious jokes. But I decided, Leave it. It's my baby pictures. You don't touch up a baby picture -- you're a baby!"

he first glimpse of Sondheim as a Broadway baby predates even "Saturday Night." It's the famous photo of him as a teenager folded uneasily into the Oscar Hammerstein II family. Hammerstein was an acquaintance of Sondheim's divorced fashion-industry parents, and he treated their stage-struck boy as a surrogate son, becoming his mentor. Though Sondheim famously despised his mother, Janet Fox (Foxy) Sondheim, whose funeral in 1992 he didn't bother to attend, his affection and reverence for Hammerstein, who died in 1960, are never far from the surface. The man who wrote "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin"' and "My Favorite Things" bequeathed a lifelong calling and ethos to the protege who would seem to affront Hammerstein's cockeyed optimism with the gimlet-eyed pessimism of songs like "The Ladies Who Lunch" and "Losing My Mind."

The kid and the "West Side Story" gang in 1957: Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Hal Prince, Robert Griffith (a co-producer, seated), Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. (The Billy Rose Theater Collection, The New York Public Library For The Performing Arts)

Sondheim lights up when I ask him if he remembers the first opening night he ever attended, because it is a show Hammerstein wrote with Richard Rodgers: "New Haven! 'Carousel'! It was a seminal experience of my life. I was completely overwhelmed." Sondheim and Hammerstein's son Jamie, both turning 15, were taken as a double-birthday treat to the pre-Broadway premiere. The first song from the show that Sondheim mentions is not "If I Loved You" or "June Is Bustin' Out All Over," but the sorrowful "What's the Use of Wond'rin'," in which the heroine rendingly predicts that the ending of her love affair "will be sad." And the first character he recalls is not among its leads, but the hoodlum villain, a misfit and outcast named Jigger. "I remember how everyone goes off to the clambake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing." The teenage Steve hugged Hammerstein's wife, Dorothy. "She had a specific fur stole that she wore to every opening of Oscar's for good luck, and I cried so heavily I stained it."

But when I try to coax Sondheim into parsing his strong reaction to "Carousel," he gives a characteristic hide-and-seek answer in which any emotional bloodletting is instantly stanched by an intellectual rationale. "Musically, it's my favorite score second to 'Porgy and Bess.' Maybe it's because it's about a loner who's misunderstood -- that's psychobabble. I don't know. Also it's about the restlessness of the father and what we inherit from our parents -- but again, that's psychobabble. What is that quality? It's yearning. Its music is so rich. Those songs are so full of feeling. It's Rodgers absolutely at his flowering best."

And Hammerstein? Though Sondheim has only praise for "Carousel," his overall appraisal of his father figure is more nuanced: "Oscar's lyrics are often flat-out sentimental, lacking in irony, which is the favorite mode of expression of the latter part of the 20th century. And I happen to love irony. He had a limited range of imagery -- too many birds in his lyrics -- stuff that is metaphorically what we all feel, but because they've been overused so much, and often by him, they lack force.

"What few people understand is that Oscar's big contribution to the theater was as a theoretician, as a Peter Brook, as an innovator. People don't understand how experimental 'Show Boat' and 'Oklahoma!' felt at the time they were done. Oscar is not about the 'lark that is learning to pray' -- that's easy to make fun of. He's about 'Allegro."'

When Sondheim was 17, he was hired as a gofer on "Allegro," the R&H musical between "Carousel" and "South Pacific." It was an experimental show, now rarely remembered or revived, about an idealistic doctor who gets distracted by success. "It's really about Oscar," Sondheim says, "who as a result of 'Oklahoma!' and 'Carousel' became very much in demand as a flag bearer for good causes." But what Sondheim most cherishes are the show's "Our Town"-style theatrical innovations, its Greek chorus and cinematic scene transitions.

Though the devices of "Allegro" were novel for big Broadway musicals then, they are puny next to Sondheim's subsequent breakthroughs. His own shows have told stories in reverse chronology, with flash-forwards and flashbacks, through dreams and nightmares, even in the stylized ritual (and drag) of classic Japanese theater. While Hammerstein introduced issues like miscegenation to the musical theater, Sondheim has annexed more complex subjects and dramatized them less preachily: political assassination, cultural imperialism, mass murder, the creation of art, the fear of intimacy and the terror of death. Along the way he has produced an incomparably diverse song catalog that embraces uncomplicated show-biz pizzazz ("Comedy Tonight"), the quintessential nocturnal cabaret turn ("Send In the Clowns") and a poetic meditation on history ("Someone in a Tree") -- songs that have attracted interpreters from Sinatra to Madonna.

Hammerstein 'had a limited range of imagery -- too many birds in his lyrics. . . . What few people understand is that Oscar's big contribution to the theater was as a theoretician, as a Peter Brook, as an innovator.'

For Sondheim, the daring of his career all goes back to that summer of '47. "Allegro' had a very, very big effect on me," he says. When the show was briefly unearthed in concert form by the City Center Encores series in 1994, he appeared on stage to introduce it. "And I thought, Oh, God, it's so navely written. What Hammerstein reveals in 'Allegro' is huge vision and a limited amount of technical ability to carry it out." His voice suddenly revs up: "Except that the total vision is huge and imaginative and exploratory and opens new paths for everybody!"

When Sondheim was working on "Allegro," he was mainly interested in "boasting to friends I was Oscar's gofer" and spreading backstage gossip. ("Hello, Mary, you can't believe what happened today: Agnes de Mille screamed at --") But he was struck as well by the disappointed reaction to the show on Broadway, where it lasted only a season. "It was baffling to most people and pretentious," Sondheim says. "These are all adjectives that came to haunt me in my own, as we say, career: pretentious and incoherent and unfeeling and whatever."

He adds: "Somebody said to me once, 'Your whole life has been fixing "Allegro."' That's what I've been doing. I've been trying to fix 'Allegro' all my life."

t was around the time of "South Pacific," two years later, that Sondheim met Hal Prince, who, in 1957, would be a producer of "West Side Story."

"Often I'd say with Hal, we got in just under the wire," Sondheim says. "We were able to enjoy the so-called fruits of our labors in a field that we genuinely loved. We'd go down the street and see somebody else's show and know that we were all talking the same language." Rock 'n' roll was exploding then, but Sondheim says: "Rock didn't affect me because the overlap was when shows were still popular so I could afford to ignore it. It was not part of my generation; it was the generation 10 years under me. To be 24 in 1954 as opposed to being in your teens is all the difference. I knew where I was and what I wanted to do. And through the 50's and 60's, the kind of shows I liked were still viable: those that developed stories through song in which the songs had individual voices. There was enough success going around, and so you were encouraged to do more."

It was in the 80's that Sondheim could no longer ignore the reality that rock, rising costs and what he sees as "dumbing down" were endangering his Broadway. "The source of what was popular in music had shifted from movies and shows to records," and even the number of musicians in Broadway pit bands had been downsized by half. "What's happened to the theater," he says, "is one thing that does depress me a lot because it is such a large part of my life. You'd go and see other shows that would stimulate you, that would make you want to write. Now it makes you not want to write because you think the audience isn't there anymore. The audience that is there is not an audience who would either like or respond to the kind of stuff I write except with, if anything, kind of detached bemusement instead of getting involved."

The Broadway community has fled, too. "There's none whatsoever. The writers write one show every two or three years. Who congregates at Sardi's? What is there to congregate about? Shows just sit in theaters and last."

We commiserated about the latest Broadway calamity -- the eviction of the nonmusical play. The theater district used to be ablaze with musicals, dramas, star vehicles and fluffy comedies all side by side. At one point this season, there wasn't a single recently written comedy or drama running on Broadway -- a grim historic first. "When was the last time you saw a straight play when you couldn't wait to get on the phone and tell your friends?" Sondheim asks rhetorically -- then gives an excited answer to his own question, sounding like a boy still infatuated with the theater after all: "How I Learned to Drive.' I saw it with Arthur Laurents. I loved it! We danced out of there. I got on the phone -- we couldn't wait to see something else on the stage -- anything!"

But "How I Learned to Drive" was produced off Broadway, not on, and three years ago.

ot that Sondheim is romantic about Broadway's past. He sees it too lucidly. I invite him to play critic and offer his candid views of a list of icons who came before him.

Jerome Kern: "It's been received wisdom for so many years that Kern is a songwriter's songwriter. But the Princess Theater musicals! Ninety percent of it is pitti, pitti, pitti -- vamps -- and those very wordy Wodehouse lyrics. A lot of that stuff is no good at all. On the other hand, you listen to 'They Didn't Believe Me' and you never want to write a song again."

Irving Berlin: "Berlin never got to me because he's like a very good character actor. He sinks into a style that's just kind of a general kind of American style. I wouldn't know an Irving Berlin song from other popular songs of the 20's and 30's written by Harry Warren. What distinguishes Berlin is the brilliance of his lyrics. 'You Can't Get a Man With a Gun' -- that's as good a comic song as has ever been written by anybody. You look at the jokes and how quickly they're told, and it still has a plot to it. It's sophisticated and very underrated. When Hammerstein slops over, as in that 'lark that is learning to pray,' you giggle. Berlin never goes that far. On the other hand, I don't think Berlin has ever touched me the way 'What's the Use of Wond'rin" has touched me. I will admire Berlin more than love him."

Richard Rodgers's pre-Hammerstein collaboration with Lorenz Hart: "I find that they write the same song over and over again in different categories. There's the ironic love song, and then there's -- the ironic love song. My objection to Hart is entirely on the matter of his technique, which is sloppy. The way the words are mis-accented: 'I know a movie executive who's twice as bright.' It was Oscar who used to defend Larry Hart. He'd say you don't understand what he did for lyric writers in America. He freed us up with his use of vernacular -- the way people converse in real life as opposed to Otto Harbach and the formalized lyric, the syntax that's reversed. What Oscar was telling me was, Don't just look at the details that can be faulted -- look at what he's saying rather than how he's saying it. I'm someone who's always been seduced by style over substance. That's a little unfair to myself; I'm also seduced by substance. But style is very important to me, and therefore technique is. So when I see a guy with lazy technique who is capable of better, I get angry. Because I see other people like Frank Loesser and Dorothy Fields who are dealing with the same vernacular and their technique is virtually perfect. They work harder."

Harold Arlen: "There are ineffable qualities like the kind of yearning, and sort of sadness, even in the joyful songs. I respond emotionally as well as intellectually. I knew him slightly. I was invited to a supper party in the days of 'Saturday Night.' I'd come prepared with three songs in case anybody asked me to sit down at the piano. And so finally somebody said that we have a promising young composer here, and I got up and blushed prettily and went over to the piano and sang the title number and then 'This Is Nice Isn't It?' and 'One Wonderful Day,' which is a 2-4 with a rousing climax. So I got terrific response, right? I sat down next to Harold Arlen, blushing with pride, and he turned to me and not in any way bitchily or meanly said, 'You mustn't be afraid not to write a blockbuster,' because what I had done was wham, wham, wham. And then you think of Arlen songs like 'Sleepin' Bee' that just are beautiful and charming and are not meant to bring the house down. Of course, when you're 24 years old you want to bring the house down. But it was a lesson I learned, not to always try to write a blockbuster. It's a story I told Michael Bennett when we were doing 'Follies,' because you know his tendency was to want every single number to stop the show. I said, Give them a break every now and then."

Ira Gershwin: "He is less lazy technically than Larry Hart but much more self-conscious. It's rare in an Ira Gershwin lyric where you don't feel the sweat because he's shoving so many rhymes in. The fact is that all the really great lyrics in 'Porgy and Bess' are written by DuBose Heyward."

Would Sondheim critique Sondheim? "Verbosity is the thing I have to fight most in the lyric department. One reason I admire Oscar is that he's the least verbose, if sometimes plain to the point of being uninteresting. 'Less is more' is a lesson learned with difficulty. As you get older, you pay more attention to it -- that's why composers end up writing string quartets. Once a line becomes poetry, it's not a lyric. Reduction releases power. E.B. White may be my favorite American writer because of that." As for his own music, Sondheim says: "I'm accused so often of not having melodic gifts, but I like the music I write. Harmony gives music its life, its emotional color, more than rhythm."

mong the composers Sondheim most admires is, fittingly, George Gershwin, who also spanned the gamut from Tin Pan Alley to "serious" musical theater. Sondheim describes a pilgrimage to look at the original manuscript of "Porgy and Bess" at the Library of Congress, his voice rising as he speaks. "I was trembling. You can see how Gershwin wrote the trio by looking at the music paper. He starts off, and it's fully harmonized and he's got the melody -- Bess, where's my Bess?' Then an idea takes control of him, and he can't prevent himself from going ahead with the melody and he leaves the harmony blank, and every now and then he'll put in a chord just to remind himself that at this point I'll get to the C minor chord, and then he goes on and you see a song take him over. It's thrilling!"

'I'm nostalgic for the things that aren't there anymore,' Sondheim says. 'I feel threatened by change.'

Sondheim is too young to have met Gershwin, but vividly remembers meeting Cole Porter in the late 50's, near the bitter end for Porter, whose leg had recently been amputated. "Gypsy" was in preparation, and Ethel Merman corralled Sondheim and Jule Styne to pay a cheer-up visit to Porter's apartment at the Waldorf Towers and play some songs. "Cole was very depressed," Sondheim says. "He was carried in like a sack of potatoes by a burly manservant. But he couldn't have been more charming. On that line in 'Together' -- No fits, no fights, no feuds and no egos, amigos' -- he chortled, and I knew I got him. He didn't see the last rhyme coming. It was a real Cole Porter rhyme -- he inserts foreign words into lyrics -- an homage to Cole Porter without meaning to be. He got such a moan of pleasure, it was absolutely sexual. It was great! It was a great moment!"

I could listen to these stories all night, so I prod Sondheim to dish Merman, the star whose career was bookended by Porter's "Anything Goes" in the 30's and "Gypsy" a quarter-century later. He doesn't demur: "I've made a joke that is both glib and I suppose slightly tasteless about her being an illustration of the old anecdote that it isn't remarkable that the dog lost playing chess -- it's the fact that the dog plays chess. What was remarkable was watching a woman who everybody assumed couldn't act, act. Now, it's a limited kind of acting. She didn't quite understand what 'Rose's Turn' was about."

In a key moment in that legendary "Gypsy" finale, a musicalized nervous breakdown, Rose is supposed to stutter over the word "mama" to indicate "you were seeing a mind crack" -- a device Sondheim says he stole from Jessica Tandy's Blanche DuBois in the last scene of "A Streetcar Named Desire." But as he tells it, no matter how elaborately Merman was invited to ride the moment emotionally, she had only one question about the stutter: "Does it come in on the downbeat?" Speaking of the 1974 Broadway revival with Angela Lansbury, Sondheim says: "That's the kind of moment Angie understands exactly. Ethel never did."

We can't let Merman go: "She performed the hell out of the show when the critics were there. Or if she thought there was a celebrity in the audience. So we used to spread a rumor that Frank Sinatra was out front. That whoever, Judy Garland was out front." Josh Logan, who had directed Merman in "Annie Get Your Gun," warned Sondheim that Merman could become mechanical, but "I was smug enough to think, Well, 'Gypsy,' compared to 'Annie,' is one of the great roles, it's great literature, blah blah blah blah. And of course she did exactly to us what she'd done to 'Annie.'

"I'll tell you one thing she did do, she steadily upstaged everybody. Every night, she would be about one more foot upstage, so finally they were all playing with their backs to the audience. I don't think it was conscious. Ethel was not big on brains. But she sure knew her way around a stage, and it was all instinctive."

Sondheim thinks "stars are great" for the theater, but doesn't believe the theater has any stars now except itinerant visitors from movies and TV. Bernadette Peters comes closest, he says, but when "she does a show that's a hit like 'Annie Get Your Gun,' she has to stay with it for two years. In the old days, Bernadette would have done at least as many shows as Merman, a couple of dozen. She's done maybe 10 shows."

Sondheim's own favorite star performances in musicals, his or others? Among male performances, he unequivocally cites two: Alfred Drake in "Kismet" and John McMartin in "Follies." The list of women is longer, including Peters in "Sunday in the Park," Lansbury in "Sweeney Todd" and "obviously, Ethel was thrilling in 'Gypsy."'

So what can you do on a Saturday night -- alone?"

That lyric, sung by lonely young men in Brooklyn desperate for romance, is at the top of "Saturday Night." For those of us who don't find Sondheim's songs pretentious and unfeeling, it encapsulates the deeply felt Sondheim signature emotion in its fetal form: the aching, ambivalent and often thwarted desire to connect with someone. It's the naked yearning that runs through "With So Little to Be Sure Of," "Too Many Mornings," "Being Alive," "Pretty Women," "Not a Day Goes By," "Finishing the Hat."

Stephen Sondheim Web Sites

•Stephen Sondheim Stage •The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide •The Stephen Sondheim Society

Like everyone else, I want to know what of the offstage Sondheim is in these songs. Is there some of him in Bobby, the perennial bachelor in "Company"? Or in Georges Seurat of "Sunday in the Park," who would rather trance out and paint than be with his lover? Or even in the murderous Sweeney, whose yearning for lost love metastasizes into rage?

Sondheim balks, of course. With rapid-fire erudition, he soliloquizes on how "the outsider is basic to a lot of dramatic literature. This country's about conformity. And so nonconformity is a fairly common theme, and it's obviously something I feel, belonging to a number of minorities."

Well, in his case, does being gay play a part in it?

"Homosexuality, certainly it's a part of it. But the outsider feeling -- somebody who people want to both kiss and kill -- occurred quite early in my life. I was an only child. I was the youngest and got the best marks in the class -- I won't say the smartest. Right away that means some people love you and some people hate you.

"But my memory of my childhood is very happy, and I spent most of my life in school anyway, because my parents were both working parents. And so I had a very good time. And for the most part, teachers liked me a lot. And older students liked me a lot. But I was aware that I was different.

"The kind of writing that I do in the musical theater, for which I'm both praised and condemned, has to do with its individuality, I think. It has to do with the fact that it's not like others. I started to become aware of it with 'Company,' which is where I first got to start my own voice loud and clear. And the anger and condemnation and snottiness and sneering that I got with 'Company' quite startled me. Because I'd been dismissed before, which is not the same thing.

"When you make somebody hate you without intending to make them hate you, it's a different feeling."

But Sondheim instantly adds that he doesn't mind "because it's so much better to be disliked than ignored." I have no doubt he means it. Perhaps the show of his that aroused the fiercest hostility, "Anyone Can Whistle," which folded in a week in 1964, introduces an evil Mayoress played by Lansbury with the lyric "Everybody hates me, yes, yes" -- and it's a jazzy, finger-snapping, Kay Thompson kind of number.

Was the rap on "Company" in 1970 -- some found it "anti-marriage" -- in part a coded antagonism to the possibility that the show's creators covertly intended Bobby to be gay?

"That's not what we intended. And if that's what we unconsciously meant, then that's what we unconsciously meant. We were talking about somebody unable to make an emotional connection. Period. It's about how difficult it is to live with somebody. And there are millions of men around who are Bobbies, who just will not make an emotional commitment to a woman. What is all this that it's got to be gay? There's the myth that one of the problems of homosexuality is that people can't commit. There are plenty of homosexuals who are committed emotionally to others. And there are plenty who are not."

Sondheim lived alone until he was 61, when he met Peter Jones, a young songwriter. His long solitary spell, he says, didn't faze him. "God knows I spent enough hours on the psychiatrist's couch discussing it, but it's partly what you're used to as a kid. I grew up entirely, as one friend puts it, as an 'institutionalized child' in that I was brought up either by a cook, a nanny or a boarding school or camp." He thinks of himself as never having had parents, "so I never had any role models of what it was like to have a family feeling. I was not miserable; at least I didn't think I was, so I didn't miss it.

"I remember when I went to Williams I wanted very much to be in a fraternity" -- he joined Beta Theta Pi -- and so I guess there was a part of me that wanted to be 'accepted.' I was very lucky now that I look back on it, that the first theater experience I had was 'Allegro,' a completely maverick show. And the first show that I wrote that got produced was 'West Side Story,' a completely maverick show. I think that confirmed me in, O.K., you're going to be a maverick. So I was able to build on it instead of retrenching and going back to join another fraternity.

"Something I only realized in my adult life is that one of the reasons I love writing musicals is that musicals are collaborations. I love the family feeling. I don't think I could ever write a play, because I'd be too lonely." The two major nonmusical scripts he has written, a thriller for the movies ("The Last of Sheila") and another for the stage ("Getting Away With Murder"), were both done with writing partners.

"Because I had a lot of friends in my 20's and 30's," he continues, "I didn't feel alone. I liked working, which you do in a room by yourself. I wasn't missing anything. I really wasn't. I had so-called relationships, just not very intense or none that I wanted to make a sort of permanent daily relationship. Not unlike Bobby. I'm sure one of the reasons I had no trouble writing for him was I understood what that emotional, not so much disconnection or dysfunction, but aloofness, or reserve, was. Or perhaps fear. I don't know. At any rate, it actually never really occurred to me to live with anybody. It just didn't occur to me until it happened by accident, when I met Peter Jones and we got together."

Sondheim is now living alone again, though he and Jones are "still close and seeing each other." His daily routine is fairly regimented: work into the evening, exercise and a late dinner. He's not a habitue of the New York show-biz party-and-premiere circuit. "I like writing, and because I don't have a family, I don't have an awful lot else in my life."

Among the things not in his life -- eccentrically enough for one of the country's premier wordsmiths -- is books. He has rarely read any since college. "I didn't enjoy a lot of them. I get very upset by just tiny glitches in prose style, and I get impatient. I can't get into it easily. And then when I do, I'm a very slow reader." If he's hungry for aesthetic thrills, he seeks them at BAM and in London; he's been a devotee of experimental troupes like Theatre de Complicite and Cheek by Jowl. While Sondheim tries to keep up with contemporary opera and once flirted with a collaboration with Robert Wilson, he is no fan of ballet or operagoing. And though friends may call his attention to a hip-hop cut or two, he says: "I can never be as interested in pop music as pop music fans are, because to me music is about harmony, and in most pop music, the harmony is not interesting because that's not what it's about. It's about rhythm and performance and visceral reaction and participation and dancing." Sondheim is "behind" on the Internet. He watches little TV and doesn't do e-mail, activities he sees as drains on his work time. His famous fascination with games has waned; he'll look at cryptic crosswords "to figure out the gimmick" but not bother to execute the solution.

"Movies were, and still are, my basic language," he says. In the 50's, his film-buff expertise propelled him through the contestant tryouts for "The $64,000 Question." He admires independent filmmakers like Errol Morris, yet finds most current Hollywood films formulaic next to childhood favorites like "Citizen Kane," "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Stairway to Heaven." He usually watches them in video form and misses the movie palaces of his youth like the Roxy, whose demolition inspired the set of "Follies."

He misses much of old New York, including the local steak house, Christo's, where he wrote some of "A Little Night Music" in a booth. Nor is he enamored of the malled Times Square.

"I'm nostalgic for the things that aren't there anymore," he says. "I want things to be the way they were because that staves off mortality. So I feel threatened by change."

ondheim would welcome changes in the New York theater, but doesn't expect any, despite his long efforts to champion his own Hammerstein-like causes, like the Young Playwrights Festival and the Broadway Initiative, an attempt to lower producing costs. "The theater is an acquired taste," he says. "You don't go by yourself at 10 years old -- you're taken. Children don't acquire that taste anymore because it's too expensive, while movies and TV are shoved in their face from the beginning. I don't think the theater will die per se, but it's never going to be what it was. You can't bring it back. It's gone. It's a tourist attraction."

While Sondheim's affections obviously do not lie with writers who cater to those tourists, he won't badmouth Andrew Lloyd Webber, who turns 52 the day Sondheim turns 70. "I've never said anything rotten about Andrew in print, and he never said anything about me. That we're Aaron Burr and Hamilton -- that's everybody else's perception." Sondheim is somewhat more vocal, if understandably perplexed, about Frank Wildhorn's "aura of success" in the new Broadway: "If you add up the millions lost on 'Civil War' and 'The Scarlet Pimpernel,' he's probably the most unsuccessful composer in the history of Broadway in terms of the amount of money lost."

Sondheim has mentored many other young songwriters, including Adam Guettel, whom he finds "dazzling," and the late Jonathan Larson, of "Rent": "Jonathan was on the path of making that bridge between the bus-and-tunnel audience and the young audience. But nobody else does that because other writers into pop don't have Jonathan's interest in the tradition of musical theater." Sondheim is also discouraged that recent musicals confuse his and Hammerstein's idea of the "serious" musical with mere solemnity: "They're so eager to make what they write important that they start with themes instead of stories and characters." He's even more scathing about the British-spawned trend of pseudo-operatic "sung-through" musicals. "What is hard to write are 32-bar songs, particularly if you are telling a story. It's about economy. Recitative is chocolate sauce poured over everything. It impresses audiences because they think it's art and songs are songs. But songs are art."

Given the obstacles to writing musicals today, Sondheim is surprised by the steady contacts from young writers who want to emulate him. But he dispenses realistic advice. "I say write it and put it on any place you can. I warn them Broadway is no longer an outlet for new work. I'm lucky I get my shows on."

t's 1:30 in the morning. The cook has retired, and the house feels as big as it is. The night is old, and I remember when I was one of those young people eager for Sondheim's advice. Sondheim may have no children, but he does have that paternal Hammerstein gene. What he gave me when I was starting out was not just priceless encouragement but a role model for going my own way in my work, whatever the hostilities I aroused along the way. I've heard, and don't doubt, most of the stories from those who find Sondheim difficult, if not impossible, but I plead immunity to them. The vulnerable quality that makes his songs so haunting -- those aesthetic stutters that illuminate the cracks in people's lives -- is to me always visible in the man. Sondheim is well defended with intellectual armor, yet he is still the precocious, awkward kid in the rehearsal photos of "West Side Story," "the boy in the bubble," as he described himself to his biographer, Meryle Secrest. Out of his "difference" he has been making art for nearly 50 years, and for that he has willingly paid a certain price in life.

Of course he is older now, and he has won every establishment prize: Tony, Oscar, Grammy, National Medal of Arts, Olivier, Pulitzer, Kennedy Center Honors. "One of the problems is that I get more frightened each time I write because people are expecting so much. That slows me down. I say, Don't think about it. I never used to. I used to just write and hope that people would like it. Now I'm aware of people. It was very painful to do 'Wise Guys' partly because I thought everybody's going to forget this is a workshop. They're going to come down and expect to be blown away or to hate it if they hate my work.

"I have always conscientiously tried not to do the same thing twice. If you're broken-field running, they can't hit you with so many tomatoes. I certainly feel out of the mainstream because what's happened in musicals is corporate and cookie-cutter stuff. And if I'm out of fashion, I'm out of fashion. Being a maverick isn't just about being different. It's about having your vision of the way a show might be. I mean, doing 'Pacific Overtures' is not being in anybody's fashion. It's not being out of fashion, either. It's called 'Pacific Overtures.' Now, let's go on to something else."

Sondheim hopes two of his experiments, "Assassins" and the now-revised "Merrily," will get new full-dress New York airings in his lifetime. The only project he regrets was his collaboration with Richard Rodgers on "Do I Hear a Waltz?" after Hammerstein's death. Sondheim attributes that production's rancid atmosphere to his sense that "Dick was afraid that his well had run dry."

Does Sondheim have the same fear?

"I worry about it all the time in the last 8, 10 years. Because it's my observation that Broadway composers past the age of 50 never turned out anything good. Cole Porter, Dick Rodgers, you name them. There's a reason for it, which is that every 25 years, every generation, popular music goes through a change. Thus, when I was growing up, Romberg was on the way out, and Rodgers and Hammerstein were on their way in. Then Rodgers and Hammerstein in 25 years got old-fashioned, and in came the sort of new-style musical represented partly by me, by Kander and Ebb, by our generation. Then we passed by, and in comes Jonathan Larson and the Disney generation. And so the fact that I've lived past that age still writing stuff strikes me as surprising. Surprising because most of the time, that's what happens in popular art -- it gets superseded."

For a second, I think of the 15-year-old Sondheim sobbing while watching Jigger in "Carousel" -- the dark, wily misfit making his own solitary path across the stage while the crowd runs off laughing to the clambake. I'm eager to give Sondheim the reassurance he once gave me, and start to argue that since he has always defied the crowd, he might endure even if Broadway does not.

But Sondheim deflects this emotional plea on his behalf as soon as he detects it. "I've never been popular," he reiterates quickly, as if to say, What's the use of wondering if there's any other way his story could have turned out.

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March 12, 2000