At 80, Stephen Sondheim is more popular than ever. Why are we so passionate about the composer?

Published on Tuesday 27 July 2010 20:48

I WAS in my mid-twenties when I first saw a Stephen Sondheim show.

The Donmar's celebrated 1995 production of Company starred Adrian Lester as a relationship-phobic New York bachelor, Bobby, who enjoys brief encounters and fleeting relationships; he's lonely, living in fear of a life of monogamy.

At dinner with friends after the show, I was unusually quiet. They'd invited me out to a musical - surely the lightest, most transitory form of theatre. Yet I'd seen a deep, thoughtful masterwork that accurately encompassed all my own fears and insecurities. There was Bobby, dismissing the idea of spending a life with one person, "someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep". To which his married friends tut-tutted, and extolled the virtues of coupledom. "Don't be afraid, it won't be perfect," sings one, "the only thing to be afraid of is that it won't be." "It's better living it than looking at it," suggests another.

It's the ability Sondheim has to turn the emotional crises of real life into compelling theatre that in part explains the passionate following he evokes. Seats for Saturday's 80th birthday Prom at the Royal Albert Hall have long since gone; when the Donmar announced this month that it would stage concert performances of Company, and Merrily We Roll Along, in the autumn, all 4,000 tickets sold out within 24 hours.

Yet Sondheim is still seen as an art-house composer, a writer whose work best suits the subsidised theatre rather than the commercial West End. His shows are complex; they are not painted in the rich, primary colours that make them immediately appealing to coach parties and overseas tourists.

The Welsh actor Daniel Evans, who has starred in Sondheim shows in London and New York, says it is his skill at "exposing darkness" that makes his output so great. "

All his work is about a kind of yearning for love and acceptance," Evans told. "Sondheim brings to the stage that deep human wish to be accepted for what one is. You get people warts and all."

Sondheim's characters always seem real. We can see aspects of ourselves in Bobby, in Sally and Phyllis, the long-retired vaudeville stars of Follies (1971), even in the demon barber Sweeney Todd (1979). They are fully developed, three-dimensional, human creations. They sing lyrics that are sometimes waspish, bitter, sometimes regretful, often comic, but completely convincing. And what makes Sondheim almost unique in the first division of music theatre creators is that he is both composer and lyricist.

His musical influences are catholic; Leonard Bernstein, with whom he collaborated on West Side Story; Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde New York composer who taught him; Maurice Ravel, the French composer whose music he adores. With his natural talent, if he had taken another direction he probably could have been one of the great modern American classical composers. Much of A Little Night Music (1973) is in waltz-time; Pacific Overtures (1976) utilises minor keys inspired by the Japanese pentatonic scale. When the rich, sinister score of Sweeney Todd was first heard, some said it was more suited to the Metropolitan Opera than Broadway. Classical influences pervade Sondheim's work but are often set alongside more conventional musical theatre fare - what Sondheim describes as "real 32-bar songs", and standards that have gone on to have independent lives: Send in the Clowns, Good Thing Going, Losing My Mind.

"I've never been popular," Sondheim has said. But maybe more popular acclaim is finally coming. The Donmar's Sondheim festival includes a new staging of his 1994 show, Passion, later this year and Into the Woods (1987) opens next month at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.

"The older Sondheim gets, the more his shows get done," says producer Cameron Mackintosh.

The original 1964 Broadway production of Anyone Can Whistle closed after just nine performances, yet a tight, clever staging of what is surely the first musical to explore the issues of mental health and local government corruption was the sell-out hit of the year at the Jermyn Street Theatre. And the Menier Chocolate Factory's intimate revival of Sunday in the Park with George in 2005, starring Daniel Evans in the title role, took both the West End and Broadway by storm.

As co-owner of Music Theatre International, which controls the rights of Sondheim's shows, Mackintosh adds: "I see the paperwork and it's a wonderful extending graph of the number of performances. I remember pointing this out to Sondheim. He came straight back: 'I see, so what that means is I get the cachet and you get the cash.' "

• Petroc Trelawny presents the live BBC Proms 2010, BBC Radio 3, 7:30pm. The concert can be seen on BBC2 at 9pm.