Author Description

Sondheim is an artist of contradictions: he is an avant-garde composer and lyricist working in the populist art form, an acerbic critic who captures the ambivalent pain of passion, and an intellectual who pens some of the funniest bawdy lines on the Broadway stage. He confronts an audience that is looking for escapism with the very issues it has fled to the theatre to avoid. This collection of original essays takes particular pains to present Sondheim's diversity in a chronological plan that illustrates how each new work grew out of the previous one.