For decades now, fans of American musical theater have been fretting about the death of the genre. As globo-spectacles like
Mamma Mia!
and
Beauty and the Beast
crowd out daring new artworks, "where," ask these anxious theatergoers, "are the young Sondheims?" There won't be any. Not because high-brow musical theater is dead, but because the old Sondheim keeps on being new. Composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, 79, continues to dominate the genre he has constantly reinvented, first with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome
Robbins on
West Side Story
in 1957,
Company
(1970),
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
(1979) and
Sunday...
