In the following essay, Block assesses Sondheim's dramatic output and investigates his place within the American musical theater tradition.

In the following essay, Lovensheimer argues that Sondheim dramatizes the figure of the outsider or outlaw in American musicals using “popular song styles in ways that subvert the connotations they have carried for a century or more, he is taking a drastic stylistic step, one that cannot but disturb and unsettle American audiences.”

In the following essay, McLaughlin examines the theme of love in contemporary society in West Side Story, Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods.

In the following essay, Adler utilizes a number of critical approaches, including generic, formalist, and thematic, to assess Sondheim's dramatic philosophy as well as his contribution to American musical theater.

In the following essay, Van Leer elucidates the reasons for the mixed critical and popular reaction to Sondheim's musicals.

In the following essay, Lewis traces Sondheim's development as a writer and composer.

In the following essay, Leithauser examines Sondheim's strong professional recognition despite the lack of finality in his productions, his dark motifs, his use of rhyme, and his complex characterizations.

In the following essay, Lahr views Sondheim's musicals as emblematic of American disenchantment, inertia, and spiritual emptiness in the late twentieth century, deeming him “an entrepreneur of modern anxieties.”

In the following essay, Martin discusses the similarities and differences between Sondheim's work and opera, focusing on character, musical structure, orchestration, amplification, and musical style.

In the following essay, Fraser discusses the re-evaluation of American ideals in the seventies—specifically marriage, the women's movement, injustice of American society, and Western imperialism—and how those ideals are expressed throughout Sondheim's works.

It's hard to talk about lyrics independently of music, but I will try. Obviously, all the principles of writing apply to lyrics: grace, affinity for words, a feeling for the weight of words, resonances, tone, all of that. But there are two basic differences between lyric writing and all other forms, and they dictate what you have to do as a lyric writer. They are not even rules, they are just principles. First, lyrics exist in time—as opposed to poetry, for example. You can read a poem at your...

Sondheim's lyric ancestors are Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Noël Coward, and W. S. Gilbert. He may lack Porter's and Coward's nonchalant gaiety, irreverent fun, and rueful melancholy, and Hammerstein's compassion and rugged simplicity, but he is more than their equal (and Gilbert's) in verbal felicity. Sondheim's wit is mordant, intellectual, edgy rather than funny, the hard-hitting repartee of contemporary New York. (p. 309) Sondheim incorporates disparat...

Mr. Sondheim has always functioned as a theater man first, a songwriter second. Unlike all but a few of his theatrical contemporaries, he has never aspired to write songs that have a pop life of their own; all of his songs reflect the dramatic situations and characters of the musicals they were written to serve. What is more remarkable is how well Mr. Sondheim fulfills this mission. Yank one of his songs out of its original context, and you're often left with a self-contained play. One example on the...

In his 13 shows—he wrote only lyrics for three, music and lyrics for the rest—Sondheim has staked out a turf as big as the emotional landscape of post-World War II America. Even when the shows have been set abroad or in the past, their themes have addressed contemporary topics—or universal ones, Sondheim might aver—by way of metaphor. This is particularly true of the Sondheim shows since 1970. He has treated the travails of modern marriage in "Company," the corrosio...

Authentic genius is never recognized until the genius is dead, so the saying goes, but Stephen Sondheim is proving it a lie. At forty-three he has composed the music and/or lyrics for only (!) eight Broadway shows and one television special, yet practically everybody who knows or cares anything about the subject regards him as already the most important force in American theater music since Cole Porter. His songs are witty, sardonic, intelligent, brilliantly structured, and, above all, courageous. If there&...

Although Sondheim's dazzling accomplishments as a rhymester appear to be uncontested, it is sometimes said that his composing doesn't measure up to his lyric writing…. For my part, I find Sondheim as resourceful a composer as he is a lyricist. As a writer of sophisticated show tunes, he was schooled in a theatrical tradition that reached a peak with [Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein], and he has sought to advance that tradition in the face of its seeming decline. In "Company...

[The album] "Side by Side by Sondheim" is a tribute, bouquet, what-have-you to the work of Stephen Sondheim, probably the most gifted and productive creative force now at work in the American lyric theater. It is a collection of songs from an astonishing career that began—at the top—with West Side Story (he was then only twenty-five years old) and has continued on to the recent Pacific Overtures. The release ["Side by Side"] is a recorded version of the "musi...

It's difficult to see the sense in an all-Stephen Sondheim revue being done in a Broadway theater by an all-British cast, and it was even more difficult after seeing "Side by Side by Sondheim."… Sondheim is, of course, the most important composer and lyricist working in the American musical theater today. By "important" I mean that his contributions have gone beyond the creation of fine songs. He has added to the very structure of our musical theater, developing app...

Sondheim based his musical version [of Sweeney Todd] on a recent London stage play, and it is a positive feast (!) for English majors. There are traces of Jonathan Swift (his icily ironic Modest Proposal), of the Beggar's Opera (the Brecht version, not the life-celebrating John Gay original), of Charles Dickens' pestilential nineteenth-century London, of [William] Hogarth's prints, France's Grand Guignol theater of horror, and even I Remember Mama (the culinary secret of her meat...

["A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"] has a book that is not only marvelous but without period in respect to its style. The Burt Shevelove-Larry Gelbart script is tremendously funny—it is literary, consistent and impeccably structured. It may well be the best book in all our musical theatre…. The final contribution that makes for [its successful revival] … is Stephen Sondheim's score, which went unappreciated even when the show was winning its various p...

[In "Marry Me a Little"], a single young woman and a single young man, each living alone in an apartment in New York …, sing seventeen songs by Stephen Sondheim that were pulled from his shows during rehearsal…. [Their] unawareness of each other as they move about the apartment, even when they share the same bed at the end, is the running joke of this mini-musical. None of the songs struck me as exactly vintage Sondheim, although "Saturday Night," "The Girls ...