Awards

• Winner of Library Journal Best Reference Title 2021

Overview

The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia is the first reference volume devoted to the works of this prolific composer and lyricist. The encyclopedia’s entries provide readers with detailed information about Sondheim’s work and key figures in his career, including his apprenticeship with Oscar Hammerstein II, his early work with Leonard Bernstein, and his work on television. Entries include all of his major works and key songs from such musicals as Assassins, Company, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Gypsy, Into the Woods, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, and West Side Story. Additional entries focus on his key collaborators, from lyricists to directors.

Full Product Details

9781538115862

Table of Contents

Reviews

I'm having the best time leafing through Richard's thoughtfully and thoroughly collected volume, discovering a wealth of new facts and stories about our most treasured musical theater composer (and his shows) at every turn. It's an impressive text that's at the same time scholarly and great fun. Despite being exhaustively researched, it's almost less an encyclopedic and more a kaleidoscopic look at the entire world of Steve's work from a thousand different angles, one that reveals new connections and different perspectives with each turn. It might be the first encyclopedia I can imagine reading cover to cover. But you could just as easily turn to any random page and start reading-and find yourself hours later still thumbing through the wealth of details and stories behind not just the work, but the hundreds of collaborators and performers who have been the conveyors of Sondheim's gifts to the world. It's a gift to theater lovers on both sides of the footlights, likely to be on the desks of audiences and artists alike. And it's a gift to future generations someday, who won't have been as lucky as we have been to live and work in the days of Stephen Sondheim. -- Michael Cerveris, two-time Tony Award and Grammy winning actor and musician

I’m having the best time leafing through Richard’s thoughtfully and thoroughly collected volume, discovering a wealth of new facts and stories about our most treasured musical theater composer (and his shows) at every turn. It’s an impressive text that’s at the same time scholarly and great fun. Despite being exhaustively researched, it’s almost less an encyclopedic and more a kaleidoscopic look at the entire world of Steve’s work from a thousand different angles, one that reveals new connections and different perspectives with each turn. It might be the first encyclopedia I can imagine reading cover to cover. But you could just as easily turn to any random page and start reading—and find yourself hours later still thumbing through the wealth of details and stories behind not just the work, but the hundreds of collaborators and performers who have been the conveyors of Sondheim’s gifts to the world. It’s a gift to theater lovers on both sides of the footlights, likely to be on the desks of audiences and artists alike. And it’s a gift to future generations someday, who won’t have been as lucky as we have been to live and work in the days of Stephen Sondheim. -- Michael Cerveris, two-time Tony Award and Grammy winning actor and musician

Author Information

Rick Pender has been an award-winning theater critic since 1986. He has written for CityBeat, Cincinnati’s alternative newsweekly, since it was founded in 1994. From 1998 until 2006, he was the newspaper’s arts and entertainment editor and is currently a contributing editor, writing a theater column and reviewing local theater productions. In 2002, the Society of Professional Journalists named him Ohio’s best critic. Pender is a past chair of the American Theatre Critics Association. From 2015 to 2017 he served as executive editor and publisher of Everything Sondheim, a website and quarterly magazine. He was also the managing editor of The Sondheim Review, a quarterly magazine.

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