"He was the theater’s most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century..."

So began the very first sentence of the New York Time’s obituary for Stephen Sondheim. It succinctly sums up Stephen Sondheim’s importance to the American Musical Theatre. He moved the musical from the tuneful, entertaining and formulaic storytelling of Jerome Kern, Rogers and Hammerstein and Jerry Herman to one of complexity, urban sophistication and the ambiguities of the human experience.

Each week we will view and discuss one of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals beginning with West Side Story and moving chronologically through to Merrily We Roll Along. Our constant guide for our journey will be none other than Mr. Sondheim himself as related in our core book, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. This book, penned by Sondheim, as the title suggests, provides an inside look into each production including lyrics, history and personal insights. Our second core book will be He Never Did Anything Twice: Deconstructing Stephen Sondheim by Scott Miller which provides detailed critical analyses of the Sondheim oeuvre. These book will be augmented with archival interviews of Sondheim and other key members from each production. Each week will also include an analysis of one song from the show as well as a look at how the production was initially received by the theatre critics of the time.

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