A Tale of Mentorship: Stephen Sondheim and the Making of American Musical Theatre

Iris Spark

When Stephen Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of ninety one, the tributes reached for superlatives that in almost any other case would sound like exaggeration. Frank Rich, for decades the most influential critic in American theatre, had already called him, simply, the greatest and best known artist working in the American musical. The numbers bear the claim out with unusual precision. Sondheim won eight Tony Awards, more than any composer in the prize’s history, alongside an Academy Award, eight Grammys, five Laurence Olivier Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which he received in 1985 for Sunday in the Park with George. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1993, and by the time of his death his collected works, across Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and Passion, had accumulated more than sixty individual and collaborative Tony Awards between them. Theatres bear his name on both Broadway and in the West End, a rare honour for a living writer and a rarer one still for two different countries to bestow independently.

In some respects that’s the least of it. What he was able to achieve in the work itself is harder to compress into a sentence, since it is the range that astonishes as much as the depth: a demon barber’s revenge staged as Victorian melodrama and abattoir at once, a chorus of presidential assassins rendered as a grotesque carnival, Georges Seurat’s pointillist canvas turned into an act of self-portraiture, the darker undertow beneath the Grimm fairy tales, and the collision of American gunboats with Japanese court ceremony in Pacific Overtures, each cast in a musical and lyrical idiom built entirely for that story and set aside once it had served its purpose. He did not so much develop a style as a method, one that treated rhyme, harmony and character as functions of each other rather than separate problems of craft, so that a chord progression could carry psychological information no lyric alone could supply, and a rhyme scheme could betray a character’s self-deception before a line of dialogue did. It is this, more than any tally of prizes, that persuaded a generation of composers and critics that the American musical could bear the weight of ambiguity, cruelty and real intellectual seriousness, and that persuasion is the inheritance the rest of this story is really about.

What is easy to miss amid the roll call of prizes is that Sondheim did not regard his own achievement as self-made in the way the word usually implies. He spoke often, and with evident feeling, of a debt to a single man who had shaped him before he had written a professional word, and he spent much of his own long career trying to repay that debt forward, to a fourth generation of writers who in turn owe him what he owed Oscar Hammerstein II. That chain, running from Jerome Kern through Hammerstein through Sondheim to Adam Guettel and Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel Miranda, is one of the great stories of professional formation in any field, and it has something serious to say about mentorship. It reminds us that careers are built rather than simply discovered. It is also, I think, a useful mirror in which to examine what British musical theatre has and has not managed to build for itself.

The story begins in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Sondheim’s parents divorced when he was a boy and his mother moved them near the Hammerstein family farm. The young Sondheim became friends with Hammerstein’s son, Jimmy, and Oscar Hammerstein II, already one of the most successful men in the American theatre, became something close to a surrogate father. At fifteen, attending the George School, Sondheim wrote a school revue called By George, a comic send-up of the faculty and his fellow pupils, and was, by his own later account, entirely convinced of its brilliance. He showed it to Hammerstein and, fatefully, asked to be read not as a family friend but as a professional. Hammerstein agreed, and summoned him the next day to tell him, in essence, that it was the worst thing that had ever crossed his desk, though not, he was careful to specify, because the boy lacked talent. He then went through the script line by line, and Sondheim later said he learned more about writing musicals in that single afternoon, a session of some two and a half hours, than most people learn in a lifetime.

Hammerstein’s method was not simply to correct. It was to redirect the boy toward his own voice rather than his teacher’s. Sondheim recalled him saying, more than once and in various forms, that Sondheim’s concerns were not Hammerstein’s concerns, and that he would be, in Hammerstein’s own estimate, ninety per cent ahead of everyone else if he could learn to write like himself rather than like Hammerstein. It is a strikingly modern piece of mentoring advice, less concerned with producing a disciple than with producing an independent artist, and it is worth holding in mind against everything that follows, because not every senior figure Sondheim worked with in those early years shared it.

Hammerstein did not stop at one afternoon. He set the teenager a course of study that would occupy him through his years at Williams College: four assignments, each designed to teach something different about dramatic adaptation. The first was to musicalise a play he admired, and Sondheim chose Kaufman and Connelly’s Beggar on Horseback. The second was to musicalise a play he liked but thought flawed, for which he chose Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor. The third was to adapt a novel or story never before dramatised, which led him to an unfinished attempt at Mary Poppins. The fourth was to write something wholly original. None of the four was ever produced, and that was rather the point. Hammerstein was not trying to get a prodigy onto Broadway. He was trying to get him trained, on the understanding that craft has to be earned in private, through a controlled and properly supervised apprenticeship of failure, before it can be spent in public.

In 1957 it was Hammerstein who pushed the twenty-five-year-old Sondheim to take the job of lyricist on West Side Story, a show conceived by Jerome Robbins with music by Leonard Bernstein, when Sondheim’s own instinct was to hold out for a project where he could write both music and words. Bernstein and Sondheim’s collaboration on that score was genuine and, by both men’s later accounts, mutually admiring, and their friendship endured, in warm letters and shared wordplay, until Bernstein’s death in 1990. But it was not without friction, and the friction is instructive precisely because it complicates the story rather than confirming it. The two men later disagreed over billing and royalties, with Bernstein receiving three per cent to Sondheim’s one, and though Bernstein offered to even the split, Sondheim declined, satisfied with the sole lyric credit instead. A further attempt to collaborate, a show called The Race to Urga, collapsed in 1969 when Robbins abandoned the production during auditions, and Sondheim later said flatly of the whole misbegotten effort, “I was ashamed of the whole project.” Whether Bernstein, whose own theatre career never again matched the success of West Side Story while his onetime lyricist went on to eight Tony Awards and a Pulitzer, ever entirely made his peace with being remembered as the composer his lyricist eclipsed is not the kind of thing that settles into a tidy verified quotation. But the friction is real enough, and worth naming, because it is a useful corrective to any account of mentorship in this world that makes it sound uniformly generous. Hammerstein’s gift to Sondheim was rare precisely because others fail in this competitive world to conduct themselves similarly.

It is worth going back one generation further, because the chain did not begin with Hammerstein either. Hammerstein himself had been shaped by an older, more established figure a decade his senior: the composer Jerome Kern, already one of Broadway’s most accomplished tunesmiths when the two men met in the mid-1920s after their first collaboration on Sunny in 1925. It was Kern who had the idea, against the advice of colleagues who thought the subject matter of racism and a broken marriage entirely unsuited to musical comedy, of adapting Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat, and it was Kern’s ambition for the piece that pushed Hammerstein to abandon the looser, number-driven structure of operetta in favour of a story-first, dramatically integrated musical play. That conviction, that a musical could be as serious as any other dramatic form, stayed with Hammerstein for the rest of his career and was precisely what he later transmitted, more deliberately and more explicitly, to the teenage Sondheim. Kern himself described his own working method modestly, telling an interviewer late in life, “I write music to both the situations and the lyrics in plays,” a self-portrait of a craftsman rather than a genius waiting for inspiration, and it is that same workmanlike insistence on serving the story that Hammerstein absorbed and passed on.

Nowhere is the difficulty and the strangeness of that creative partnership more visible than in the writing of Show Boat’s most famous song. According to Hammerstein’s biographer Hugh Fordin, Kern at first resisted the idea of a river song altogether, not seeing how it would be intrinsic to the story, much as Hammerstein himself would later resist writing the title number for Oklahoma! Kern eventually found his way into it not through Ferber’s text but through the sound of Paul Robeson’s speaking voice, which he said he heard once and from which the melody of Ol’ Man River followed almost immediately. Even then, the tune alone was not yet a song. The orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett recalled being handed Kern’s bare music, thirty two measures that he later said “sounded to me like they wanted to be wanted,” unconvincing until he saw them again days afterward with Hammerstein’s words written in. It was only then, Bennett said, that it became a song at all, a point Kern himself seemed to concede: when Bennett praised the finished number, Kern reminded him drily that he had not said so when the music alone was in front of him. Dorothy Hammerstein put the same point more pointedly still, telling a party guest who had complimented Kern on the song that her husband, not his, had actually written Ol’ Man River, since all Kern had supplied was, in her demonstration, a wordless string of notes. The anecdote is unfair to Kern’s melody, which is one of the most haunting he ever wrote, but it captures something true about how hard-won even a masterpiece of this stature was, and about the particular, sometimes prickly intimacy of a mentorship conducted through collaboration rather than instruction. Kern taught Hammerstein by example and by sheer ambition for the work; Hammerstein taught Sondheim by direct instruction. It is, in essence, the same lesson, passed down twice before it reached its fullest flowering.

Sondheim did not simply receive what Hammerstein gave him and keep it. He said of his own later mentoring that he loved passing on what Oscar had passed on to him, and he did so in a spirit that was recognisably the same, rigorous and sometimes uncomfortable, rather than merely encouraging. The most striking instance involves Adam Guettel, Richard Rodgers’s grandson, who at fourteen showed his own songs to Sondheim expecting the unqualified enthusiasm a famous family friend might offer a gifted child. Guettel later recalled arriving, in his own words, “all puffed up thinking I would be rained with compliments,” only to receive instead some direct and unsparing criticism. Years afterward Sondheim wrote to apologise, not for the substance of what he had said but for the way he had delivered it, which had landed as discouragement rather than the challenge he had intended. It is a telling correction of the Hammerstein story: Sondheim had absorbed the rigour of his mentor’s method but had to learn, separately and through his own mistakes, the gentler art of delivering hard truths to the young. Guettel went on to become one of the most distinctive composers of his generation, with Floyd Collins and The Light in the Piazza, and has himself become a teacher of younger writers, extending the lineage a further generation.

The same pattern recurs with Jonathan Larson, who corresponded with Sondheim while working on what would become Rent. When Larson wrote to tell him about the new piece he was attempting, he described it, with the earnestness of a writer who did not yet know what it would become, as a project he was “working on passionately,” and Sondheim, by several accounts among the first people outside Larson’s circle to know the show existed, encouraged him through it. Sondheim spoke afterward, with evident grief, of Larson’s sudden death on the eve of that show’s opening. It recurs again, more publicly than either, with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who has said of Sondheim’s notes on his own developing scores, delivered in the same spirit Hammerstein had once delivered his, simply that “variety, variety, variety” was the recurring instruction, and who has credited the relationship in the plainest terms: “it made my work infinitely better, and it made my life infinitely better.” Miranda has since become an active mentor and producer for a younger cohort of musical theatre writers, much as Sondheim did for him. The chain runs, with real continuity but never with the frictionless neatness of legend, from Kern through Hammerstein through Sondheim to Guettel and Larson and Miranda and onward: a transmission of standards, vocabulary and a certain moral seriousness about the form, passed person to person across a century, in conversations that were rarely comfortable and were almost always generous, even when, as with Bernstein, the generosity ran alongside something more complicated.

This is where the story becomes, I think, a genuinely useful case study for anyone thinking about how careers in the creative professions are actually built, because what it describes is not talent alone. American musical theatre has never lacked for talent. What it describes is an infrastructure of apprenticeship that talent by itself cannot create. Hammerstein did not simply tell the fifteen year old he was good. He gave him exercises, deadlines, a body of completed but unproduced work, and an unambiguous account of exactly where he currently fell short, which is closer to the craft apprenticeship a young cabinetmaker or a junior surgeon might recognise than to the more diffuse, encouragement-shaped mentoring that culture often substitutes for it. And it persisted institutionally as well as personally, in workshops and writing programmes such as the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, and in a continuous culture in which senior writers read and respond seriously to the unfinished work of writers thirty or forty years their junior, on the assumption that the junior writer is capable of hearing hard truths and improving because of them.

It is against this backdrop that the comparative thinness of an equivalent tradition in British musical theatre becomes interesting, and worth asking about honestly rather than simply lamenting. Britain has, after all, produced figures of real stature in this sphere. Noel Coward’s wit and theatrical instinct were sufficient to make him a dominant figure across several forms for decades, but he worked, by most accounts, in a fundamentally solitary way, a brilliant performer-writer-composer who was his own institution rather than the founder of a school, and he mentored almost nobody in any formal sense. A generation later, Andrew Lloyd Webber built something different again: not a culture of dramaturgical apprenticeship in the Hammerstein mode but an industrial model, the megamusical, internationally franchised and replicable, designed for scale rather than the kind of intimate textual conversation that produced Sweeney Todd or Sunday in the Park with George. Both Coward’s solitary brilliance and Lloyd Webber’s commercial scale are real achievements, and Britain should be proud of them. Neither, though, produced what Hammerstein produced almost in passing: a living chain of mentorship that has now run for four generations and is still running.

It is worth asking why. Part of the answer is structural. America’s regional theatre and opera ecosystem has historically given serious, difficult work more places to fail honestly and improve, away from the immediate commercial pressure of the West End. Part of it is generational proximity and personal accident: Hammerstein happened to live near a clever, lonely teenager with an absent father, and chose to take that obligation seriously for four years, an act of attention that no institution can fully replicate but that institutions can certainly try to encourage. And part of it, frankly, is cultural: an American tradition, inherited partly from a general belief in technical training and partly from the conservatoire and studio systems that fed Broadway throughout the mid-century, that craft can and should be taught directly, generation to generation, by people who have already done it.

For a publication committed to the idea that careers, including the most apparently inspired and least apparently teachable ones, are built rather than simply discovered, the lesson of Kern, Hammerstein and Sondheim is not really about musical theatre at all. It is about what serious attention from an elder, rigorously and honestly given, can do for a young person who has shown enough promise to be worth the trouble. Hammerstein could have simply praised the fifteen year old’s show, sent him on his way with his self-belief intact, and remained merely a kind family friend. Instead he treated him, in his own words, like a professional, which is to say, like someone capable of hearing the truth and using it. That decision, made on an ordinary afternoon in Pennsylvania in the 1940s, is still, by way of Guettel and Larson and Miranda and all the writers they in turn encourage, shaping the American musical stage today. British theatre has produced its own kinds of genius. What it has not yet quite produced is that particular, unglamorous, generation-spanning discipline of one artist taking the trouble to tell a younger one, in detail and without flattery, exactly why the work is not yet good enough, and then staying around long enough to see it become so.