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<\/a><\/p>\nStephen Sondheim shown in London ahead of the premiere of “Side by Side by Sondheim,” a West End musical revue celebrating his catalogue, April 2, 1976. (R. Jones\/Evening Standard\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cI would love to write about Sondheim if you\u2019re interested, but I have to tell you that he was not in any way, in any remote way, a practicing Jew,\u201d Okrent recalled saying.<\/p>\n
The people at Jewish Lives were unfazed \u2014 that is, until he turned in his manuscript. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey said, \u2018Could we have a little bit more Jewish stuff in there?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
I can sympathize. It can be tricky to write about famous, highly assimilated Jews like Sondheim, for whom Jewishness did not seem to be a significant part of their private identity or what made them famous. In writing an obituary, for example, there\u2019s a risk of \u201cclaiming\u201d someone as Jewish in ways they might have rejected, or of forcing their life into a Jewish narrative in a way that seems artificial or exaggerated. <\/p>\n
And yet, Okrent argues, Sondheim was unmistakably Jewish.<\/p>\n
\u201cI look at it as a form of Americanized Yiddishkeit: his nature, his worldview, his sense of humor,\u201d said Okrent in an interview last week. \u201cTo me, also having grown up as a pretty areligious Jew, that felt very Jewish.\u201d<\/p>\n
Okrent, a journalist and former public editor of The New York Times whose previous books include histories of prohibition and U.S. immigration policy, wrote \u201cStephen Sondheim: Art Isn\u2019t Easy\u201d as an unabashed fan. <\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to understand the life through the work and the work through the life,\u201d he told me. The book chronicles the friendships, rivalries and personal demons that informed Sondheim\u2019s unmatched contribution to the American musical, from the lyrics he wrote for \u201cWest Side Story\u201d and \u201cGypsy\u201d to the scores and lyrics he composed for canonical shows like \u201cCompany,\u201d \u201cA Little Night Music,\u201d \u201cSweeney Todd\u201d and \u201cSunday in the Park with George.\u201d <\/p>\n
And while Sondheim, who died in 2023 at age 91, spent a lifetime denying it, Okrent concluded that his life and art were \u201cintimately intertwined,\u201d and that his shows were often autobiographical.<\/p>\n
With the exception of a handful of musicals, \u201ceverything else reflects his life, his feelings, his triumphs, his failures,\u201d said Okrent. <\/p>\n
That includes \u201cSweeney Todd,\u201d the ghoulish, operatic story of a deranged barber who kills his customers and serves them up as meat pies. When Judy Prince, wife of his longtime collaborator Hal Prince, told Sondheim that \u201cSweeney Todd\u201d was the story of his life, Sondheim agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did he see in that? Revenge,\u201d said Okrent. Sondheim understood what it was to hold a grudge \u2014 against critics, notably, and anyone else who suggested his shows were too elitist, too cool or (and this galled him to the degree that he wrote a song about it) not \u201chummable.\u201d <\/p>\n
What almost never appears in his shows or music, however, is a Jewish theme or character, at least explicitly so. And when they do appear \u2014 notably as theatrical producers in shows like \u201cGypsy\u201d and \u201cMerrily We Roll Along\u201d \u2014 they reflect the main way Sondheim himself claimed his Jewishness. <\/p>\n
When asked about his Jewish identity by the journalist Abigail Pogrebin for her 2005 book \u201cStars of David,\u201d Sondheim said, \u201cIt\u2019s very deep. It\u2019s the fact that so many of the people that I admire in the arts are Jewish. And art is as close to a religion as I have.\u201d<\/p>\n
The future composer grew up on New York\u2019s Upper West Side; his parents, Herbert and Etta, known as Foxy, were prominent in the dressmaking business. They belonged to Temple Emanu-El, the socially prominent Reform synagogue on the East Side. After their divorce when Sondheim was 10, he moved with his mother to a Pennsylvania exurb not far from the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, who became a surrogate father and musical mentor. <\/p>\n