The New York Times just did a great series of stories in honor of Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday. The legendary composer is being celebrated all over the place in the media right now. While he may be America’s lion of the theater, you won’t see an extended explication of any of his shows on this site. Even though he’s had several shows on Broadway over the years, his longest running production was “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which clocked out at 964 performances in its run from 1962-64. Sure, 1,000 performances is an arbitrary limit but a guy’s gotta have standards.
In terms of why Sondheim has never had a mega-blockbuster hit on Broadway, I think this analysis from Time’s Richard Corliss sums it up pretty well: “The Sondheim conundrum is that his lyrics are often so complex, they have to be heard twice — on the cast album, after the show has closed. The corollary is that his musicals are more acceptable as revivals than as originals.” It doesn’t thrill me to be spending my time researching the originators of “Beatlemania” versus the genius behind “Sweeney Todd,” but that is, for better or worse, the task at hand.