Stephen Sondheim in Connecticut: premieres, surprise visits and a show in a swimming pool. Roxbury composer dies at 91.

The musical theater titan Stephen Sondheim was known for bringing a modern intellect and fresh concepts to a staid, traditional Broadway. Some of those new ideas first got tried out in Connecticut on the way to New York.

Sondheim, who was 91, died Friday at his estate in Roxbury. Connecticut was not only the New York native’s longtime home but had a role in some of his musical successes.

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the first Broadway musical for which Sondheim wrote both the music and lyrics, had its world premiere at the Shubert in New Haven on April 7, 1962. It was at that pre-Broadway tryout in Connecticut that the show’s creators realized audiences didn’t know how to respond to its blend of ancient Roman comedy by Plautus and early 20th century burlesque clowning. Sondheim began work on a new song, the riotously self-explanatory “Comedy Tonight!,” and the show triumphed.

The musical “Do I Hear a Waltz?,” for which Sondheim provided the lyrics to Richard Rodgers’ music, also had its world premiere at the Shubert, on Jan. 30, 1965. Sondheim had gotten so much acclaim as a lyricist, for such hits as “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” that he was fending off offers from major composers so he could establish that he could write music himself.

“Do I Hear a Waltz?” was the last time he’d be solely a lyricist on a musical. From then on, with “Company” (1970), “Follies” (1971), “A Little Night Music” (1973), Sondheim took a strong hand in all his projects, writing music and lyrics but also conceiving and shaping most of them, and choosing his collaborators carefully.

One of Sondheim’s most audacious experiments, “The Frogs,” was staged in the Yale swimming pool in 1974 by the Yale Repertory Theatre with then-Yale School of Drama students Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang swimming in the chorus, to choreography by Carmen de Lavallade. The show, which starred comic actor Larry Blyden, reunited Sondheim with “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” book writer Burt Shevelove, and like that show drew from ancient comedy (in this case the Greek playwright Aristophanes).

“The Frogs” remains one of the most talked-about shows in the history of the Yale Rep, but had classic out-of-town troubles. It didn’t make it to Broadway until 30 years later, in a revised version (on a stage, not in a pool) starring Nathan Lane.

Regional theater in Connecticut

Connecticut’s major regional theaters have kept Sondheim’s shows alive over the years.

The Goodspeed Opera House did not stage a Sondheim musical until 1996, when Gabriel Barre directed the composer’s dark “Sweeney Todd,” about a murderous barber whose victims end up in meat pies. The Goodspeed also did a lavish, emotionally charged production of “A Little Night Music” (which features one of the composer’s biggest hits, “Send in the Clowns”) in 2001. The director this time was Darko Tresnjak, who a decade later would be artistic director of Hartford Stage. In 2009 the Goodspeed got silly with “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

Westport Country Playhouse did a lively magic-themed “Into the Woods” in 2012 that brought a cast member from the show’s original Broadway production, Danielle Ferland, back to the show but in a different role.

“Into the Woods,” which finds anxious fairy tale characters interacting with each other (as well as a witch and a giant), has been performed frequently at colleges, high schools and (in a shorter, less psychologically intense version) grade schools throughout the state. Some lesser-known Sondheim works have also found favor at college theaters. Ambitious Yale students have tackled two exceptional yet famously difficult Sondheim works, “Anyone Can Whistle” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” numerous times each.

Hartford Symphony Orchestra did a pops concert tribute to Sondheim in 2013, with songs from “Sweeney Todd,” “Follies,” “Into the Woods,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Company,” “A Little Night Music” and “Sunday in the Park with George.”

In 2017, the Yale Repertory Theatre staged Sondheim’s controversial “Assassins,” which explores the psyches of people who have tried to kill American presidents, just months after the 2016 Presidential election. Sondheim and the show’s book writer, Yale Law School alum John Weidman, took part in a live discussion about “Assassins” at the Yale University Theater. Sondheim joked that he “shouldn’t be here” because he was hard at work on another show at the time.

When Broadway star Terrence Mann (from “Cats” and “Les Miserables”) became artistic director of the Connecticut Repertory Theatre’s Nutmeg Summer Series at the University of Connecticut, he took the starring role in an exceptional production of “Sweeney Todd.”

A Roxbury home

In September of 2020, during the COVID pandemic, the then-90-year-old Sondheim made a surprise visit to an outdoor production of “Assassins” which the Warner Theater presented at the Pleasant Valley Drive-In in Barkhamsted. The show had a single performance before about 200 people who were inside cars. Sondheim’s presence was kept a secret from the cast until after the show and because they were car-bound audience members didn’t know he was there either.

West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park chose “Into the Woods” as the inaugural musical in its new Connecticut Shakespeare Festival this past August. It was originally planned as an outdoor show at Auer Farm, then hastily moved indoors when the farm became unavailable.

Sondheim’s work is valued as highly as ever. A Broadway revival of “Company,” which innovatively makes the lead character in the show a single woman rather than a single man, has just opened after being stalled a year by COVID. A new movie version of “West Side Story,” the musical for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics, will be released Dec. 10.

Kenneth Fuchs, the Grammy-winning professor of composition at the UConn, had a correspondence with Sondheim that lasted over 40 years. Both Fuchs and Sondheim had studied, 25 years apart, with the distinguished composer and music theorist Milton Babbitt. The correspondence began, Fuchs says in an email to the Courant, “in the summer of 1977, when I was still an undergrad student at the University of Miami. He replied to my first letter and told me he was writing a musical “about blood and cannibalism” titled ‘Sweeney Todd.’ (!)”

Fuchs spent time with Sondheim in New York in 1979, just after “Sweeney Todd”'s Broadway opening. “You can imagine how enthralled I was to be in the presence of a composer whom I admired so much,” Fuchs says. “Although Steve could be a complicated figure personally, he always took time to reach and support aspiring composers.”

David Krane, a Connecticut-based composer/arranger/orchestrator for Broadway, movies and television, says “My connection to Sondheim goes back to 1987 when I music directed the first off-Broadway revival of “Company” at the York Theatre. Steve wrote this note to me: ‘Just a note to tell you I thought the musical aspects of “Company” were wonderful. Thanks — and congratulations!’” Krane would later be music director on the first Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd” in 1989.

“I moved to Roxbury in 2002,” Krane says, “as I knew that Steve loved it and for a while early in my career we shared the same agent, Flora Roberts, who also had a country home in town. He was very private, however, and I never had the opportunity to visit him while I was living there.

“In 2013, I adapted music for the screen adaptation of ‘Into the Woods’ and worked with Meryl Streep in my Roxbury home as she lives in Litchfield county. When Steve wrote a new song for the film to present to Meryl, I had the honor of accompanying Steve on the piano in his Turtle Bay home. He cheekily autographed the music to Meryl writing, ‘Don’t f*** it up. Love, Steve.’

“When Johnny Depp, who played the Wolf in the film requested a new arrangement for his song, ‘Hello, Little Girl’ in a swing 1940′s feel, I was thrilled to receive this note: ‘I hate to say it, but I like it better than what I wrote.’ It brought tears to my eyes. Steve wrote me detailed and encouraging letters when I sent him early musicals that I composed, and when I had the opportunity to work on his incredible music, it was a thrill.”

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.