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a conversation with STEVE SONDHEIM - by Patricia Bosworth

[[image - portrait photo of Sondheim]]

On a warm afternoon recently, forty-year-old Stephen Sondheim, who's been called "the theatre's supreme lyricist," could be seen pedaling furiously down East 49th street on his bicycle.

Dressed in faded khakis, his hair hanging lankly across his pale forehead, he looked more like a graduate student than the composer of such award-winning hits as Follies, Company and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

As soon as he arrived at his destination--an imposing buff-colored townhouse he calls home--he hopped off the bike and rolled it into the cool stone confines of the front hall.

"You're five minutes early," he remarked to a reporter waiting to interview him and then he grinned. "Just a second while I get my messages.
 
So saying he hurried through a living room lined with antique puzzles and conferred briefly with his secretary. He returned in less than five minutes so the interview could begin exactly on time.

The following conversation took place in the upstairs study where Sondheim does most of his composing. The windows overlook a rippling green ocean of trees known as Turtle Bay Gardens. Occasionally, Sondheim confided, he will have morning coffee out on the adjacent terrace. "The birds never stop singing and the view soothes me. Particularly when I have a hangover."

Not so long ago, at the premiere of Follies, he had just cause for drunken celebration, but in this case he could not even get high. "I was too tired," he explained. "That musical took six years of my life. Jim Goldman and I went through three producers and twenty drafts. I wrote some of the songs back in 1965. Opening night Jim and I stared at each other and  shrugged. 'If nothing else happens,' we said, 'at least we finally got the show on.'"

Of course a lot more happened. Follies won mostly rave notices as well as the coveted Critics Circle Award as the best musical of 1971 and it's currently one of the hottest tickets on Broadway. However, Sondheim remains exasperated by those reviewers who dismissed the Follies book as weak. "What most critics don't understand is that a musical is first and foremost a collaboration," he said, stressing the word. "As a songwriter I start out by picking everybody's brains. I always need help--inspiration. The hardest thing about writing a song is discovering the basic concept. Long before Follies went into rehearsal Michael, Hal, Jim and I sat around throwing ideas back and forth.

"When Hal Prince optioned the property he began playing around with visual 

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