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Sondheim: A Musical Tribute March 11, 1973
Up for sale is a lot of five items associated with one of the most historic Broadway musical theatrical evenings ever that paid tribute to the young 42 year old Stephen Sondheim just a few weeks after the opening of his critically acclaimed hit, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. Lot includes One Playbill, One Playwright Neil Simon personalized and signed invitation letter to purchase tickets to the performance and after party, one ticket purchase invitation, one after party guest list card and one return envelope. All items are shown in the photographs.
The fundraising event was originally planned as a tribute to Hal Prince. He passed on the honor and Sondheim agreed thinking that it was to be a fund raiser dinner event. When it was clear what the evening was meant to be, a story-based evening featuring the songs of, Sondheim enlisted friend Burt Shevelove to pop across the pond and take charge. He did. And all the stars aligned. Well, all but one brash loud one. Broadway's Mama Rose opted out of the event as she had plans to take her daughter to Florida that she refused to change. Not to worry Miss Ethel Merman, it was such a swell evening even without you.
"It was March 11, 1973.
With the premiere of A Little Night Music only two weeks before, forty-two-year-old Stephen Sondheim had experienced his third Broadway triumph in three years. After previously winning Tony Awards® for his work in Company and Follies, he would soon go on to win yet another Best Score Tony® for A Little Night Music and so become the only composer-lyricist in Broadway history to win the Tony® for three consecutive years. With eight musicals produced on Broadway in the previous seventeen years, Sondheim was finally enjoying acclaim as the innovator of a new form of musical theater.
Sondheim was introduced professionally to the theatrical world at the age of twenty-five, when he was chosen by Leonard Bernstein to write the lyrics for West Side Story (1957). After his initial success on Broadway as a lyricist, he asked friend Burt Shevelove if he had an idea for a show. Shevelove suggested doing some of Plautus’s plays as a musical, and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum was on its way to creation.
But preparations for Forum were interrupted when Sondheim accepted an invitation to write the lyrics to Jule Styne’s music for Gypsy (1959). After the triumph of that show, Forum was finally completed (1962) and became the first produced musical for which Sondheim wrote both words and music.
He then composed the score for the experimental Anyone Can Whistle (1964). It lasted only nine performances but quickly became a legend, celebrated for its offbeat subject matter and Sondheim’s innovative score.
Do I Hear A Waltz? (1965), a show for which he wrote the lyrics to Richard Rodgers’s music, proved to be the last of Sondheim’s “lyrics only” musicals.
Working closely with producer-director Harold Prince, Sondheim, in successive years, turned out the scores for Company (1970), Follies (1971) and A Little Night Music (1973), thereby securing his place as one of the vital creative theatrical forces of his generation.
It was March 11, 1973.
On that rainy, muggy night in New York, a crowd of celebrities, journalists and musical theater fanatics gathered inside the Shubert Theatre for an evening that would be talked about for years to come. It was the first public acknowledgment – in the form of a musical retrospective – of Sondheim’s work in the theater.
It had all begun five months before, when the American Music and Dramatic Academy and the National Hemophilia Foundation first proposed a fundraising event – a tribute – to honor Harold Prince. Prince declined the honor, but Sondheim agreed to participate in Prince’s stead, thinking the affair was “merely a dinner.” Little did he know that it would turn out to be a musical production featuring thirty-three performers and a thirty-piece orchestra. AMDA called upon Kurt Peterson, one of its alumni, to help organize the event, and Peterson asked Craig Zadan and Neil Appelbaum to join him as co-producers.
As it became increasingly apparent that the Tribute would actually be a show, Burt Shevelove agreed to direct the evening, and Donna McKechnie (at the time, one of the featured stars of Company) was engaged to choreograph the production numbers. The event would be staged at the Shubert Theatre on Boris Aronson’s country-garden set for A Little Night Music. And only actors who had been featured in Sondheim shows would be invited to perform." - Craig Zadan, Author of Sondheim & Co. - Massterworks Broadway
