Who is Stephen Sondheim?

Stephen Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist whose full given name was Stephen Joshua Sondheim. Sondheim was born in New York, New York on 22 March 1930 and studied piano as a child. But it was his reaction to seeing a Broadway musical at age nine that began his interest in theater. That same year, his parents divorced, and he moved to Pennsylvania, where he met Jimmy Hammerstein, whose father was lyricist and playwright Oscar Hammerstein II.  more

Stephen Joshua Sondheim is a composer / lyricist for the musical theatre who has also dabbled in teaching, screen writing, composing film scores, creating crossword puzzles for New York Magazine, and authoring plays. He was born on March 22, 1930 and is alive and actively pursuing his career. He has never been married and he has no children. 1.2 Early Life His parents divorced when he was rather young, and he grew up in rural Pennsylvania with his mother. He became very close to a neighboring family, the Hammersteins. Oscar Hammerstein II (of the songwriting team Rodgers and Hammerstein) became a surrogate father to young Sondheim. It was through Oscar Hammerstein II that Sondheim first became involved in theatre, although he later said that he so looked up to Hammerstein that he "would have become a geologist if Oscar had been a geologist." He attended the George School, where he wrote his first musical, By George, parodying the school's denizens. He proudly showed the script to his ...  more