Sondheim on South Bank Show Revisited

Stephen Sondheim will appear on The South Bank Show Revisited on Sunday April 25th (the same evening as The Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year heats). It will include clips from West Side Story and the current Broadway production of A Little Night Music, starring Catherine Zeta Jones and Angela Lansbury.

Melvyn Bragg will talk to Sondheim about his childhood, his parents’ divorce and how Oscar Hammerstein became like a surrogate father to him.  It was when Hammerstein took him to the opening of Carousel that he realised he wanted to write his own songs.

Archive footage from his earlier appearances on The South Bank Show will be shown as this will be the third time that Sondheim has been featured. He first appeared in 1980 when working on Sweeney Todd, and in 1984 when he oversaw a master class with musical theatre students.




There are a number of productions being mounted in the UK in celebration of Sondheim’s 80th birthday this year, including Passion at the Donmar Warehouse and Into the Woods at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park.