" I don't have any emotional reaction to ' Saturday Night ' at all – except fondness ," Sondheim says.

Sondheim has said of Peters, " Like very few others, she sings and acts at the same time ," he says.

The idea came from when Sondheim was a panelist at producer Stuart Ostrow's Musical Theater Lab, and he read a script by playwright Charles Gilbert.

Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein wrote The Race to Urga, scheduled to play at the Lincoln Center in 1969, but when Jerome Robbins left the project, it went unproduced.

* In December 2010, Stephen Colbert wrote and performed an " extended ending " to ' Send in the Clowns ' to composer Stephen Sondheim when he appeared on Colbert's program, The Colbert Report.

Sondheim first came up with the idea of writing a musical when he saw the Italian film in 1983:

Lapine wrote a couple of scenes and Sondheim had just started working on the opening number when he began to feel that his musical style was unsuitable for Muscle.

A few years later, when he was invited by Hal Prince to write the score for a film remake starring Angela Lansbury as a fading musical comedienne rather than a silent film star, Sondheim declined, citing his conversation with Wilder.

* Yvonne when Stephen Sondheim invited her to join the musical, Follies: " He wrote it for me, just for me!

Otherwise, the award has gone to the composer and lyricist for their combined contributions, except for 1971 when the two awards were split ( although Stephen Sondheim won both, for Company ).

Connor starred in the revue One Over the Eight ( 1962 ), at the Duke of York's Theatre, the original London West End production with Frankie Howerd of the Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum ( 1963 ), as Hysterium – and directed the show when it went on tour – The Four Musketeers ( 1967 ), with Harry Secombe at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, playing King Louis XIII, and the revue Carry On London ( 1973 ) at the Victoria Palace.

He rescued the doctor and was relieved when Sondheim was able to save the life of his beloved Cassie.

Guare was asked to convince Sondheim to do the lyrics.

Eighteen years later, Bernstein and Robbins asked Sondheim to retry adapting the show, but Sondheim refused.

Sondheim asked Gilbert for permission to use his idea.

Sondheim was asked to translate Mahagonny-Songspiel, although he did not state the time.

Laurents asked Sondheim if he would be interested in tackling the task.

Sondheim asked Gilbert for permission to use his idea.

During the post-show Q & A session, one of the members of The Stephen Sondheim Society asked Mr. Sondheim if he would now allow the show to be performed publicly.

When asked his reaction to seeing Saturday Night performed in New York after 40 years, Sondheim replied, " I don't have any emotional reaction to Saturday Night at all — except fondness.

By the time the project began to jell, however, Hammerstein had died, and Stephen Sondheim was asked by Laurents and Mary Rodgers, Richard Rodgers ' daughter, to write the lyrics.

They went to dinner, and after twenty minutes, Sondheim asked them what they thought of the show: they both were silent.

" Babbitt and Sondheim were both fascinated with mathematics and together they studied songs by various composers, especially Jerome Kern.

" Sondheim then said of Babbitt, " I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts with all his serious artillery.

He had agreed to work on The Girls Upstairs if Sondheim would agree to work on Company ; Michael Bennett, the young choreographer of Company, was also brought onto the project.

But if Pacific Overtures is never going to be anyone's favorite Sondheim musical, it is a far more forceful and enjoyable evening at the Promenade than it was eight years ago at the Winter Garden ... Many of the songs are brilliant, self-contained playlets.

Sondheim questioned if he should write only the lyrics for another show, but Hammerstein told him writing for a star would be valuable experience.

According to Robbins, if Sondheim didn't do it, Bernstein wouldn't do it.

Rodgers ' mistreatment of Sondheim left the composer feeling apathetic if not outright sour about the project, but he maintained his professionalism.

Most biographers blame Lerner's professional decline on the lack of a strong director with whom Lerner could collaborate, as Neil Simon did with Mike Nichols or Stephen Sondheim with Harold Prince ( Moss Hart, who had directed My Fair Lady, died shortly after Camelot opened ).

( 1965 ), for which he had written the lyrics to Richard Rodgers's music, Sondheim decided that he would henceforth work only on projects where he could write both the music and lyrics himself.

In Four Black Dragons various peasants describe the arrival of the American ships with escalating panic, until finally the nightmarish event does seem to be, as claimed, the end of the world .... Someone in a Tree, is a compact Rashomon-and as fine as anything Mr. Sondheim has written ... The single Act II triumph, Bowler Hat, could well be a V. S. Naipaul tale set to music and illustrated with spare Japanese brushstrokes ... Bowler Hat delivers the point of Pacific Overtures so artfully that the rest of Act II seems superfluous.

During that final moment, Sondheim and I were standing, facing the choir of students from the University of Utah's opera program, our backs to the audience, and I could see tears welling in his eyes as the voices rang out.

In his review of Sondheim's Follies, he wrote " ' Follies ' " is intermissionless and exhausting, an extravaganza that becomes tedious for two simple reasons: Its extravagances have nothing to do with its pebble of a plot ; and the plot, which could be wrapped up in approximately two songs, dawdles through 22 before it declares itself done ... Mr. Sondheim may be too much a man of the seventies, too present-tense sophisticated ... The effort to bind it up inhibits the crackling, open-ended, restlessly varied surges of sound he devised with such distinction for " Company '.

Sondheim told biographer Meryle Secrest, " I just wanted to study composition, theory, and harmony without the attendant musicology that comes in graduate school.

" to which Sondheim replied, " You'll see ".

The 2012 Season, the theater's 50th Anniversary Season, will feature Lily Rabe and Oliver Platt in Shakespeare's As You Like It directed by Daniel Sullivan and Amy Adams and Donna Murphy in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods, a transfer of an outdoor production done in Regent's Park in London in 2010.

It has been rumored that while Bernstein was off trying to fix the musical Candide, Sondheim wrote some of the music for West Side Story, and that Bernstein ’ s co-lyricist billing credit mysteriously disappeared from the credits of West Side Story during the tryout, presumably as a trade-off.

Sondheim said of the project, " two people and what goes into their relationship ... We ’ ll write for a couple of months, then have a workshop.

Sondheim took a dim view of today ’ s musicals.

: Stephen Sondheim ’ s puzzles for New York Magazine have been collected in book form.

Past productions have also included four Pulitzer Prize winners: Doug Wright ’ s I Am My Own Wife, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George, Alfred Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles.

McBride was awarded the 1997 American Music Festival ’ s Stephen Sondheim Award, the 1996 American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award, and the 1996 ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award.

Kind created the role of Addison Mizner in Stephen Sondheim ’ s Bounce, and has appeared on Broadway in The Tale of the Allergist ’ s Wife ( 2000 ), The Producers ( 2002 ), and Sly Fox ( 2004 ).

In 2000, Graham made his début at the BBC Promenade Concerts at The Royal Albert Hall, performing in Kurt Weill ’ s Street Scenes and a 70th birthday tribute for Stephen Sondheim.