It’s hard not to glance at the list of biographies in the Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series and think that you’d have had a much better chance of amounting to something if you’d been born Jewish, or at least had converted at an early age. Now adding to an imposing lineup that includes Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein, as well as artistic luminaries ranging from Leonard Bernstein to Mark Rothko, the publisher has anointed Stephen Sondheim. Daniel Okrent’s superb new biography, Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy, is a tightly written, emotionally perceptive, and often exhilarating study of a Broadway giant who, if measured by his gifts for irony, ambivalence, harmonic complexity, lyric beauty, peerless wit, breadth of subjects, and psychological acuity, is hands down the greatest Broadway-musical composer of the last 50 years, if not of all time.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of articles, books, and videos devoted to the career during which Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for 18 musicals, the lyrics for four others, and more than 500 songs. He won every major award, including eight Tonys, eight Grammys, an Oscar, and the Pulitzer Prize. After his death, in 2021, his memorial service was held in a Broadway theater named for him.
