Sondheim went on to study with the avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt, worked briefly as a television scriptwriter in Hollywood, and composed a musical, Saturday Night. The show was still-born (it would not actually reach the stage until 1997), but the score brought Sondheim to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who hired him to write the lyrics for West Side Story (1957). cheap New era mlb hats He worked again as the lyricist on Gypsy (1959); composed the music and lyrics for the farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), and suffered his first crushing blow with Anyone Can Whistle (1964), about the mayoress of a small town who fakes a miracle to attract tourists. The show closed after 13 performances.
'I asked Oscar to read it, as if it had just crossed his desk and from an unknown writer,' he remembers. 'And he said, well, it's terrible. It just doesn't make any sense. And you want to know why it's terrible? I didn't say it's untalented, but let's just look at the first page direction: what does this mean? How do you do that on the stage? Is this character going to sing this song having just said that line? And it was one of those "Alice on her golden afternoon" moments. wholesale New era mlb hats Everything went "wham" and I understood what Hammersteinish musical theatre was about. And from then on I wrote Hammerstein-type musicals, meaning to attempt to tell stories, attempt to deal with character, attempt to do the kind of work that he was doing. The principles of everything I've written ever since can be traced back to that afternoon.'
With Hammerstein's encouragement, Sondheim wrote his first musical when he was 15. By George, about life at the Quaker boarding school where his mother had sent him,Cheap New York Yankees Hats comprised three acts, 20 songs, dances and a cast of 50.
