Broadway Baby

Stephen Sondheim, the Broadway composer behind A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, in 1990.

By Chip Brown

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, READ ON