Musical theater icon Stephen Sondheim dies at 91

Stephen Sondheim, the award-winning composer-lyricist who took the Broadway musical to a higher level of emotional complexity than his predecessors in shows such as “Company,” “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd,” has died at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

Sondheim, who was briefly incapacitated in early 2020 when he tore a ligament in a fall at his Connecticut home, died suddenly, his attorney and friend, Rick Pappas, told The New York Times. He was 91.

In a Broadway career launched in 1957 at age 27 as the lyricist for the classic “West Side Story,” Sondheim went on to write the lyrics for the 1959 hit “Gypsy” before writing both the lyrics and music for the 1962 hit “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” winner of the Tony Award for best musical.

But it was as the composer-lyricist of what former New York Times theater critic Frank Rich described in 2000 as “a new, jarring, adult kind of Broadway musical” that Sondheim became “the greatest and perhaps best-known artist