Theater
Stephen Sondheim and Adam Guettel
For the first time in a long while, we can dispense with the notion that the quality Broadway musical is dead. How could it be in a year when the master and a pupil both filled theaters and delighted critics? Stephen Sondheim—who not so long ago couldn’t find a producer for Bounce—saw a glorious reception for a revival of Sweeney Todd. Meanwhile, The Light in the Piazza shone bright for its young composer, Adam Guettel. “It was an incredible year,” he says. “A lot of pending questions about my legitimacy were answered.” And where Sondheim collaborated with Richard Rodgers, Guettel—Rodgers’s grandson—acknowledges a debt to Sondheim. He fell in love at age 13, when the first whistle blew in Harold Prince’s 1979 Sweeney production. “Many of us my age and younger owe that to Steve,” says Guettel, whose next project is an adaptation of The Princess Bride. “The courage to try.”