Note to the Reader
Cast of Characters
Preface
Reintroduction
1. Sunday in the Park with George
2. Into the Woods
3. Assassins
4. Passion
5. Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show: A Saga in Four Acts
6. Other Musicals
7. Movies
8. Television
9. Commissions, Occasions, Beginnings
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Oversights
Appendix B: Original Productions
Appendix C: Selected Discography
Index of Songs
Subject Index
STEPHEN SONDHEIM wrote award-winning music and lyrics for theater, film, and television. He is the author of Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) and Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011). He is also the coauthor of the film The Last of Sheila and the play Getting Away with Murder. Sondheim was on the council of the Dramatists Guild of America, having served as its president from 1973 to 1981. He lived in New York City. He died in 2021.
“Sondheim is a national treasure, a giant in the world of musical
theater who changed the structure and sound of the form in
20th-century masterpieces. Speaking of heaven, though, here's Look,
I Made a Hat, the second part of Sondheim's two-volume collection
of lyrics, this one spanning 1981-2011, with additional bits and
pieces. Talmudically thorough and devilishly diverting with what
the author refers to as ‘attendant comments, amplifications,
dogmas, harangues, digressions, anecdotes, and miscellany,’ the
book is divine. It's also even more magnanimously authoritative
than the first book. The handsomely designed book, like the first
volume, contains illuminating reproductions of pages from the
author's beloved legal pads on which he works out rhyme schemes, as
well as annotated scripts and pages of musical notations. And the
second volume is brimming — a word Sondheim would probably dismiss
as ‘infelicitous’ — with precise, vigorous, instructive,
sharp-tongued, and often very funny comments. Look, I Made a Hat,
together with Finishing the Hat, makes an enormously satisfying
journal by one of the great theatrical minds of our time, a guide
and touchstone for who knows how many future great theatrical
minds. A” —Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
“While the book technically covers Mr. Sondheim’s output from 1981
to the present, aficionados will delight in all the bits and bobs
from early in his career that Mr. Sondheim didn’t make room for in
the first volume . . . The extensive miscellany also includes a
drawerful of lyrics Mr. Sondheim wrote as birthday gifts for
friends like Harold Prince, Mary Rodgers and Leonard Bernstein. One
of the choicest pleasures of the first volume was in Mr. Sondheim’s
sharp-minded analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of musical
theater lyricists from the past. He’s covered most of that
territory already, so the new book features essays on ‘Awards and
Their Uselessness’ and ‘Critics and Their Uses’ — savory reading.”
—Charles Isherwood, New York Times
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