Show Business: A Precious Fancy

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Couple such lyrics with Sondheim's comparatively rarefied musical sources —Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Brahms (the music of the Greek chorus is inspired directly by Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes) —and you have a composer born to the musical stage. (Early training with Composer Milton Babbitt and an apprenticeship with Family Friend Oscar Hammerstein II helped, of course.) Opera turns him off, even those by the same Mozart whose Eine Kleine Nachtmusik gave Sondheim and Prince their show title. "I know it's my loss, but Mozart's whole body of music doesn't get to me gutwise."

Sondheim does not consider himself a pop writer, and although he and Actor Tony Perkins have written the screenplay for a forthcoming Warner Bros, murder mystery (The Last of Sheila, starring James Mason and Raquel Welch), he has no desire to write music for films. There is no symphony or concerto kicking around in his brain, no great play or sonnet.

No Respite. Instead, at 42, Sondheim is totally caught up in the furious activity of composing musicals. "All I ever really wanted," he says, "was to make enough money from the theater to be able to write for the theater." Sondheim seems to work best at the edge of a precipice. For Night Music he was still writing songs at the eleventh hour, after the sets were already onstage and the staging set. Last week there was no respite. Lyric sheets had to be corrected for the forthcoming Columbia recording of Night Music. Rehearsal followed rehearsal for A Tribute to Stephen Sondheim, booked for the Shubert Theater at week's end with such stars as Angela Lansbury, Alexis Smith and Jack Cassidy.

These days dark circles ring Sondheim's eyes. A mere haircut will no longer salvage the graying mop atop, aside and below his daedal pate. The waist bulges. He lumbers like a benumbed bear shaking off a winter's sleep. "You ask about my life-style!" he cries aloud. "I'll tell you about my lifestyle. I have no lifestyle. Since 1969 I have done nothing but write, write, write. I mean, I haven't even had a game party in my house in three years."

There will be plenty of game parties in the days ahead. Games are Sondheim's greatest passion outside the theater. His bachelor town house in Manhattan bulges with them the way other well-appointed homes do with paintings and sculpture—game boards by the dozen, penny-arcade jackpot games, a slot machine, Skittle-Pool table, mammoth chess set peopled by bitches, idiots and 1984-style proles. When friends like Leonard Bernstein (composer to Sondheim's lyrics in West Side Story), Perkins or Actress Phyllis Newman come to call, it is usually for what Sondheim calls "cutthroat anagrams." Says Sondheim: "You don't take turns. You just turn up letters, and the first person to see a word yells it out. Lennie Bernstein is a terrific anagram player. All during the work on West Side Story, we would blow up our tensions at the anagram table."

Since Sondheim is obviously a happily possessed man, what might the letters of his name spell out in such a game? Voilá! "His demon."