Musical genius Stephen Sondheim died on November 26, 2021, at the age of 91. I can watch this clip from Six by Sondheim over and over. Sondheim makes an appearance in the middle of it. The priceless part starts at 2:48, when he plays the role of the producer. “It’s not a tune you can hum.”
While at Williams College in Williamsport, Massachusetts, Stephen Sondheim became a member of the Zeta Chapter of Beta Theta Pi. The chapter was founded on February 5, 1847. Sondheim is the only Beta Theta Pi member to have been awarded three top entertainment honors – Oscar, Grammy and Tony. He also has a Pulitzer Prize, a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, and a Laurence Olivier Award.
Beta Theta Pi chapter house at Williams College with snow dragon guarding the premises, date unknown. (Courtesy of Williams College Archives)
Sondheim was one of 24 pledges in his pledge class. Sophomore year, along with roommate and fellow Beta Josiah T.S. (Joe) Horton, the campus humorist, he wrote a campus musical, Phinney’s Rainbow. It was the first musical presented by Williams’ undergraduate drama society Cap and Bells. The title was a take off on Finian’s Rainbow and it harkened to Williams’ President James Phinney Baxter III. Sondheim wrote 25 musical numbers for the show.
The plot of the satirical look at campus life centered on the efforts of a Swindlehurst Prep School fraternity, Dogma Nu, to replace the compulsory physical education classes with more house parties. Their motto was “strength through sex.” Two of the songs from the show “How Do I Know?” and “Still Got My Heart” were his first published songs.
The book Stephen Sondheim: A Life, offers a glimpse of the play: “A ‘Goat Room’ was where all the rituals of initiation were performed,” Sondheim said, and so he took Beta Theta Pi’s ceremony “with just a slight smidgen of variation and exaggeration and put it on the stage. All the brothers were horrified, but of course everybody else thought it was screamingly funny; it seemed like a work of the imagination. And I told everybody at the house ‘Don’t get into an uproar. If you don’t tell anybody, it’s real, they won’t believe it.’”
Williams College was then an all-male institution, and the women’s roles were played by men (picture a chorus line of football players in a-line skirts and demure crew neck sweaters). The four performances in April and May of 1948 made a profit of $1,500.
The following year, he wrote the music, lyrics and book for the Cap and Bells production of All That Glitters. It was based on the play Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly; Sondheim received permission from Kaufman to perform the musical at Williams’ Adams Memorial Theater.
Sondheim graduated magna cum laude. He was awarded the Hutchinson Prize, a $3,000 cash award, renewable for a second year, for further study of music. The Prize Committee certainly got their money’s worth!
Sondheim turned 80 on September 15, 2010. To celebrate the occasion, the Henry Miller Theatre located in New York City’s theater district at 124 West 43rd Street, between Broadway and 6th Avenue, was renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.
A celebration was to have taken place for his 90th birthday. The Take Me to the World concert on Youtube had to suffice during the global pandemic.
