Saturday, August 21, 2010

Is a Sitcom Featuring a Hard-Drinking Composer Based on Stephen Sondheim?


That's the word, according to the Telegraph.

From the piece...

The original script for the pilot episode is understood to have portrayed Segal as a homosexual, heavy-drinking Broadway composer, aged 44, who lives a self-destructive, cocaine-fuelled existence before having a heart attack.

Sondheim, who is homosexual, had a heart attack in 1979, when he was 49. He has admitted that he has a "large capacity for alcohol" and told his biographer, Meryle Secrest, that he took cocaine in the Seventies. The script is believed to have undergone several key changes, including Segal suffering an aneurysm rather than a heart attack. However, a spokesman for Sondheim, whose musicals include Sweeney Todd and Follies, declines to discuss allegations that his lawyers requested changes be made.

"Steve is a very private person," says the spokesman. "The closest he will ever come to revealing his own personal history is in the form of the book he is publishing with Random House in October called Finishing the Hat, and even that is in lyric form."

His friendship with Logan is reportedly under strain.


Here's Dame Judi Dench singing "Send in the Clowns":

1 comment:

Emmy said...

Sondheim is an amazing composer! I loved Sweeney Todd and the Assassins :)