Sorry-Grateful: 2 New Books Show the Many Sides of Sondheim

AMERICAN THEATRE: Don’t meet your heroes, goes a popular axiom. In the case of Stephen Sondheim, the composer/lyricist who redefined the possibilities if not the sound of American musical theatre, the wisdom of that advice might depend on when you caught him: in his early years, when he was learning at the feet of Oscar Hammerstein II while cannily maneuvering among peers and collaborators and chafing at the era’s, and his medium’s, restraints; in his ascendant 1970s period, when his struggle to assert his unique voice gave him a short-tempered, even manic aspect; or in his later éminence grise phase, when he mellowed into a kind of encouraging father figure for younger generations.