After Sondheim: Contemporary Musical Theater Composers

The legendary lyricist and composer, Stephen Sondheim, who died at age 91 last November, is still inspiring a new generation of writers making their way to Broadway and beyond.

Sondheim’s voice will no doubt resonate for generations to come. His influence is seen across the art form, including in works by this year’s Tony-nominated composers. Among the nominees are Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop), Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss (Six), and Jason Robert Brown (Mr. Saturday Night), all composers with distinctive styles.

“So much of my career has been joyfully at the service of and in collaboration with the people who are my heroes,” says composer Jason Robert Brown who has contributed to the American musical theater canon with Parade, The Bridges of Madison County, and more. “A musical opens things up emotionally in different ways,” explains Brown about his latest musical Mr. Saturday Night starring Billy Crystal. “My job was to let this character Buddy Young Jr., who's this sort of abrasive comic who has lost his place, in not just the business but in the conversation…and to say, how does he open up to the world?”

When it comes to having a singular style, “the instrumentation, the chords, the harmonies, the texture...the verbal language,” as Brown puts it, “Steve very much set the template for that.”

Michael R. Jackson’s self-referential musical, A Strange Loop, about a Black, queer aspiring composer facing life’s disappointments leads the pack of Tony nominees this year with 11 nominations. For Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the Tony-nominated writers behind Six, the British pop musical based on the wives of King Henry VIII, Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along is difficult to watch. “[It’s about] writers growing jaded and old, and we're sitting next to each other going, ‘Oh no. It's going to come,’” says Moss.

Marlow and Moss, however, are far from growing jaded. The popularity of Six has proved that musical theater has entered a new era, with different measures of success. After presenting their musical as a student production, the pair returned to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a professional production, and producers encouraged audiences to share in the delight of the final number of the show as if it were a pop concert. Fans uploaded the footage to their Instagram feeds, and Six became a hit.

“It all happened very, very quickly compared to...the journey of a lot of musicals,” says Marlow. As of March 2022, the London Cast Album has been streamed on Spotify over 262 million times.

“There's a hunger for more musical theater writers,” says Michael R. Jackson who is now lending his talent to writing screenplays. “The commercial reality of musical theater is it's as difficult as it ever was, and I think that the writers all have to find their own path to these opportunities.”

Like in the case of Marlow and Moss, one of today’s approaches to breaking into musical theater involves audience interaction. The apparent power of social media has disrupted the traditional path for a new generation of theater makers. Online streaming and imaginative performances are ways for theater and production companies to take notice.

In 2022, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album went to a musical released on TikTok. Playwrights Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear wrote The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical based on the hit TV series, and the musical went viral on social media as they published their writing process in a series of TikToks. The duo performed one of their more compelling numbers with Darren Criss at the Kennedy Center's 50th Anniversary concert, broadcast on PBS in October of last year.

Lucy Moss, who also scored a Tony nomination for Best Direction of a Musical for Six, believes that a young playwright or director with a distinguished position within Broadway bears some responsibility. “Let's talk about the structures of theater and the traditions and the good things of the traditions,” she says, “But also the things that might need changing.”

Moss shared that the audiences are one of her favorite aspects of theater since she happened into this new world, “You got families going just for a bit of fun, and watching the dads about 30 seconds [into the show] laugh [at] the first joke...sort of getting onboard in a way that they probably wouldn't have chosen, to see some feminist piece of theater.”

To find more composers inspired by Stephen Sondheim, visit the #PBSForTheArts hashtag on social media.