I love the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. I was hoping for a biography of the artist and his work. I got an autopsy that uses every word in the thesaurus to analyze what musicals and what music really means within some objective cultural sense blah blah blah. This book goes on like that forever.

The book is a bit like listening to a NASA engineer talking about the interpersonal impact of the biological hormonal sensation known as “love”. (Please stop!)

Listening to it I felt like saying, “just climb down from your ivory tower and tell us the story of Sondheim and his work!”

Someday someone will write a book about Stephen Sondheim, they will interview his friends and fellow artists they will interview his producers and performers who worked with him. They will write about Sondheim’s philosophy and his inspiration behind his many great works.

But this isn’t that book.