The Latest Breaking News from Stephen Sondheim

4/5 A lavish production that plays to the musical’s strengths

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s fairytale adventure follows its archetypal characters into real-world emotion, brilliantly drawn and sung

Theatre and opera director whose work stretched from Gilbert and Sullivan to Shakespeare

Inspired by a protest that took place while he was at Yale, Safe Space is musicals star Jamie Bogyo’s debut play. He speaks about well-meaning white liberals, saying ‘cringe’ things – and tutoring a Bin Laden

Looking Glass legend Austin Grossman describes the sometimes absurd process of conjuring Dunwall.

A treasure trove of manuscripts, notebooks and recordings from the theatre legend has been acquired by the Library of Congress in Washington DC

Manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings, notebooks and scrapbooks from Stephen Sondheim have been donated to the Library of Congress

In musical theatre lore, when emotion outgrows words, characters sing (and when emotion outgrows song, they dance). This idea – in various guises, configurations and subversions – has shaped musical theatre for the last eight decades. The expectation that in a musical, characters sing is deeply ingrained: songs move the…

A droll Dionysos, an ab-obsessed himbo and a waddling ballet for goggle-clad frogs can’t outshine Sondheim’s songs in this rarely seen version of the ancient Greek satire