He was both incredible and incredibly exacting - something the discussion of west side story doesn’t cover is that he also hated some of his work in that show.

He was both incredible and incredibly exacting - something the discussion of west side story doesn’t cover is that he also hated some of his work in that show. For “I feel pretty” he regretted that the lyrics were more poised than the character would have delivered, and for “America”, he hated how some of the rhymes landed, e.g. “everything free in America/for a small fee in America” - a great rhyme, but sung at tempo it sounds like “for a smafee in ame-ri-ca” So you write the lyrics for one of the iconic musicals of the American canon, and spend a lot of time dissecting the flaws in your own work. Then there’s some of my favorite lyrics from his shows, for example, from Into the woods, where jack’s mother is singing to jack (of beanstalk fame) about selling their cow: “We’ve no time to sit and dither While her withers wither with her” Amazing. Even Sondheim talks about one of his proudest moments being when he played for coke porter late in his life: “ Porter had recently had both legs amputated, and Ethel Merman, the star of Gypsy—in which Sondheim’s words accompanied music by Jule Styne—had brought the young lyricist along as part of an entourage to cheer him up. Sondheim played the clever trio “Together.” “It may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life,” he writes, to witness Porter’s “gasp of delight” on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language: “Wherever I go, I know he goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos / Amigos / Together!” The level of detail and precision is incredible. The music is just as, if not more, precise.