Stephen Sondheim is silent over sitcom featuring hard-drinking composer
A forthcoming American television series written by [Sondheim’s] friend John Logan, The Miraculous Year, follows the life of a fictional Broadway composer, Terry Segal, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sondheim.
The original script for the pilot episode is understood to have portrayed Segal as a homosexual, heavy-drinking Broadway composer, aged 44, who lives a self-destructive, cocaine-fuelled existence before having a heart attack.
Sondheim, who is homosexual, had a heart attack in 1979, when he was 49. He has admitted that he has a “large capacity for alcohol” and told his biographer, Meryle Secrest, that he took cocaine in the Seventies.I kept thinking about All That Jazz, which has a heterosexual, heavy-drinking Broadway choreographer in his 40s “who lives a self-destructive, cocaine-fuelled existence before having a heart attack.” The difference, I suppose, that Bob Fosse was telling his own story in that one.
