Most artists can expect a slump in reputation with their deaths, but, five years after his passing at the age of ninety-one, the shine has yet to wear off Stephen Sondheim. In London alone, the sumptuous tribute show Old Friends was a big hit of 2023; at this year’s Olivier Awards, Into the Woods was crowned Best Musical Revival; next summer, the Barbican will stage Sunday in the Park with George with a starry cast.

In the United States, a Sondheim academic industry also thrives. Since Meryle Secrest’s biography was published with the composer’s cooperation in 1998, countless scholarly essays have pored over his oeuvre, a fraction of them recorded in The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies. A quarterly review ran for twenty-odd years, and there’s a Sondheim encyclopedia, too. The Library of Congress catalogue lists 288 books under the ‘Sondheim’ rubric, almost all to do with the composer.

Now comes a critical overview by the former New York Times journalist Daniel Okrent. Brisk and candid, Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy runs at about two thirds the length of Secrest’s book, but has the advantage over hers of including coverage of the last two decades of its subject’s life.