SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM, Pegasus Players. Born a generation too late to fully participate in Broadway’s most fertile era–roughly the 1920s through the ’50s–Stephen Sondheim still turned out witty tunes and pleasing lyrics worthy of the masters: Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin. When this revue of early Sondheim songs opened in 1976, he hadn’t yet written Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park With George, or Into the Woods, yet this lively, loving anthology contains an embarrassment of riches. It’s packed with songs from West Side Story and Gypsy (to which Sondheim contributed lyrics) and Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (for which he wrote music and lyrics), as well as songs from his famous flops Do I Hear a Waltz?, Anyone Can Whistle, and Pacific Overtures.
