(Reuters) — Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who assisted American musical theater evolve beyond pure entertainment and attain new artistic heights with these kinds of will work as “West Side Story,” “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd,” died early Friday at the age of 91, his publicist reported.

The musical excellent died at his residence in Roxbury, Connecticut, spokesperson Kathryn Zuckerman explained to Reuters by electronic mail, declaring she experienced very little further facts. The news was noted before by the New York Instances.

Sondheim’s 8 Tony Awards for his lyrics and songs surpassed the total of any other composer. In 2008 he also gained a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.

He started out early, mastering the artwork of musical theater when he was a teenager from his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, the legendary lyricist guiding “The Sound of Songs.”

“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was in flip mentored by Sondheim, has referred to as him musical theater’s biggest lyricist.

Sondheim’s most thriving is effective involved “Into the Woods,” which opened on Broadway in 1987 and employed kid’s fairy tales to untangle grownup obsessions the 1979 thriller “Sweeney Todd,” about a murderous barber in London whose victims are served as meat pies and 1962’s “A Humorous Issue Took place on the Way to the Forum,” a vaudeville-style comedy set in historic Rome.

He also wrote the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s rating for “West Aspect Tale,” influenced by William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and collaborated with fellow composer Jule Styne as lyricist for “Gypsy,” loosely based mostly on the memoirs of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee.

“I love the theater as considerably as new music, and the full thought of finding throughout to an viewers and earning them laugh, making them cry – just generating them come to feel – is paramount to me,” Sondheim reported in a 2013 interview with National Public Radio.

Quite a few of Sondheim’s strike musicals were being turned into motion pictures, like the 2014 film “Into the Woods,” starring Meryl Streep, and the 2007 “Sweeney Todd” with Johnny Depp. A new film edition of “West Facet…