(Reuters) – Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who served American musical theater evolve outside of pure enjoyment and attain new creative heights with these kinds of will work as “West Facet Story,” “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd,” died early Friday at the age of 91, his publicist said.

The musical excellent died at his residence in Roxbury, Connecticut, spokesperson Kathryn Zuckerman instructed Reuters by email, declaring she had minimal supplemental information. The news was noted before by the New York Situations.

Sondheim’s 8 Tony Awards for his lyrics and new music surpassed the overall of any other composer. In 2008 he also won a Exclusive Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.

He begun early, learning the art of musical theater when he was a teenager from his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, the famous lyricist behind “The Seem of Audio.”

“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was in change mentored by Sondheim, has identified as him musical theater’s finest lyricist.

Sondheim’s most thriving operates included “Into the Woods,” which opened on Broadway in 1987 and utilized kid’s fairy tales to untangle adult obsessions the 1979 thriller “Sweeney Todd,” about a murderous barber in London whose victims are served as meat pies and 1962’s “A Funny Matter Transpired on the Way to the Discussion board,” a vaudeville-design comedy established in historic Rome.

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

“I adore the theater as a lot as tunes, and the total strategy of receiving throughout to an viewers and creating them chuckle, generating them cry – just creating them…