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Watch: Signature Theatre Artistic Director Matthew Gardiner Visits Sondheim Collection at the Library of Congress
The collection includes cut songs, unproduced teleplays, scrapbooks, recordings, and more.
February 27, 2026 By Meg Masseron, Logan Culwell-Block
Watch Signature Theatre Artistic Director Matthew Gardiner tour the Library of Congress's new Sondheim Collection with the library's senior music specialist Mark Horowitz in the video above. Approximately 5,000 items from the personal archives of late Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim have found a home at the Washington, D.C. institution, with everything from music and lyric sketches to cut songs, unproduced work, scrapbooks, recordings, and more.
"I got to know Steve in 1990 when we worked on a production of Merrily We Roll Along at Arena Stage, so I wrote him a letter saying, 'Steve, now I'm at the Library of Congress, let me do a show-and-tell for you...I think I can guarantee you a moving experience.' I spent a couple of weeks preparing for this visit, I covered a room with things I thought would be moving...one of the things I wanted to show you was Steve's letter to Bernstein for the opening night of West Side Story," says Horowitz in the video, which offers a glimpse of the treasured letter, in which Sondheim extends his admiration and gratitude towards Bernstein, to whom he writes: "Friendship is a thing I give and receive rarely, but for what it's worth, I want you to know you have it from me always."
Sondheim, who died in 2021 at the age of 91, was a true titan of the musical theatre, re-defining the genre with a string of musicals in the 1970s (all directed by Harold Prince) that included Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd. His legendary body of work also includes West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park With George, Into the Woods, Passion, Assassins, Road Show, and Here We Are.
His manuscripts join a collection that also includes the work of Sondheim's friends, collaborators, and mentors, including Oscar Hammerstein II, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, Mary Rodgers, Arthur Laurents, Harold Prince, and Milton Babbitt. They also join a previous Sondheim donation, his collection of records, which came to the library in 1995.
Visit LOC.gov.
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