Printed menu for The Kennedy Center Honors. Saturday, December 4, 1993. Cardstock with raised gilt illustration to front, bound with gold/green ribbon. 2 pp. Fine. 

From the collection of Sondheim's friend Larry Miller (1935-2018) who with his partner Robert Beardsley, were longtime close friends of Sondheim.  Miller worked in advertising in New York City in the 1950s, moving to Boston in 1963.  According to his obituary in the Berwick, ME "Weekly Sentinel," March 23, 2018 (Volume 14, Issue No. 12), Miller moved to Boston and "parlayed his classy style and copywriting skill into Laurence Associates" and in 1979  founded Larry Miller Productions, creating "innovative, state of the art Audio Visual presentations for ad agencies and corporations in Boston," subsequently retiring to his home near Ogunquit "to pursue writing memoirs...and entertaining his vast network of colorful friends."  A later New York Times article on Sondheim (Meryle Secrest, "THEATER; A Stage Era's Passing Gave Birth to 'Follies'," NY Times 6/14/98), notes that "Sondheim invariably carried a flask on opening nights, drinking as a way to combat the tension. But starting with ''Company'' (which had opened the year before, in 1970), Larry Miller, one of his friends, would hire a capacious limousine. It would be parked at the curb like a welcome wagon, Sondheim said, and at intermission they would repair to the car to drink champagne and smoke pot." 

One of the most important figures in twentieth-century musical theater, Sondheim is credited for having "reinvented the American musical." His shows tackled "unexpected themes that range far beyond the [genre's] traditional subjects" with "music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication" and addressed "darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience", with songs often tinged with "ambivalence" about various aspects of life. Sondheim began his career by writing the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959), before eventually devoting himself solely to writing both music and lyrics. His best-known works include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987). His numerous accolades include eight Tony Awards (including a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2008), an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has a theater named for him both on Broadway and in the West End of London.