Isn't it rich? Isn't it rare? For Stephen Sondheim, far from Broadway at Britain's oldest university, this is the year to send in the class.
The American composer-lyricist has just completed his first weeks as a visiting professor of drama and musical theater at Oxford, saying he isn't so much teaching as conducting "a musical on the road.""I said, when I agreed to take this course on, that I would only be willing to do so if it was in conjunction with a show of mine in rehearsal or production somewhere nearby," he said.
This was because Sondheim does not believe that theater, a collaborative effort, can be properly taught in a classroom.
So, on their third meeting, his 13 students were off to London's Royal National Theater to see rehearsals of "Sunday in the Park with George," which is to premiere March 15.
The students had already received librettist James Lapine's original script for the workshop production off-Broadway, and Lapine's finished script for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway show.
On a recent Monday, Sondheim showed them the video of the Broadway production made for American public television. The next day, they met the show's British director, Steven Pimlott, and studied a model of Tom Cairns' set.
Sondheim has a second show opening this summer on London's West End: "Into the Woods," directed by Richard Jones and starring Julia McKenzie.
The remainder of his week was spent on the students, who were asked to write and present an opening number for a show - "the most important part of a musical piece," he said.
The 59-year-old Sondheim fielded questions at St. Catherine's College in his first public event since arriving in Oxford Jan. 13 to inaugurate an annual professorship in contemporary theater. At the end of the week, he flew home and is due back this month to continue the course.
The chair is financed by a 1.75 million pound ($2.8 million) endowment from Cameron Mackintosh, the British producer of "The Phantom of the Opera," "Miss Saigon" and the 1987 London debut of Sondheim's "Follies."
Sondheim told the spillover crowd of 250 academics, students, stars and Oxford townspeople that he saw his task as encouraging young writers.
With Mackintosh's help, he selected 13 people in December from 92 applicants for a course he intends to be "very narrow" in focus.
"It is about songwriting for the theater, not songwriting for the airwaves, MTV or anything like that," he said.
Each applicant sent a tape of at least three musical numbers. Sondheim said the successful ones all displayed "a feel for the theater . . . a (musical) growth into manhood or womanhood."
He said they constituted "a truly heterogeneous group whose voices were not alike" and whose influences included "jazz and pop and traditional and folk and cabaret and Rodgers and Hammerstein and me."
The students, not exclusively Oxford alumni, are composers or lyricists, although they earn their living in such fields as publishing, pharmaceuticals and screenwriting. The 11 men are British; one of the women is Canadian, the other Australian.
The British have responded admiringly to Sondheim's appointment, despite complaints that Oxford undergraduates aren't more involved.
Richard Wolffe, news editor of the student newspaper Cherwell, called Mackintosh's gesture "well-meaning" but said that "the position is kind of irrelevant because we don't have any drama courses at the university."
Mark Steyn wrote in The Independent newspaper: "Nobody expects the young writers taking tutorials from Sondheim suddenly to produce a `Gypsy' or `Company,' but if the experience teaches nothing more than an awareness of the decades of evolution which preceded those shows, it will have been worthwhile."