Leonard Bernstein dubbed into other languages. All of them were released on DVD by Kultur Video (half of them in 2013). Around the time he was appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic, and living opposite Carnegie Hall at The Osborne, Bernstein composed the music for two shows. The first was for the operetta "Candide", which was first performed in 1956 with a libretto by Lillian Hellman based on Voltaire's novella. The second was Bernstein's collaboration with the choreographer Jerome Robbins, the writer Arthur Laurents, and the lyricist Stephen Sondheim to produce the musical "West Side Story". The first three had
Stephen Sondheim a musical adaption of "Beggar on Horseback" (a 1924 play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, with permission from Kaufman) which had three performances. A member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, he graduated "magna cum laude" in 1950. "A few painful years of struggle" followed, when Sondheim auditioned songs, lived in his father's dining room to save money and spent time in Hollywood writing for the television series "Topper". He devoured 1940s and 1950s films, and has called cinema his "basic language"; his film knowledge got him through "The $64,000 Question" contestant tryouts. Sondheim dislikes movie musicals, favoring