Stephen Sondheim suggested evening the percentage at two percent each, but Sondheim refused because he wanted the credit. Sondheim later said he wished "someone stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth because it would have been nice to get that extra percentage". After "West Side Story" opened, Shevelove lamented the lack of "low-brow comedy" on Broadway and mentioned a possible musical based on Plautus' Roman comedies. When Sondheim was interested in the idea he called a friend, Larry Gelbart, to co-write the script. The show went through a number of drafts, and was interrupted briefly by Sondheim's next project. In 1959, Sondheim was
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