Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rueful look at love out of synch, Send In the Clowns, for A Little Night Music. Each of the 14 shows for which he has been composer, lyricist or both has been shot through with emotion. His latest, Into the Woods, which opened last month and promptly became Broadway's newest musical hit, with advance sales climbing to $2.5 million, embraces every experience from birth to death, from delirious infatuation to parting regret. Yet to acerbic critics and ardent fans alike -- and Sondheim, at 57, is surely the most controversial major figure in the American theater -- his own dispassionate characterization...
Sondheim's intellectuality is reflected in his choice of subjects, far weightier than the heft of the average straight play on Broadway, let alone the merry moonshine of past musicals: the birth of pointillist painting (Sunday in the Park); Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures, 1977); a murderous barber with a Marxist-sounding class grievance and a woman companion who cooks his victims in pies (Sweeney Todd, 1979); the impossibility of marriage (Company, 1970); and the decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence (Follies, 1971). Like...
Anna's tragedy is that she could conceivably return to communist Prague, recant her politics, and become a star again, rather than remain in America and demean herself by jumping at understudy roles in silly, pretentious Broadway shows. As she tells her former acting professor, a Czech who has sold out his politics to regain his status, "My problem is I love America too much." He answers, "But America doesn't love you, and it never will." She replies, "But it leaves me alone...
...started to make repairs by appearing "in Atlantic City a hundred times, Vegas 200 times, Miami Beach a million times." Then came ventures in theater and film. A comedy, A Teaspoon Every Four Hours, featuring Jackie Mason and $100,000 of his money, lasted one night on Broadway. He produced and acted in the celluloid bomb The Stoolie, "another effort in my series of efforts to get somewhere." Through all those trials and travels on the road, Mason, 56, never married "because I didn't want to be intensely involved with someone I knew I wouldn't see a week...
...many years of obscurity made him desperate for stability and recognition. In a final theatrical gesture, Mason allowed his manager to talk him into doing a solo shot on Broadway. To the astonishment of everyone, including the star, it was an immediate smash. New York Times Critic Frank Rich wrote, "So sue me . . . Mason was very, very funny." The professionals closed ranks behind the comedian: Writer-Producer Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) returned eight times, and Mel Brooks announced that "nobody makes me laugh harder." Joe Papp, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, went further. When Donald Moffat...