Word: lyricist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...show's essential conception in Eliot Elisofon's picture of Gloria Swanson amid the ruins of Manhattan's Roxy Theater, a barococo movie palace that was demolished in 1960. "That sparked the whole notion of rubble?how it relates to the past and present." Prince set Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with him on Forum and Company, to work emulating typical mid-'20s and '30s show tunes for the "Loveland" sequence, and devised the flowing, cinematic style of the play. He also gave Costume Designer Florence Klotz one great illumination: Follies was to be a "Fellini musical...
...that point Prince had acquired the show's two greatest assets, disparate but complementary: Smith and Sondheim, the star of another era and the lyricist of today; the enduring actress and the volatile writer; the svelte woman and the stylish wordman...
...other talent: Stephen Sondheim. For the musical, he has written some of the glossiest, wittiest lyrics in Broadway history. His melodies gracefully genuflect to Kern and Gershwin, Berlin and Arlen. His words bow to no one. With Follies he has established himself, beyond doubt, as the theater's supreme lyricist...
...mother, an interior decorator known to friends as "Foxy," Stephen easily became a social caterpillar on the Manhattan show-biz party circuit. At one affair he met Playwright Arthur Laurents, who was reworking Romeo and Juliet in modern dress. Lenny Bernstein was doing the music, said Laurents. The lyricist? There was none at present...
...Sondheim became co-author of West Side Story and an established Broadway lyricist. "Steve always wanted to be an American Noel Coward," Foxy recalls fondly. The lyrics for Sondheim's next show, Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne, revealed a Lorenz Hartfulness. He rhymed Mazeppa and schlepper, and the progression "he goes, she goes, egos, amigos" could have come from the master himself. Despite his growing reputation as a lyricist, Sondheim yearned to be recognized as a composer, although his credentials as a musician were skimpy. In 1962, though, he wrote the music as well as the words...