Word: nunn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Meanwhile, London is playing host to a Sondheim at the Garrick Theatre in the West End, where director Trevor Nunn is teasing out the nuances in A Little Night Music, Sondheim's 1973 adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. Often performed as a light soufflé of a show, Nunn has turned the musical, which runs until July 25, into a Chekhovian meditation on desire and death. (See pictures of London...
Others give the credit to Sondheim himself. Director Nunn compares the lyricist's poetic gift and humanism to Shakespeare's. Both men, he says, are "fascinated with the contradictions of human beings, with their complexities and ambiguities. As with Shakespeare, there's heightened poetic expression in Sondheim, but when you dig into it, you find it's in touch with something real." The song "Send in the Clowns" contains not just pretty lyrics, but musings perfectly pitched for the character of Desirée, a glamorous actress pushing 40 and facing what may be her last chance for love...
...first five days of Night Music rehearsals, Nunn had the cast speak - not sing - the lyrics. He found that, unlike the numbers in most musicals, they didn't stop the show, but rather carried it on, each song a little scene in its own right, deepening the characters while advancing the plot. "I approach characters like an actor approaches them," says Sondheim. "With the risk of only slight exaggeration, by the time I have written a score I know the book better than the author does. I've examined every word, and why [a character] says...
...know who else theater companies say that about?" asks Night Music director Nunn. "Chekhov." When it comes to Sondheim, debate about the future of the musical misses the point. He occupies a place in the pantheon not of musical theater, but of theater itself...
...lead by example and take public and significant efforts to reduce our weapons stockpiles as well as encouraging Russia to do the same. The rising calls of a number of eminent Americans, including the “Four Horsemen” (George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn) in several recent articles, lay out a nuclear-free world as the only possible stable endpoint. As long as nuclear weapons exist anywhere, no one is safe, particularly in this age of terrorism, when bombs can no longer serve as deterrents for stateless actors who believe themselves martyrs...