Word: sondheimer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...LIFE'S CHOICE IRONIES that (in the realm of art, anyway) what is gentle and equivocal often outlasts what is tough and brazen. When in 1970 Company first opened--music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by George Furth--it was celebrated for its punch. Here was an innovative, hard-hitting musical that trafficked in booze and pot, bile and cynicism, promiscuity and adultery. Yet these are the aspects of Company that seem most dated a quarter-century later in a revival that has just come to Broadway, starring Boyd Gaines as Robert, the bachelor of many nicknames (Bobby, Robby...
...aisle. And Robert Westenberg, contemplating Robert's inquiry, "You ever sorry you got married?" offers a splendid version of that bittersweet hymn to ambivalence Sorry--Grateful. Westenberg vindicates the suspicion of those who (overlooking the cheesy arrangement of the original-cast recording) have long viewed this as one of Sondheim's most touching songs...
...Sondheim was 40 when Company premiered. Anyone Can Whistle and the lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story were behind him; A Little Night Music and Follies were soon to come. This revival provides a useful vantage for surveying the second half of a venturesome, glittering career. Among those American artists today whose livelihood is linked to words and wordplay, Sondheim holds a unique preeminence. There's no contemporary novelist, poet or essayist who is so indisputably at the top of his or her field as Sondheim is of his. As a song lyricist, he has no plausible peer...
...they appear in. Detachable because his lyrics are, in their wit and dexterity, satisfyingly autonomous; they appear in anthologies of light verse and books of contemporary poetry. Undetachable because his songs, usually integrated tightly into the plot line, often lose resonance on their own. It's no accident that Sondheim has originated only one tune--Send in the Clowns--that can be sure of raising a roar of recognition when its opening bars waft through any cocktail lounge in the country...
...Orleans blues (I Gotta Be Your Man), some certifiable rock-'n'-roll earthshakers (The Man), a little gospel, a brush of soul, and an overall acid bath of Newman's corrosive wit. It's music of an ambition and quality not often heard outside the work of Stephen Sondheim (whom Newman reveres), and it is performed on the album with tremendous brio by James Taylor, who sports a no-sweat self-mocking cool as God; Linda Ronstadt as the tremulous, winsome Margaret; Bonnie Raitt as Martha, a piece of trade tough enough to wring out the devil's heart...