Word: sondheimer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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AUTHOR: STEPHEN SONDHEIM...
...STEPHEN SONDHEIM SAYS HE'S never been in love, but he writes better than any other living composer or lyricist about the pleasures of passion, the pangs of jealousy, the durability and disillusionment of life in partnership -- the state he describes, in a characteristic song title, as perpetually Sorry- Grateful. It's been more than five years since he last brought a show to Broadway (his unpleasant Assassins, about John Wilkes Booth et al., had a brief sold-out run off-Broadway), and the next best thing to a new Sondheim score is a thoughtful revisit to old ones...
...show, Putting It Together, is loosely conceived as a party at which old flames flicker and new ones spark. To quote Sondheim's nearest intellectual forebear, Cole Porter, what a swell party it is. With new material from Sondheim, designs by three Tony winners, choreography by Bob Avian (A Chorus Line, Miss Saigon) and a cast headed by Julie Andrews in her first New York stage appearance since Camelot in 1961, the show seems absurdly overabundant for its venue, a nonprofit house seating 299. But then, impresario Cameron Mackintosh (Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables) has been showing up night...
Lapine is working with Stephen Sondheim on a combination of two one acts, because, he muses, "I guess I like that form." (Sunday in the Park and Woods originated as one acts as well.) The first act is based on the 19th Century novel, Fosca, by Tanchetti, and the second act is based on a contemporary non-fiction book called Muscle by Sam Fussell. "They're both about beauty and self image," he said. "The first act is about an extremely unattractive, anorexic woman who gets a dashing, handsome man to fall in love with her. And the second...
...really intrigued by muscle and he [Sondheim] was really intrigued by Fosca, so we said, 'Hey, let's just do them together.' To me muscle is a metaphor for the eighties. My generation dropped out, did drugs, became very internal, in the same way that the eighties generation became external, more concerned with the outside than the inside. Usually I write the book, but on Fosca, Steve will be writing a lot as well...