Word: sondheimer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Stephen Sondheim discovered in his musical Into the Woods, updating a fairy tale presents some prickly challenges. The old-fashioned and sometimes painfully stilted language must be made contemporary and relevant. At the same time, a writer should remain faithful to that sense of enchantment and wonder which underscores every fantasy...
That lyric, with its cross-cultural elisions and unsprung rhythms stashed inside orchestrations belonging more to Sondheim than Springsteen, is from Tokyo Rose, an elfin but savage ten-song essay on the growing misalliance of Japan and America. The record is not only big themed, it is big fun. That combination of intellectual ambition and musical serendipity can be recognized as the work of Van Dyke Parks by his legion of . . . oh, say, 782 fans. We're not talking Milli Vanilli here. But we are on the subject of someone rather terrific...
Into the Woods (1987). Stephen Sondheim's best musical was gorgeous to look at, haunting to hear and thought provoking to remember. A fractured fairy tale that brought into the same forest Cinderella, Rapunzel and the like, it asked what comes after happily-ever-after, pondering what it means to grow...