Word: sondheimer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...time when Broadway's musical well has run so dry that recycled revues like It Ain't Nothin' but the Blues and Fosse compete for Tonys, it comes as a pleasant shock to realize that Stephen Sondheim has had an unproduced show in his trunk for more than 40 years. The young composer wrote Saturday Night in the mid-'50s, but a planned Broadway opening was scuttled when the producer died. It was mounted for the first time by a small company in London in 1997. Now Chicago's Pegasus Players has given the musical (with two new songs added...
...pool their money so that Gene, the most ambitious of their band, can make a killing in the stock market. Despite piquant parallels to our own market mania, the story is a pretty standard boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-money trifle. But it's a showcase for a fresh and winning Sondheim score, from the days when he wrote melodies meant to be enjoyed, not deciphered...
Richard Rodgers' grandson, the most provocative and promising of post-Sondheim theatrical songwriters, has taken a sharp turn on the road to Broadway: his latest composition is a song cycle about love, sin, doubt and transcendence. The music is composed in an utterly personal style that blends pop, gospel and classical influences; the lyrics weave together Greek mythology and Christian hymnody to complex, unsettling effect. Persuasively performed on CD by singers such as Audra McDonald, Mandy Patinkin and Guettel, Myths & Hymns is a major event in American popular song...
...Loeb Experimental Theater rarely hosts musicals, since coordinating both choreography and singing presents quite a challenge in the limited space. Yet director Joseph Gfaller '01 has been bold enough to attempt Sondheim in Harvard's little black box, and he manages to put on a great show. The opening scene of A Little Night Music, in which the cast dances a long, impressive waltz, sets the tone for the rest of the show. While the number is far from tragic, the eerie lighting and solemnity suggest the darker side of the play to come...
Thankfully, Sondheim gives audiences a guide to understanding A Little Night Music right from the beginning. The wheelchair-bound matron Leonora Armfeldt (Lucy MacPhail '01) explains to her granddaughter (Kari Gauksheim '01) that people fall into three categories: the young, the fools and the old. MacPhail does a wonderful job with her elderly, jaded character, providing perspective on the play by holding the rest of the characters in brazen contempt. The Leibeslieders, a kind of Greek chorus, add another narrative layer to the work. Each of the singers parallels a character and performs occasional scenes based the plot, though...