Word: sondheimer
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...embarrassingly exuberant dancers kicking up their legs and belting out endless choruses of catchy ditties. The word jazz evokes an aesthetic of a different sort-two-drink minimums, low-key cool, wandering saxophone solos that trail off into ecstasy. The new album Color and Light: Jazz Sketches on Sondheim brings the worlds of jazz and Broadway together, and the result is a sensuous, satisfying collection of songs. These interpretations are more intelligent and textured than the average Broadway show tune, yet they contain more melodiousness and amiability than one usually expects from jazz...
...Stephen Sondheim is among Broadway's best and most daring songwriters (A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George), but his cerebral, challenging compositions possess depths that cannot always be fully explored in the sometimes constraining format of musical theater. Those depths are plumbed here. Each track on Color and Light features one or more jazz musicians performing a Sondheim show tune. Singer Peabo Bryson and saxophonist Joshua Redman join forces on a version of Sondheim's Pretty Women (from the musical Sweeney Todd) that is mature and mysterious, dark and sweet. Grover Washington Jr., with charismatic...
...create entertainment the whole world will pay to see. The aim is pure show-and-tell: it shows with grand images and lavish costumes; it tells with familiar songs. A cuddly optimism replaces the mordant philosophizing of Tony Award-winning shows. People don't go to Vegas for a Sondheim musical (indeed, not many go to Broadway for one). Vegas shows are zippy, out-of-mind experiences aimed at vacationers of all classes and countries. "You have to have a certain style of show here," says EFX! master Crawford. "When half your audience doesn't speak English, you have...
...most unexpected classical crossover hit of all time, landing on the British pop charts in 1993. Now Upshaw has another unlikely triumph on her hands: a new album called I Wish It So, which consists of mostly unfamiliar theater songs by Kurt Weill, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim...
...opera singers have ever seemed so convincing -- and comfortable -- in the Broadway idiom. Upshaw begins with four songs of yearning for love: the album's title number, taken from Blitzstein's 1959 Juno; There Won't Be Trumpets, a song dropped from Sondheim's short-lived 1964 show Anyone Can Whistle; What More Do I Need?, from an unproduced Sondheim musical of 1954, ! Saturday Night; and That's Him, from Weill and Ogden Nash's 1943 One Touch of Venus. Accompanied alternately by small ensembles and an orchestra, Upshaw stakes her claim as theater music's most luminous ingenue since...