Word: sondheimer
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...Guys and Dolls, Jelly's Last Jam, The Most Happy Fella, Five Guys Named Moe, The Will Rogers Follies, The Secret Garden, Once on This Island, Grand Hotel and, in an earlier gestation, Falsettos. The ardent browser will find off-Broadway hits (Song of Singapore) and fizzles (Stephen Sondheim's Assassins) and even the season's notorious flops on Broadway (Nick & Nora) and off (Eating Raoul). If Moose Murders had been a musical, someone would now be recording...
Composer Daniel Levine, who has never written a musical before, has yet to develop a distinctive sound: there are stylistic echoes of everything from Blossom Time to Sondheim, although the wistfulness is genuine enough in the title character's Act I showstopper, I'm Lost. Levine's writing partner, Peter Kellogg, also a beginner, deftly focuses the story on Anna's forced choice between romantic love for Vronsky and maternal love for her child by her husband Karenin. But Kellogg nearly wrecks the enterprise with lyrics so blandly generic that they convey hardly any specifics of character -- especially frustrating when...
Phone rings, door chimes, in comes ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY. At 10 one May Sunday morning in 1970, cinema verite filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (Monterey Pop) took his camera into the studio to document the recording of Company, the witty, brittle musical that established Stephen Sondheim as Broadway's premier lyricist-composer. Pennebaker fashioned the joy and angst of the 18 1/2-hr. endeavor into a thrilling mini-musical in itself. Virtually unseen for two decades, the film is now available on video (RCA Victor). High points: Dean Jones earnestly attacking Being Alive, Elaine Stritch agonizing through The Ladies Who Lunch...
...Like Sondheim, Finn is prone to write tinkly, brittle art songs that break off in midphrase and to fill them with lyrics so clever they reward, and maybe require, repeated hearing. Like Sondheim, he is witty, wistful and wickedly funny. But Finn is readier to satisfy the playgoer's yearning for a hummable phrase. In Falsettos he gives every character a big ballad, ranging from the tender What More Can I Say to the abandoned wife's showstopper I'm Breaking Down to the AIDS patient's edgy, sardonic You Gotta Die Sometime. In all, the three dozen musical numbers...
...years later, Finn advanced Marvin's story in March of the Falsettos, which begins with Marvin envisioning his old and new lives merging into one big, happy family and ends with him alone. The narrative was shaped with director James Lapine, who vaulted from that into becoming Sondheim's director and librettist on his two most recent Broadway musicals, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. But Finn could not seem to capitalize on his new opportunities...