Word: sondheimer
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Like the aging chanteuse in his paean to theatrical longevity, "I'm Still Here," Sondheim has survived through musical vogues and eras. The Broadway where he started out in the '50s is no more. Once the majority of Broadway audiences were New Yorkers; now they are mostly tourists. Rock and pop have moved into the mainstream, edging out movie and show tunes as the world's musical lingua franca. Sondheim's not bitter: "Pop made people listen to lyrics more." He is regretful, though, that orchestras have shrunk - no new Sondheim show has had a full orchestra since...
Meanwhile, London is playing host to a Sondheim at the Garrick Theatre in the West End, where director Trevor Nunn is teasing out the nuances in A Little Night Music, Sondheim's 1973 adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. Often performed as a light soufflé of a show, Nunn has turned the musical, which runs until July 25, into a Chekhovian meditation on desire and death. (See pictures of London...
Earlier this spring, a London fringe theater put on a sellout production of Saturday Night, about young Brooklynites gambling on the 1929 stock market, which Sondheim penned when he was 24 and saw performed on stage first in 1997. "I take it as an encouraging sign that the shows are worth looking at a second time," Sondheim says. "Most musicals, you look at them a second time, they're not as good as they were the first time." His own endure, he believes, because "I write with better librettists. They're better playwrights than the librettists of most musicals...
Others give the credit to Sondheim himself. Director Nunn compares the lyricist's poetic gift and humanism to Shakespeare's. Both men, he says, are "fascinated with the contradictions of human beings, with their complexities and ambiguities. As with Shakespeare, there's heightened poetic expression in Sondheim, but when you dig into it, you find it's in touch with something real." The song "Send in the Clowns" contains not just pretty lyrics, but musings perfectly pitched for the character of Desirée, a glamorous actress pushing 40 and facing what may be her last chance for love...
...sing - the lyrics. He found that, unlike the numbers in most musicals, they didn't stop the show, but rather carried it on, each song a little scene in its own right, deepening the characters while advancing the plot. "I approach characters like an actor approaches them," says Sondheim. "With the risk of only slight exaggeration, by the time I have written a score I know the book better than the author does. I've examined every word, and why [a character] says...