Word: sondheimer
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...makings of Broadway musicals. The U.S., after all, is a nation built on optimism, and the musical, its foremost contribution to the world theater, has typically been seen as a straightforward comic romance that sends audiences out grinning and humming. But in an intensely imaginative 13-show career, Stephen Sondheim has embraced all those unpromising themes. From his big-time debut in 1957 as the lyricist of West Side Story to his 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, a fantasy about the creation of a French impressionist painting, Sondheim, 56, has steadily pushed toward--or beyond...
This is all the more impressive because Sondheim rarely originates concepts and recoils from most proposals made by others. Indeed, says his erstwhile collaborator, Director Harold Prince, "Sondheim will find every good reason not to do a show." Once he agrees, however, his creativity is liberated by the confinement of specifics. Sondheim has said, "If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini...
Critics have often labeled Sondheim's work special or even avant-garde. In fact, Sondheim is simply carrying forward an innovative tradition in which he was steeped from youth. Born into a prosperous New York City dress- manufacturing family, Sondheim had as friend and mentor Oscar Hammerstein II. Although Hammerstein became a pillar of the mainstream musical, some of his revered standards, notably Oklahoma! and South Pacific, were seen the way Sondheim's work often is now, as daringly unromantic and political. Where Sondheim genuinely differs from the past is in his effort to avoid writing pop ditties so catchy...
These days Sondheim has disappointingly little competition. For the past two years--since Sunday in the Park--the New York Drama Critics Circle has not deemed any musical worthy of an award. Next season promises a resurgence, with perhaps the brightest glimmer on the horizon Sondheim's own Into the Woods, devised with his Sunday in the Park partner, James Lapine. Its premise is that the stories of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy-tale figures all take place on the same day in the same forest, practically within bumping distance. The show...
...mythical audience for the Broadway musical in its heyday was the tired businessman looking for a little mindless entertainment. That kind of theatergoer has often been intimidated by Sondheim's literacy, acidity, unpredictability and aspiration. Thus Sondheim's admirers hope that Into the Woods will at last give him a blockbuster mainstream hit. However the show fares, Sondheim is once again rejuvenating a too often tired and mindless format. And the best news for the future of the musical is that Sondheim can rightly claim that, in the title phrase of a bawdy anthem he wrote for the movie...