Word: sondheimer
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There is much to enjoy. New and unusual works? In addition to La Rondine, the company has revived Léo Delibes' fragile song of the subcontinent, Lakmé, and mounted an operatic staging of Stephen Sondheim's Grand Guignol Broadway masterpiece, Sweeney Todd; next month it presents Philip Glass's new opera Akhnaten. Splendid singing? Clarion-voiced Tenor Jerry Hadley shone as Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, and the company's impressive roster of young sopranos this season includes Kaaren Erickson, Elizabeth Hynes and Elizabeth Knighton...
Still, Sills plans to continue in this season's vein. She will encourage provocative, revisionist productions of classic operas. There will be more modern works (Sills and Sondheim are discussing a full-fledged opera, and she hopes to commission Glass's next piece) as well as selected revivals of Broadway shows like South Pacific. "We should be looked at as an experimental company," says Sills, contrasting the City Opera's image with that of the grander Metropolitan Opera next door at Lincoln Center. "[Music Director] Jimmy Levine agrees with me that the Met should be like...
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; Book by James Lapine
...demanding concept. No high-kicking razzmatazz here; in fact, no choreography. No heart-pummeling sentiment; in fact, virtually no characters, as Author-Director James Lapine follows Seurat's lead and dehydrates his actors into cardboard stereotypes. Nor is there a surfeit of "humma-mamumma-mamum-mable melodies," Stephen Sondheim's derisively witty phrase from his last show, Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim long ago renounced such simple show-biz pleasures; neither Dot nor the audience gets to go to the Follies. This score is often doggedly mimetic, achieving its pointillist effects note by Johnny-one-note. Nearly every...
...discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, even composers with the most commercial motives may turn out to have been writing memorable, lasting scores. Two of the most electrifying operas of the '70s, for example, were Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd...