Word: sondheimer
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...decades now, fans of American musical theater have been fretting about the death of the genre. As globo-spectacles like Mamma Mia! and Beauty and the Beast crowd out daring new artworks, "where," ask these anxious theatergoers, "are the young Sondheims?" There won't be any. Not because high-brow musical theater is dead, but because the old Sondheim keeps on being new. Composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, 79, continues to dominate the genre he has constantly reinvented, first with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on West Side Story in 1957, Company (1970), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...
Having written his first musical at 15, under the tutelage of Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim is frequently cast as the last of the genre's greats. But far from being a relic from a golden age, his work continues to gain new audiences and interpretations. This season saw major revivals of A Little Night Music in London and West Side Story on Broadway - where there's been at least one Sondheim show playing annually for the past five years. Add in smaller venues, there are hundreds - even thousands - of revivals of his shows in any given year...
...there may be more to come. Sondheim's "nibbling" at a couple of new shows with his two longtime collaborators, John Weidman and James Lapine, and is writing an annotated retrospective of his lyrics. But breaking fresh ground can be hard going, says Sondheim, whose latest work, Road Show - based on the lives of huckster brothers behind Florida's ill-fated 1920s real-estate boom - was more than a decade in the making. "You think every time you pick up your pencil it's going to be a little bit easier, but it isn't," he says...
Road Show had a limited run and mixed reviews when it opened in New York City last winter, but that's an old tradition with Sondheim. Many of his original productions were commercial - and critical - flops the first time round. Critics found him cold, audiences found him élitist, and producers wanted tunes people could hum. Much of Sondheim's career has been spent waiting for everyone else to catch up. And they usually do. This season, fans in the U.S. can see productions of his works from the Midwest to Florida, or take their pick from hundreds of versions...
...dinner party with the right people can stoke spirited debate. The 76-year-old host has acknowledged he occasionally mangles an unfamiliar name or movie title (the Japanese director Kon Ichikawa came out "Ron Ichikawa," the French film La Terre was La Ter-ray); he once said that Stephen Sondheim emails him when he catches an Osborne gaffe. But his avuncular or grandpaternal demeanor puts the home audience at ease even as it charms the celebrities he chats with. Weekend afternoons go to Ben Mankiewicz, third-generation Hollywood royalty and a slightly spikier presence, who has also done...