Word: sondheimer
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Music, Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by George Furth Directed by Harold Prince...
Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim seem to have been born middleaged. Rue, disenchantment, a kind of middle-aged tristesse recur in their collaborations. In the most brilliant of them. Company and Follies, melancholia about marriage and success was imminent but airborne; in Merrily We Roll Along it falls with the thud of a foregone conclusion...
Larry Fuller's choreography is mostly of the hop, skip and jump variety, rather like a discarded thought from Agnes de Mille's brain. To save the saddest for last, much of the show's score sounds like an aside from Sondheim. Fragmented strains from Pacific Overtures, A Little Night Music, Company and Follies filter through the air like aural ghosts. One ballad, Not a Day Goes By, beautifully captures the bittersweet mystery of love, and the single smash number of the musical, Good Thing Going, has the stamp of permanence about it. Frank Sinatra...
...Hepburn in The West Side Waltz, Claudette Colbert in A Talent for Murder, Anne Bancroft in Duet for One, Joanne Woodward as Shaw's Candida. And then, and always, there are the musicals. At least 16 have been announced, including one potential gem that begins previews next week: Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Hal Prince and based on the 1934 Kaufman and Hart comedy. With Company, Follies and Sweeney Todd, Sondheim and Prince yanked the Broadway musical into the Age of Angst. This time they have dared to move backward?to tell a story in song...
...roof is kept over all heads. From the opening number, Four Jews in a Room Bitching, the humor is spikily and spicily urban and ethnic. The actors are spirited, and Director James Lapine's tempo is stopwatch crisp. In astringence and cleverness, Finn is the child of Stephen Sondheim. In the current musical theater, no one could choose a better master or pay an apter tribute...