Word: sondheimer
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...meat pies. With Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou in peak performances, Sweeney Todd is a classic example of the remarkable virtuosity and range of the U.S. musical when it is in the hands of two flamboy ant masters of the stage, Director Harold Prince and Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim. It is also the closest Sondheim has come to writing an opera, albeit dark, cynical and morbid...
Played by George Hamilton (and very nicely too), he is booted out of Transylvania by the humorless Communists who are going to turn Castle Dracula into a sports and recreation center. The count decides to go to New York City in pursuit of Model Cindy Sondheim (Susan Saint James), whom he recognizes from magazine covers as the reincarnation of the one woman he has really loved for some seven centuries. Cindy, alas, is not quite the innocent she was in her past lives. She divides her evenings between the discos and one-night stands, popping uppers and downers...
...believe this "the best of all possible world1," experiences an interminable and hysterical series of disasters that teach him to view life a bit more realistically. To reproduce the Voltairian spirit. Prince engaged Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd) to re-write the book and Stephen Sondheim (ditto) to furnish some additional lyrics. He also "cast young" in-order to convey the naivete the original production lacked. The Loeb version has added a few direct confrontations between Candide and Voltaire, in which the character and his creator discuss the manifestations of God's will in the world: this...
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by Hugh Wheeler
Most of Stephen Sondheim's score matches the best competition-Stephen Sondheim. However, Broadway's Uris Theater is the worst place to hear his intricately clever lyrics. As a tractor factory, the cavernous Uris might pass muster, but as a theater, no. Irony is Sondheim's razor, and its cutting edge is equally present in bittersweet ballads (Pretty Women, Johanna) or in A Little Priest, an antic account of what kinds of pies the varying professions taste like ("Here's a politician so oily/ It's served with a doily...