Word: sondheims
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
Meanwhile, London is playing host to a Sondheim at the Garrick Theatre in the West End, where director Trevor Nunn is teasing out the nuances in A Little Night Music, Sondheim's 1973 adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. Often performed as a light soufflé of a show, Nunn has turned the musical, which runs until July 25, into a Chekhovian meditation on desire and death. (See pictures of London...
Earlier this spring, a London fringe theater put on a sellout production of Saturday Night, about young Brooklynites gambling on the 1929 stock market, which Sondheim penned when he was 24 and saw performed on stage first in 1997. "I take it as an encouraging sign that the shows are worth looking at a second time," Sondheim says. "Most musicals, you look at them a second time, they're not as good as they were the first time." His own endure, he believes, because "I write with better librettists. They're better playwrights than the librettists of most musicals...