Word: sondheims
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...everybody gets a “happily ever after.” That is all very well—and appropriate, since Scwhitters wrote them during the Nazi regime—but the question arises as to what about that fact warrants a collection devoted to these tales. Stephen Sondheim used the same theme in his 1986 musical “Into the Woods,” but he also incorporated comedy, nuance, and innovative new plots beyond “what happens after happily ever after” to create an imaginative musical drama. For Schwitters, whose multivalent creative...
...widely accepted masterpieces of the genre, it's the one I have never seen onstage. Nor even - until a few weeks ago, when I finally broke down and rented the DVD - the multiple-Oscar-winning 1961 movie. Of course, I know most of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim score; I've seen enough clips to be familiar with the famed Jerome Robbins choreography; and I'd have to be a pretty benighted theatergoer not to know at least the central conceit of the story - Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet transplanted to the street gangs of New York City...
...there a duller love ballad in any major American musical than "Maria" ("Maria! I've just met a girl named Maria"), or its Muzak-ready twin brother, "Tonight" ("Tonight, tonight/ There's only you tonight")? Who would know that the lyricist would grow up to be Stephen Sondheim...