Word: sondheims
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...Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club's new production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's "Company" manages to achieve what many of the latest big-budget Broadway productions have not: chemistry. The combination of musical and acting talent and expert direction make "Company" one of the best pieces of student theater in recent memory...
Deceptively lightweight, "Company" nevertheless captures real moments of human emotion without weighing the audience down with sentimentality or artistic pretensions. Sondheim and Furth add irony, a much-needed quality in a musical, without being too self-consicous about it. Even their "types" (crusty matron, dim-but-nubile stewrdess), manage to escape cliche. And when the couples sing "The Little Things You Do Together," with barely-hidden hostility, they articulate the uncanny need for men and women to stay together, no matter how ridiculously miserable they might...
...Sondheim was 40 when Company premiered. Anyone Can Whistle and the lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story were behind him; A Little Night Music and Follies were soon to come. This revival provides a useful vantage for surveying the second half of a venturesome, glittering career. Among those American artists today whose livelihood is linked to words and wordplay, Sondheim holds a unique preeminence. There's no contemporary novelist, poet or essayist who is so indisputably at the top of his or her field as Sondheim is of his. As a song lyricist, he has no plausible peer...
...they appear in. Detachable because his lyrics are, in their wit and dexterity, satisfyingly autonomous; they appear in anthologies of light verse and books of contemporary poetry. Undetachable because his songs, usually integrated tightly into the plot line, often lose resonance on their own. It's no accident that Sondheim has originated only one tune--Send in the Clowns--that can be sure of raising a roar of recognition when its opening bars waft through any cocktail lounge in the country...
...Peter Pan syndrome--and a dozen other pop-psychological maladies illuminated on post-'70s talk shows. No wonder Company's director, Scott Ellis, so often has Gaines peering handsomely but dazedly into the spotlights. What's to become of him? He blinks with uncertainty--unlike his creator. After Company, Sondheim would move on to the even finer musicals--Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods--on which his reputation more securely rests...