Word: sondheims
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ASSASSINS Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim...
When the ever venturesome Stephen Sondheim said his new musical would portray people who killed, or tried to kill, U.S. Presidents, even fans of his acerbic wit and nonpareil invention wondered how such a show could be put together. The work that opens off-Broadway this week amply, at times brilliantly, demonstrates how. The question that lingers...
...back, but seldom forward." commented one of the leads at the beginning of Merrily We Roll Along, Stephen Sondheim's backwards musical about a man (Frank) who has it all and hates himself. The first scene occurs in 1979, the last in 1957. In between, audiences at the Agassiz Theater this January were treated to consistently great acting, some good singing hysterically funny, dated costumes...
Every bit as remarkable as the largeness of vision is the intimacy of scale with which director and co-author James Lapine has staged it. Lapine, who collaborated with composer Stephen Sondheim on the intricate musicals Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, here limits himself to a few chairs, a doorway, two beds, a white curtain and a handful of props. The result is as magical as the computer-generated wizardry of a Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera. The action shifts fluidly from reality to fantasy, from confessional thought to naturalistic dialogue, from poignance...
...film par excellence -- Terms of Endearment out of Gypsy. Suzanne has her poignant wrangles with movie types (nice turns by Dennis Quaid and Rob Reiner as producers, Gene Hackman and Simon Callow as directors), but Postcards is bound by family ties. MacLaine gives a wonderfully excessive rendition of the Sondheim song I'm Still Here: "First you're another sloe-eyed vamp,/ Then someone's mother, then you're camp." In Postcards she is all of these, and better still she finds an aging woman's tenacious grimace under decades of gamine makeup...