Word: sondheims
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Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim...
Sweeney is surely a difficult show to put on. Stephen Sondheim's often dissonant, virtually non-stop score, is hard enough to sing, but Music Director David Gregg increases his singers' burden by backing them with only a piano and a synthesizer. Fortunately, the actors and the large chorus are up to the task, though Talenti and Carter occasionally fall flat on Sondheim's melodically meandering ballads...
With success came creature comforts. Sondheim splurged in 1960 and bought a Manhattan town house after the movie sale of Gypsy. He still lives there, in an East Side enclave of houses that share a sprawling back garden with low brick walls, small fountains and mossy enclosures. Katharine Hepburn resides next door, but they did not meet until nearly a decade after he moved in. "I was up one night at about 3, pounding on the piano, writing The Ladies Who Lunch for Company, when I heard this banging on the garden door. There she was, in a babushka...
Perhaps what makes Sondheim's work most interesting is that he is fascinated by happiness without quite sharing the gift for it. Among the characters in Woods are a father uncomfortable with babies, who Sondheim admits is his father, and a mother who regrets having had children, who Sondheim says is his mother. In almost all his shows at least one character stands apart from the world and comments, and that is Sondheim himself. His salvation, always, has been work. Mary Rodgers recalls, "My only expectation, and it was shared by all his close friends, was that Steve would have...
With his piercing intelligence and emotional candor, Stephen Sondheim reigns as master of the Broadway musical theater...