Word: sondheims
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PEOPLE WHO started out thinking of Stephen Sondheim as just a clever lyricist have long ago given him his due as an artist--and a chameleon. As soon as he started writing the music to go behind his own words. Sondheim began varying the roles he could play--sliding a melody off key or twisiting a double-entendre into mid-line, he was the vitriolic social critic in Sweenes Todd, the light satirist in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, the gentle troubadour in A Little Night Music; he was blandly anthologized as cultural phenomenon...
...found in this faraway fable aspects of her own autobiography, and made Yentl a metaphor for the long struggle of womankind to emerge into the lonely splendor that is Streisand. For her male co-star she hired Mandy Patinkin, who has wrapped his crystalline Broadway tenor voice around Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, then gave him no songs to sing; all eleven are Streisand solos. And she has inflated the production values until the humblest shtetl looks grand enough to house the Scarsdale Hadassah. Chutzpah, folks...
...when Robert unexpectedly decides to stand up the people at his own party thereby destroying the entire progression of the plot we realize that Sondheim's seeming circle was really a straight line...
...Sondheim brilliantly complements a serious look at relationships and one man's realization of his own free will with 15 whimsical musical numbers. Beneath the clever melodies that resound long after the show has ended lie brittle lyrics about surface relationship and about commitments...
...even though we can't hear Jones all the time, his Robert successfully attracts our attention with his energy and charm. Jones is youthfully handsome, just what is needed for the adolescent who virtually matures before our very eyes. His ultimate realization makes Sondheim's message especially poignant that marriage will not necessarily fulfill all his needs; that travelling in circles will only make you dizzy...