Word: sondheims
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...STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street shocks like an amusement park's house of horrors, slitting the emotions and jangling open nerves, but the chill melts quickly and the musical ultimately fails. For his first stab at opera, Sondheim appropriated the hackneyed Victorian tale of Sweeney Todd, a barber who exacts revenge for his wife's death by slashing the throats of her murderers. Sweeney's neighbor, a Mrs. Lovett, capitalizes on their punishment by grinding the corpses into filling for her famous meat pies. It's all rather messy...
Other composers have turned turgid melodrama into art--Puccini exhumed Belasco creakers to create Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla Del West--but Sondheim's score achieves little distinction. It flounders in a pool of notes instead of gushing with passion. Only the lushness of "Pretty Woman," the dissonance of "Epiphany," and the insouciance of "A Little Priest" salvage the first act from musical banality. Even here, the Metropolitan Center's gully of an orchestra pit prevents Sweeney's blazing razor attack from terrorizing even the first...
...Cabaret and Zorba won him six Tony Awards; in Nyack, N.Y. An art student in Moscow and Paris before coming to New York in 1923, Aronson designed more than 100 theater, opera and ballet productions in 50 years, including a distinguished series of collaborations with Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures...
During "What is This Thing Called Love?" and David Frutkoff's rendition of Sondheim's more recent "Losing My Mind," After Hours becomes simply a musical recital. Nothing happens onstage, and the tunes lose the original meanings they conveyed as a part of the musicals McIntosh lifts them from. The women's solos work better. Kathy Teague's lively "Thou Swell" and Nancy Cotten's energetic "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me," with typically American lyrics and ideas, capture best the spirit of these musicals...
...first Robbins-Bernstein-Smith Broadway show, On the Town. From then on, Robbins went from hit to hit. Over two decades he worked with the best stars (Zero Mostel, Barbra Streisand, Judy Holliday, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman) and the best songwriters (Bernstein, Jule Styne, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim) in classic shows such as The King and I, Peter Pan, Bells Are Ringing and Gypsy...