Word: sondheims
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Directed by HERBERT ROSS Screenplay by STEPHEN SONDHEIM and ANTHONY PERKINS
...Stephen Sondheim (the Broadway composer who is himself a famous game player) and Anthony Perkins (the estimable actor) have outsmarted themselves in crafting their script. Their plot is so fiendishly difficult that their characters spend most of the time bogged down in endless expository scenes...
...latest is Sondheim's most brilliant accomplishment to date. That includes the lyrics for such past hits as West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) and the music and lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). Night Music's success rests on Sondheim's precious fancy, which allowed him to dare to compose the entire musical in ¼ time-or multiples thereof (6/8 and 9/12 are some of the other meters employed). For good measure, in both senses of the word, Sondheim has also thrown in such ancient techniques as canons...
...essence of a Sondheim song is its theatrical Tightness for the evening's dramatic tone. In Company, he wrote 13 or 14 songs that dealt mostly with one-to-one relationships-thoroughly appropriate to the show's concern with marriage. In Follies, the songs did not move the play along so much as they suspended moments in time and savored them, following the practice of tunesmiths in the era nostalgically evoked by the show: the 1920s and '30s. Night Music is devoted predominantly to what Sondheim calls the "inner monologue song," in which characters sing of their...
Based on Ingmar Bergman's 1956 sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, imbued with a kind of mocha fantasy more typical of France's Jean Anouilh, Night Music is a masquelike affair, tailor-made to fit Sondheim's flair for depicting confused people experiencing ambivalent thoughts and feelings. Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm flaunts his amours openly in front of his wife, but at the barest hint that she may be following suit, he sputters...