Word: sondheims
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...show's essential conception in Eliot Elisofon's picture of Gloria Swanson amid the ruins of Manhattan's Roxy Theater, a barococo movie palace that was demolished in 1960. "That sparked the whole notion of rubble?how it relates to the past and present." Prince set Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with him on Forum and Company, to work emulating typical mid-'20s and '30s show tunes for the "Loveland" sequence, and devised the flowing, cinematic style of the play. He also gave Costume Designer Florence Klotz one great illumination: Follies was to be a "Fellini musical...
...that point Prince had acquired the show's two greatest assets, disparate but complementary: Smith and Sondheim, the star of another era and the lyricist of today; the enduring actress and the volatile writer; the svelte woman and the stylish wordman...
With the kind of cast whose savvy spans a half-century of show business, Prince could do enough of what David Merrick calls "flimflam and legerdemain to cover an awful and gloomy book about nothing at all." Fortunately, the Prince and his Follies have that other talent: Stephen Sondheim. For the musical, he has written some of the glossiest, wittiest lyrics in Broadway history. His melodies gracefully genuflect to Kern and Gershwin, Berlin and Arlen. His words bow to no one. With Follies he has established himself, beyond doubt, as the theater's supreme lyricist...
...frontier of the American musical theater is wherever Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim are. Last season, the producer-director and composer-lyricist collaborated on Company, which focused a diamond-cutting laser beam on marriage, Manhattan-style. With Follies, Prince and Sondheim, together with Choreographer and Co-Director Michael Bennett, have audaciously staked out some unknown territory. They have put together the first Proustian musical-an act of dramatic creation even more daring than making a Proustian film (see CINEMA...
Rarely have such searching, unsentimental questions and answers been put to a Broadway audience with such elegance and expertise. Sally's number Losing My Mind is the torch-singing peak of the show, but Sondheim's entire score is an incredible display of musical virtuosity. It is a one-man course in the theatrical modes of the '20s, '30s and '40s musicals, done not as parody or mimicry, but as a passionately informed tribute. Michael Bennett's dances have a charged, steely precision, a top-hat, hot-pants staccato rhythm. James Goldman...