Word: sondheims
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Stephen Sondheim's score uses old conventions of songwriting as well as new ones, and it is in his music and lyrics that Follies puts across its extraordinarily upsetting point of view. Almost cruelly, we watch old performers of yesteryear relive their greatest moments on the stage, singing melodies that sound as ancient and scratched as our parents' old 78 records, dancing steps proclaiming a kind of spirit that has long since passed from their lives as well as our own. The world of the dead Follies and the reality of the present intermingle constantly in Sondheim's work...
...good fifteen minutes of repetition in the first act can be pruned without much difficulty and a few awkward speeches in which the characters point too obviously at their failures during the first part of Act II can be eliminated. Suffice it to say, on the other hand, that Sondheim has composed his richest score (and also his most difficult), that Prince and Bennett have not missed out on any opportunities in their complex staging, and that Boris Aronson has designed a set that in itself evokes the substance of the show it houses...
Urban Junglegym. The people who put together Company belong on a royal honors' list. At the top stands Stephen Sondheim, composer and lyricist. Many recent Broadway scores have sounded as if they were composed by a Waring Blender. Sondheim is a man with an inventive musical mind; his lyrics have a spartan simplicity, yet they are witty, incisive and playful. Of George Furth, who wrote the libretto, one can only say: Hosanna, finally a book with intelligence. Producer-Director Harold Prince surpasses himself in staging this show and invests each scene with an electric tingle of surprise, delight...
Everything else about this musical is marvelously right. What is there to say about Stephen Sondheim, the composer-lyricist, except that his songs are the most unusual ever written for the American musical stage? There are no conventional, Tin-Pan-Alley tunes here: the influences are Weill and Mahler and the melodies trail off into surprising and often jarring rhapsodies of sound...
...Sondheim's lyrics are also as inventive as ever, continuing in the same cynical-witty vein that marked his great, neglected score for Anyone Can Whistle. One song, telling about "The Little Things You Do Together" that make a marriage work, lists "The neighbors you annoy together / The children you destroy together" as examples. Another song, in which husbands explain the role their wives played in shaping their lives, has such couplets as "It has nothing to do with her / all to do with her." There is also a fantastic number in which a female trio does a song (half...