Word: weste
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young Sondheims?" There won't be any. Not because high-brow musical theater is dead, but because the old Sondheim keeps on being new. Composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, 79, continues to dominate the genre he has constantly reinvented, first with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on West Side Story in 1957, Company (1970), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) and Sunday in the Park with George...
...tutelage of Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim is frequently cast as the last of the genre's greats. But far from being a relic from a golden age, his work continues to gain new audiences and interpretations. This season saw major revivals of A Little Night Music in London and West Side Story on Broadway - where there's been at least one Sondheim show playing annually for the past five years. Add in smaller venues, there are hundreds - even thousands - of revivals of his shows in any given year. (See the top 10 plays and musicals...
...season, fans in the U.S. can see productions of his works from the Midwest to Florida, or take their pick from hundreds of versions of what Sondheim and collaborator James Lapine once joked was their "pension" - the (relatively) feel-good Into the Woods. There's also a gutsy Broadway West Side Story, with many of the lyrics rendered in Spanish. (Read "What's Wrong with This Spring's Broadway Plays...
Meanwhile, London is playing host to a Sondheim at the Garrick Theatre in the West End, where director Trevor Nunn is teasing out the nuances in A Little Night Music, Sondheim's 1973 adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. Often performed as a light soufflé of a show, Nunn has turned the musical, which runs until July 25, into a Chekhovian meditation on desire and death. (See pictures of London...
...potential "new Sondheims" to grow. At the same time, globalization has boosted the McMusical: crowd-pleasing, corporate-franchised extravaganzas like The Lion King, which play seamlessly from Peking to Peoria. Sondheim, with his precise relationship with the English language, doesn't travel so well, with the exception of West Side Story and Sweeney Todd. "Amateur companies tell me that when they're doing a Sondheim, that's often the hardest of them to sell," says Lynne Chapman, of the U.K.-based Stephen Sondheim Society. "When they're doing middle-of-the-road stuff, they can sell it several times over...