Word: westly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...doomsday rhetoric won't necessarily go down well with the White House. Iran's intentions worry the U.S. too, of course, but Obama and his advisers are expected to move briskly to an equally pressing matter: Netanyahu's refusal to back the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the keystone of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are demanding that Netanyahu sign on. Netanyahu has hinted that he does not oppose the creation of a Palestinian state...