Whether it's the pointillist pluck and shimmer of notes in "Sunday in the Park" or the East-West fusion of "Pacific Overtures," the music veers away from simple lyrical outbursts and forthright harmonic resolutions. every day there were new changes.” But those changes were being made under merciless press scrutiny. Wendy Smith is a contributing editor of the Scholar and the author of Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940. And while it's going along, you take for granted some love will wear away, We took for granted a lot, and still I say, it could have kept on growing, Instead of just kept on, we had a good thing going, going, gone. The American Musical Theatre of San Jose (formerly the San Jose Civic Light Opera) has pulled its weight as well, tackling such difficult works as "Follies" and "Assassins.". . Lyrics & Lyricists , 92Y. A small but instructive exhibition of posters, photographs, memorabilia and manuscripts, "The Art of Making Art: A Celebration of Stephen Sondheim," continues through June at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum. "Passion" left me spent in Mountain View. The movie musical was entering artistic senescence just as the Broadway musical was being revitalized by a new generation. High-Quality and Interactive, transposable in any key, play along. . Sweeney was the show that most perfectly balanced Sondheim’s desire always to be trying something new with his grudging understanding that if he wanted to work in the commercial theater he needed to bring the audience along with him. With its roots in the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein, its offshoots popping up everywhere from opera halls to subscription houses, Sweeney stood at a crossroads for the American musical. It is indicative of the surprises that will enthrall you as you listen to Steve Ross, a master of the art of cabaret, interpret the songs of Stephen Sondheim, a master of the … He made a murderous barber and the Cockney entrepreneur who baked his victims into meat pies desperately human. His works constitute a show business force of nature, unmatched and unapproached in their ardor, stylistic variety, intelligence, complexity, thematic depth, wit and stirring expansiveness. The next year he won a third Tony for A Little Night Music, a rare, unqualified Sondheim commercial hit. It is based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Company (1970) and Follies (1971) had garnered Sondheim back-to-back Tony Awards for best composer and best lyricist. Only in hindsight can we see that the cultural changes that allowed them to do this would eventually destroy the economic conditions that made it possible. It started out like a song, We started quiet and slow with no surprise, Then one morning I woke to realize. It is conceived and directed by James Lapine. By Wendy Smith | September 1, 2007 . It was a saner environment. Sondheim knew these feelings intimately; Company was his first complete artistic statement. He had his first star-studded tribute concert in March 1973, a few weeks before his 43rd birthday—not so premature, really, for someone who’d recently reinvented the American musical. Enough people cared about what Sondheim and Prince were trying to do in 1976 to keep the original production of Pacific Overtures afloat for 193 performances at the vast (albeit seldom full) Winter Garden Theatre. When you see the tender smile on his face as he watches the run-through, you realize there’s more to it. Shorter runs and diminished expectations are the inevitable result of what happened to Broadway, and to America, while Sondheim, Prince, and their collaborators were taking the musical into new territory. The masterpiece of Sondheim’s work with Prince, Sweeney Todd, lay eight years ahead. Photos courtesy of 92Y. As one of a six-show rotating repertory in the Kennedy Center’s 2002 Sondheim Celebration, Merrily was considered a success and ran for 16 performances, the same number it received as a flop on Broadway. Both are spare and seemingly repetitive up close, and ravishing overall. When it officially opened on November 16, 1981, critics agreed that the book was a shambles and the casting a mistake; Merrily We Roll Along closed after 16 performances. Sondheim’s friend Harold Prince, who produced West Side Story, took the unusual step of bringing it back to Broadway after the national tour, persuading Bernstein to conduct the reopening night and the critics to re-review it. "Follies" gave us "Broadway Baby" and "Losing My Mind." For more than a decade, Hammerstein had been instructing Sondheim in the craft of writing show tunes, firmly discouraging early attempts to emulate the bucolic imagery of Oklahoma! The curtain goes up and six ballet-dancing juvenile delinquents in color-coordinated sneakers go, ‘Da da-da da da,’ with their fingers snapping. To enjoy Prime Music, go to Your Music Library and transfer your account to Amazon.com (US). The Marin Theatre Company revived "Company" a couple of seasons back. About imperialism? Doyle was more faithful to Sondheim’s idea that the show would be scariest if it were intimate. North Beach bar bombarded with negative reviews after viral TikTok alleges anti-Asian racism, Dozens of witnesses to fatal car plunge off Bodega Bay overlook, Warriors' Steph Curry shouts out godsister Cameron Brink after Stanford wins national championship, This AI-powered resume master class will help land a new job, If you have a cat, you need this breed and health DNA test, Take over 50% off a 2-for-1 unlimited talk and text plan, Outsmart fruit flies and mosquitoes with this $28 gadget, This dongle connects your wireless headphones to anything, Woot’s got several Adidas shoes starting at just $36. Meanwhile, there's someone in Chicago or Portland or Prague putting an old Sondheim show together with the excitement of a new discovery. Assassins, which so repulsed sensibilities in 1991 (with its depiction of presidential killers driven by an all-American lust for fame) that it became the first Sondheim show not to play on Broadway, got its due in 2004, when Joe Mantello’s fun-house staging underscored its even greater pertinence in the age of Jerry Springer and reality TV. Rock ’n’ roll—which had recently emerged at the time Sondheim did West Side Story in 1957—coexisted with show tunes and traditional pop material into the 1960s, but it had long since become the dominant style in American music. Her death wasn’t as shocking because she too seemed doomed from the start. Stephen Sondheim. It’s wonderful that a more decentralized American theater provides opportunities for the misunderstood Merrily We Roll Along to get a production in which the reverse chronology underscored the poign­ancy of the characters’ shattered idealism and Sondheim’s songs became more heart-rending with each step backward in time. According to the Theorytab database, it is the 6th most popular key among Major keys and the 9th most popular among all keys. (He would do it only once more, for Gypsy in 1959.) While standing in the aisle one evening, Sondheim said, he saw a man rise from his seat not two minutes into the show, coat in hand, and head for the exit. Not exactly ingratiating subject matter—it had been one of Kaufman and Hart’s rare failures—but after Sweeney, Sondheim and Prince might be forgiven if they thought they could make just about anything work. But by the time the failure of Merrily We Roll Along ended the Sondheim/Prince partnership in 1981, Broadway’s ballooning costs, higher ticket prices, and shrinking audiences required a new approach to developing a musical. Asian American 'randomly' stabbed to death while walking her dogs. I can’t blame him. Again, the humor was dampened. Making a modern musical out of George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1934 play was a tricky proposition. Although Prince wanted to direct, he began his career as producer of The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and Fiorello!, all directed by George Abbott, the man who professionalized the ramshackle musical comedy genre by insisting that scripts make sense and lead naturally to the songs and dances. “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” a riotous break from the bleakness in 1979, was so low-key as to be almost inaudible. And Sondheim vows he isn't through. But before anyone tries to close out the richest chapter in the past half-century of musical theater, consider the evidence. Curator Sheryl Flatlow makes several telling points in her printed remarks. Artistically, nothing could have been further from the truth. He also transformed it with his own linguistic powers and thematic range, taking on subjects -- from emotional ambivalence to cultural relativism and presidential assassinations -- undreamed of by his mentor. by Joel Benjamin. Stephen Sondheim - Good Thing Going Lyrics. Good Thing Going: The Songs of Stephen Sondheim STEVE ROSS. With Lupone eschewing Lansbury’s Cockney verve, Mrs. Lovett was nearly as grim a figure as Sweeney. Without the big Broadway orchestration and Michael Bennett’s fabulous tap routine, “What Would We Do Without You?” lost its exuberance and became sadder—truer to Sondheim’s intent, maybe, but eliminating one of the few moments in which Bobby’s married friends were actually a pleasure to be with (always a problem with the script). Bob Fosse’s razzle-dazzle 1972 film Cabaret, directed onstage by Prince in 1966, was the exception that proved the rule, and Fosse was a theater man and a contemporary of Sondheim. . Tickets: $10. But composer Leonard Bernstein and director / choreographer Jerome Robbins had enjoyed Broadway hits before, together in On the Town, separately with Wonderful Town (Bernstein), High Button Shoes and The King and I (to name only two of Robbins’s many choreography credits). He would go on with other collaborators to plumb such deeply felt subjects as the joy of creation in Sunday in the Park with George and the overwhelming force of love in Passion. Publish, sell, buy and download sheet music and performance licenses! Directed by Arch Nicholson. -- "West Side Story": The Foothill Music Theatre production plays July 21-August 13 at the Smithwick Theater, Foothill College, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills. Sondheim knows how to write a song, but often times he writes things that fit into a show like a piece of a puzzle. The audiences at Playwrights and Lincoln Center, like tryout audiences of yore, understood that they were seeing works in progress. Here's why it doesn't. -- "Gypsy": The TheatreWorks production plays June 21-July 16 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, Castro and Mercy streets, Mountain View. The current and upcoming Sondheim playbill stretches from the Marin Mountain Play's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" to a Kelley-directed "Gypsy" in Mountain View. Furth was the first of many playwrights to discover that what little attention his script got was mostly confined to comments on how lacking it was in comparison to Sondheim’s lyrics. Beauty is finally personal and ineffable, and no one can persuade another to share a response. Even the operatically inclined "Sweeney Todd" has patches of heart-stopping beauty, in "Johanna" and "Pretty Women," amid the dissonant carnage. As the work of his lesser contemporaries diminishes over time, Sondheim's work can only gain in stature. Instead of soothing, caressing or march- stepping an audience to attention, Sondheim's music pries open the musical theater container and invites a different, more intimate kind of engagement. "A Little Night Music" is filled with beguiling waltzes and boasts "Send in the Clowns" as its signature. Good Thing Going is written in the key of F Major. If mega-budget Broadway is not as hospitable as it once was -- and in truth Sondheim has always had a checkered record at the box office -- his shows are done everywhere else, all the time. Her... 2 women die after car plunges over Bodega Bay cliff, Son wielding machete stops robbery of Asian parents in Oakland. But that’s when I knew my career was in trouble.”. 'Hummable' really means familiar.". Fifty years ago this fall, when the young lyricist for West Side Story made his Broadway debut, only one New York critic even bothered to mention his name. It started out like a song, We started quiet and slow with no surprise, Then one morning I woke to realize We have a good thing going. . Copyright © 2018 And yet, when the York Theatre Company in Manhattan staged a Pacific Overtures revival in 1984, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report captured the composer on camera in a warmer mode, observing a rehearsal of “Someone in a Tree.” This lovely song, which layered the memories of two characters (played as young and old men by four actors) into a single, shifting narrative about memory and history, had always been a favorite of Sondheim’s, who usually pointed to its “developed” composition as the reason for his pride. In 1957, however, they viewed themselves as “the natural inheritors of the theater we were entering,” Prince recalls in Contradictions. "Sunday's" score is a kind of auditory simulacrum of Seurat's canvases, the source and inspiration of the show. The spring issue of the Sondheim Review, a journal "dedicated to the work of the musical theater's foremost composer and lyricist," covers productions of "Company" in Dallas, "Merrily We Roll Along" in Los Angeles, "Anyone Can Whistle" in Boston, "Sweeney Todd" in Mannheim, Germany, and "A Little Night Music" in Miskolc, Hungary. Revivals have made it clear how well his work endures and how it thrives in radically different treatments. 2010 Broadway. When Raúl Esparza sat down at the piano, playing music for the first time in a production where every character mans an instrument, “Being Alive” became the wrenching affirmation of the commitment that Sondheim always wanted it to be. When Hammerstein saw the show in Philadelphia, he told them: “The audience is so anxious to applaud [Ethel Merman] that they are not listening to the scene that follows. As a producer, Prince accepted the constraints of the commercial theater. In the original production, the murders were distanced from us in the cavernous Uris Theatre, where Sweeney slit throats atop a platform and the bodies slid through a trap door. “I could not do it again because I could not in conscience raise the money.” Running the show was so costly ($80,000 a week) that, even though Follies played for more than a year, it lost its entire $800,000 initial investment. Call (510) 881-6777. Sondheim on Sondheim Concert Live at the Hollywood Bowl - July 23, 2017. The year before, Doyle’s stripped-to-the-bone version of Sweeney Todd pulled in closer to the characters and their despair, suggesting a vision that was less cynical than mournful. But Disney certainly wouldn’t spend that much on a musical like Follies, starring a quartet of middle-aged performers going on about lost glory, dreams turned to dust, and—heaven help us—“the death of the musical,” as Frank Rich (then a student, now a New York Times columnist) put it in a review for The Harvard Crimson. Sondheim roared back in 1979 with Sweeney Todd, a Grand Guignol spectacle that took the negatives attached to his work—too dark, no likable characters, no hummable tunes—and turned them into assets. Good Thing Going. (A movie version of Sweeney with Johnny Depp as the demon barber opens this December, but director Tim Burton makes his own rules, and the transition to film took 28 years.) Both men were closely attached to powerful mentors, giants of the Broadway stage who had played major roles in transforming the American musical from a rickety array of “songs and fun . Breathless at a revival of "Pacific Overtures," I heard "Someone in a Tree" for the first time and wanted to hear it again and again, right away, even as I wanted the story of Japan's future to press on. Her selfies have become legendary. It's not that nothing went wrong, some angry moment of course, but just a few, And only moments no more because we knew we had a good thing going. Stephen Sondheim only looks better with time. Abbott had little interest in the Hammerstein brand of musical drama, the sort that Prince would come to direct. When Elaine Stritch sang “The Ladies Who Lunch,” a sneering, self-loathing song was bearable, even thrilling, because her whiskey-drenched, cigarette-stained rendition recalled generations of Broadway divas. “I am happy I did Follies,” Prince wrote in Contradictions. It ran for 558 performances, fewer than either Company or Night Music, but its Victorian vengefulness didn’t seem to jar people as much as Company’s Vietnam-era alienation, and its mordant wit struck a more original note than Night Music’s autumnal ruefulness. Even as songs began to be more carefully integrated with plot in the wake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! In the ’50s, Broadway was a bit bewildered by someone who’d studied with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt and chosen, as Sondheim described it to biographer Meryl Secrest, to go “into the popular arts armed with all [Babbitt’s] serious artillery.” He realized this would be an arduous path, he told Secrest, early in the original run of West Side Story. The dramatic action was in the songs—mini-plays that variously established a character’s history, delineated an emotional dilemma, sardonically commented on the events at hand, or sometimes tentatively pointed a way forward. “I had the whole picture. Charley, his regular lyricist, and Mary, a writer, also move back toward their idealistic beginnings in a show that features such Sondheim standards as “Good Thing Going… The lack of tryouts didn’t matter for Sweeney, which was in good shape by the time it began previewing in New York, but it may well have been disastrous for Merrily We Roll Along. Its cost—$800,000—would be millions today. Few of these productions had been sure things, but all had found a niche in the commercial theater. New York audiences had to console themselves with this season's off-Broadway run of an early Sondheim show, "Saturday Night," that its creator critiqued as the artistic equivalent of his "baby pictures" -- "not bad stuff for a 23-year-old.". A housewife feels neglected by her family and walks out to start out a new life for herself. Digital score of Good Thing Going. -- "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum": The Mountain Play Association production plays next Sunday through June 18 at the Sidney B. Cushing Memorial Amphitheater, Mount Tamalpais, Marin County. Download Stephen Sondheim Good Thing Going sheet music. They pushed the musical onto more dangerous ground: deeper studies of less obviously sympathetic characters, challenging scripts that would not let the audience off the hook with a comic subplot or a happy ending, music without Big Tunes, staging without Big Numbers. “Another Hundred People” from Company lovingly eulogized this city where people “find each other in the crowded streets and the guarded parks, / By the rusty fountains and the dusty trees with the battered barks, / And they walk together past the postered walls with the crude remarks.” It wasn’t a place a lot of people wanted to visit to take in a show. Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses. It's not that nothing went wrong, Some angry moment of course, but just a few,
Maquillage Yeux Verts Marrons, Liberta Chanson Espagnole, Que Devient Pierre-jean Chalençon, Ce Que Dieu A Lié, Kinder Chocolat Noir, Atlético Grenade Chaine, Il Faut Que Je Vous Parle C8 Replay, Le Roi Lion Hakuna Matata, Thème Du Parrain,