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#ROOM IN ROME CAST FREE#
Others, critics and at least some folks who paid for their tickets, would champion Sondheim’s boldness in choice of subject (a mass-murdering barber and his psychotic helpmeet, say, or forced free trade in the Pacific), paired with a musical vocabulary that challenged, rather than coddled, the ear. His characters were stick figures, mouthpieces, people grumped. “Audiences like shows about people,” as Variety’s dismissive review of “Sunday in the Park” snarked.
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In the decade from 1970 through 1981, when his most influential collaborator was director Hal Prince, Sondheim produced an astonishing catalogue of shows that fell under the rubric of “concept musical”: “Company.” “Follies.” “A Little Night Music.” “Pacific Overtures.” “Sweeney Todd.” “Merrily We Roll Along.” They left some critics stroking their chins (when not being overtly hostile) and ticket-buyers all but waving their fists at his cerebral lyrics and the post-modern melodies that fell on ears unattuned to anything but Pop palaver.
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There’s poignance in his trust that audiences would get him, even if that trust proved, more often than not, to have been, well, theoretical. His characters were complex, and so were the songs they sang to express themselves. Most important of all, Sondheim wrote for grown-ups. Sondheim found - no, he created - new, ferociously challenging ways to write about love, friendship, youth, following your bliss, following your hiss, dreams dreamt, and dreams wrecked on the unforgiving shoreline of reality. He merely (!) expanded the available palette from the primary colors typical of operetta and matinee musicals to a thousand refulgent pixels, much as Georges Seurat, the hero of his 1984 masterpiece, “Sunday in the Park With George,” had done with dots in the after-shadow of Impressionism. None of these shows is anything like the other. But if Sondheim never repeated himself, certain themes, like certain musical motifs, suffuse his words and his music.
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That song was eventually cut from “Forum,” but the tongue-in-cheek equation of love with death would wind its shape-shifting way through all of Sondheim’s work, from “The Little Things We Do Together,” “Company’s” ode to marital discord, to “Send in the Clowns,” from “A Little Night Music” to “Passion,” in which the sickly, obsessed Fosca sings, of her love for a handsome soldier who is otherwise engaged, A love as pure as breath / As permanent as death / Implacable as stone.Ĭheery, right? American lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, whose works include the musicals 'West Side Story', 'Into the Woods' and 'Passion' on August 16, 1974. As far back as “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the 1962 musical that earned him his first Broadway credit as both composer and lyricist, he wrote, If you start to feel a tingle / And you like remaining single/ Stay home, don’t take a breath / You could catch your death / ‘Cause love is around. Sondheimia, love always is a double-edged sword.Ī drama critic, reporter and editor, I've engaged with every Sondheim show since "Company" upended Broadway norms in 1970, and with the man himself on many occasions as well. You may keep, for example, your sentimental Sigmund Rombergian paeans to love, your Ira Gershwin predilection for mush in Sondheimia, love always is a double-edged sword. Within that truism is the ambivalence (to use one of his favorite words) - of fearlessness urged along by fear - that drove him to greatness. Yet one essential clue to the genius, to the man who blew up Broadway and put it back together in his own image, is that Sondheim never did anything twice. (Oliver Morris/Getty Images)Ĭall me heretic, but I couldn’t resist starting this valedictory to Stephen Joshua Sondheim, who died on November 26 at 91, with a lyric not from one of his legendary musicals, but from a song he wrote for the film “ The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.” There are, in the Sondheim canon, plenty of sharper lyrics, lyrics that cut more acutely, draw blood more swiftly or, conversely, send the listener into paroxysms of amazement - The child is so sweet, and the girls are so rapturous / Isn’t it lovely how artists can capture us? - to choose from. Stephen Sondheim, songwriter/lyricist, listening to music in the recording control room during the original cast recording of the Broadway musical "Into The Woods", New York, 1987.