Search Results for: sondheim

The video link I posted last night of that Stephen Sondheim interview was not complete. I have replaced it with a link to a longer version. Don't thank me. Thank Steve Bacher who told me about it.

This might be an appropriate song for today. Bernadette Peters sings "Move On" from Sunday in the Park With George. This is from a concert she gave in 1998 at the Royal Festival Hall in London…

This is from The Carol Burnett Show for 12/13/91. Ms. Burnett, Tony Roberts and Bernadette Peters perform a Sondheim medley in a roadside diner. And yes, that's Richard Kind in there…

One of my favorite Sondheim moments is in the show Merrily We Roll Along. Longtime best friends Charley Kringas and Franklin Shepard have become a very successful lyricist/composer team writing Broadway shows and movies…but with success has come tension. They're growing apart as you'll see in this scene when they agree to appear on a live TV interview show.

This is from a production done in 2013 in a theater called the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. The actor doing most of the talking and singing is Damian Humbley…

I don't know of any Christmas tunes ever written by Stephen Sondheim but this one always kind of reminds me of the Whos down in Whoville clasping hands and singing without any presents at all…

Stephen Sondheim appeared on Stephen Colbert's show on September 16, 2021 for what turned out to be one of Sondheim's last public appearances. After he died, Colbert reran the interview. This version is about two minutes longer than when the conversation was first broadcast…

Stephen Sondheim appeared twice as a guest on The Colbert Report and I find those chats fascinating.  I actually found all the interviews Mr. Colbert did on that show fascinating because they were done with almost no prep or pre-interviews, and Colbert not only had to improvise his end of the conversation, he had to do so in character. A lot of folks who are considered expert at improvisational comedy marveled at his ability to do this.

He would tell the guest before the show something like, "I'm playing an idiot.  Don't be afraid to push back and treat me like one." This worked surprisingly well when he had on a guest with many areas of disagreement…and it was probably even harder for him to play that moron when the guest was someone he clearly admired, such as Sondheim.

Sondheim's first time on the show was 12/14/10 to plug the book Finishing the Hat and you can view that interview here.  Notice how much these guys liked each other and how Sondheim really seems to be enjoying himself.

He came back on 11/30/11 to promote the follow-up book and again, you can see how well these two men got along…

Imelda Staunton performs "Losing My Mind" in a 2017 production of Follies by the National Theater…

Here's what appears to be a late interview with Mr. Sondheim, mostly about his days at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. This was probably conducted in conjunction with the school staging a series of events about his work in January of 2020 called Sondheim@90@Williams…

Broadway performer Greg Hildreth performs "Buddy's Blues" from Follies. He's accompanied by Charlie Rosen's Broadway Big Band and some talented (but unidentified) ladies. I like this performance because, for one thing, it's quite unlike the way Mandy Patinkin did the number in the concert album…and therefore, the way most singers try to do it since. I believe Mr. Hildreth is in the new, just-opened revival of Company…

The gender-inverted production of the musical Company opened last night on Broadway and the reviews are in. They range from The Daily Beast…

Two and a half hours of sublime entertainment that becomes more sublime and more pleasurable as it continues, it is a transporting experience, an emotional one, a full meal with dessert, and at least two drinks of your choice.

…to The New York Times which called it "confusing, sour remake" and went on to say…

…the revival that opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater is not the Company Sondheim and the book writer George Furth (along with the director Hal Prince) unleashed on Broadway in 1970. Sure, the score remains great, and there are a few perfectly etched performances in supporting roles, especially Patti LuPone's as the undermining, pickled Joanne. As directed by Marianne Elliott, however, in a gender-flipped version abetted by Sondheim himself, what was once the story of a man who is terrified of intimacy becomes something much less interesting: the story of a woman who is justifiably tired of her friends.

Most of the reviews found something to love but even the raves don't make me yearn to see it…which is fine because I probably won't. I do have some curiosity if the lack of coherence I felt in the productions I've seen has been remedied…but I won't be going East for quite a while.

There don't seem to be any good clips from the show online yet so here's the big number — "Being Alive" — performed by a man. This is from the 2010 BBC Proms in concert version and the man is Julian Ovenden…

The first Broadway show with music and lyrics by S. Sondheim was almost a musical called Saturday Night. It never made it to The Great White Way because its producer died. Here's one of the songs written for it as sung by Benjamin Love…

Now that we've gotten past the Hanukkah Channuka Chanukah Hannukah video links, I've decided to post a lot of Sondheim video links. Some will be him being interviewed and I'll try to minimize the number in which he tells the story about Oscar Hammerstein telling him his first play was terrible, which he got trapped into telling almost every time he was interviewed. Some will be folks singing his praises or, better still, his songs.

Here's fifteen minutes of him being interviewed on The Mike Douglas Show in 1977. In those minutes, he mentions that when he and his collaborators were working on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, their "dream cast" — not that they had any delusions they could get all these people — was as follows: Phil Silvers as Pseudolus, Danny Kaye as Hysterium, Bert Lahr as Senex, Buster Keaton as Erronius and Zero Mostel as Marcus Lycus.

They wound up with Zero as Pseudolus. Mr. Mostel repeated that role in the movie where he was joined by Silvers as Marcus Lycus and Keaton as Erronius. As Sondheim notes, Mostel was playing Silvers' part and vice-versa.

He also gives a neat little explanation of the song, "Send in the Clowns" and (of course) he tells the story about how Oscar Hammerstein told him his first play was terrible…

I don't have much to say about Stephen Sondheim that others aren't saying. Greatest composer of our lifetimes…greatest composer of all times…the man who made lyrics matter…all of that is true to some extent. I'd write about how he and his work impacted me but everyone who knew his work has their version of that story and no one's is that important. It's the collective impact that matters.

The thing I feel should be underscored is how many actors owe him for the jobs they got…and the witty, meaty roles that came with that employment. When Neil Simon passed, a lot of people said he'd rebuilt the audience for comedy on the legitimate stage. Sondheim surely did the same for musicals. Though he was famously tutored by Oscar Hammerstein, he took the form in which Hammerstein worked and elevated it to new levels, new possibilities, new everything. He had a lot to do with the advancement of musical theater that was not musical comedy.

I remember years ago on a theater discussion group, there was a small group of Sondheim fans who were honestly furious at him for not writing more shows, not giving us more songs, not taking the form to greater and greater heights. Some of us argued back that the guy's only human and we should be grateful for what he did give us. Here's one of the best things he left us…