London's West End Goes Dark For Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim was adored in London. Tonight the West End (London's theater district) went dark as a memorial to The Master -- the great Broiadway musical copmposer and lyricist.

A Spicy, Rarely Heard Sondheim Tune!

 

Sondheim: Ten Things You MUST Remember!

 

 

As we move forward, keep the following in mind:

1) There will be no "new Sondheim". There is no successor. Not now, not ever. While others may follow The Master, they do not succeed him.

2) If you saw the original production of a Sondheim show on Broadway, you saw history. Doesn't matter which show it was. Any Sondheim show. Consider yourself privileged.

3) If you have a letter from the man (he wrote thousands and was vigilant about replying) let's hope you've held onto it and that you'll treasure it forever. It's invaluable!

4) Some Sondheim shows ran longer than others but all have been and will continue to be revived. There were no "flops". None!

5) If, through your own fault, you've never experienced a Sondheim show or are unfamiliar with his music you are culturally deprived and, arguably, culturally illiterate.

6) If Bob Dylan was worthy of the Nobel Prize for literature then so too is/was Sondheim.

7) Sondheim never grows old. You grow old and come to appreciate Sondheim in new, different, deeper ways. But Sondheim never grows old or tiresome. Never!

8) Sondheim was the last link -- the magic link, the missing piece -- that connected us to Broadway's dazzling Golden Age. He was the needle and the thread that pulled everything together.

9) Sondheim recreated the Broadway musical bringing it into the modern era and truly turning it into an art form. No one else was equipped to do this.

10) The man lives in his music. Everything you want or need to know about him is there in his music. He lives on there and, in so doing, he remains immortal.

And one more thing: The art of writ is hard work. You don't create it by waving a magic wand or conjuring up some celestial spirit. It's work! What this man created was the product of hard work.

SUNDAY: Broadway Sings Out For Sondheim!

 

THIS Is Broadway: Sunday For Sondheim!

Sunday's tribute to Stephen Sondheim in the center of Times Square featuring Lin-Manuel Miranda and performers from every show currently appearing on Broadway. THIS is the Broadway community: together, caring, remembering in tribute to the man who was the undisputed Master, now immortalized via the endless performances of his works all over the world forever!

Rare TV: Watch Sondheim's Mastery Of Words!

 A rarely seen 1966 episode of the game show PASSWORD, featuring Stephen Sondheim and Lee Remick as players,. In the episode, which originally aired on Christmas in 1966, Sondheim plays special guest to his dear friend, Remick. Watch Sondheim absolutely dominating in this once "lost" episode, which hasn't been seen in more than 50 years

Sondheim's Life: A Luminous Gift To All!

 

The death of Stephen Sondheim, the great Master of the American musical stage is an incalculable loss to popular culture and to the art of musical theater.
It'a a loss for civilized theater that challenged you, that made you think and feel and enter a world that could only be created by a musical genius.
For Broadway, this is the loss of the last link to the Golden Age of musicals.
Our first encounter with Sondheim came in 1970 when we saw the groundbreaking musical Company. Yes, people called it the first "theme" musical but they weren't quite sure what to make of it. We were young and hardly seasoned in the ways of the world but we loved the show from the first moment to the last.
Why? Well, it just captured a moment, a young man's journey, a yearning -- yes, but also a sense of cool detachment that was indicative of the time. Yet the piece was also timeless as evidenced by the fact that it has been revived again and again and is running on Broadway right now.
After Company, we were hooked. And so we saw A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures (a personal favorite), Sweeney Todd (his masterwork), Sunday In The Park With George, Into The Woods, Passion and, most recently Road Show. Later, we caught up with revivals of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (the first show for which he wrote both music and lyrics), Anyone Can Whistle (written with Richard Rodgers), Do I Hear A Waltz?, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along and Assassins. Of course, who hasn't seen Gypsy and West Side Story for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics?
No two Sondheim shows were exactly alike but they all touched upon Big Themes: the complicated relationships between parents and children; the tortured minds of destructive souls; the nature of evil; the ravages of time; the fickleness and foolishness of youth; the true meaning of fairy tales; brotherly love -- and hate; the relentless drive of obsessive love; the meaning (or lack thereof) of marriage; history's distortions; lust, greed, guile, guts and gullibility -- and, almost always, the longings of the human heart. And all of this, all of this staggering output spanned nearly 70 years!
In fact, Sondheim was said to be working on a new musical at the time of his death at age 91. If he wasn't creating, he wasn't alive. This was hi9s elixir, his tonic.
Sondheim always had a twinkle in his eye, even to the end. Most recently we saw him just before the COVID outbreak when City Center presented a production of Road Show. Sondheim appeared after the curtain came down to talk about the show and its various iterations and voyage to its present form. He enjoyed interacting with the show's young director. He was sharp, lucid, funny, self-deprecating and, as always, delightfully at home on a New York stage -- in a town and at a place where he spent most of his life. New York was his forever habitat and the stage was his natural milieu.
He often remarked that he wasn't in the business of writing hits because that's not the way he wrote songs. He wrote for a particular character at a particular moment in a particular scene in a particular show. But he did write Send In The Clowns, Not A Day Goes By, Broadway Baby, The Ladies Who Lunch, Comedy Tonight and Losing My Mind, among others. And, of course he wrote the lyrics for more hit tunes than could possibly be mentioned including the haunting There's A Place For Us and the rousing Everything's Coming Up Roses.
Sondheim was the essence of Broadway and he loved the main stem, the Great White Way. Nowhere was that love more evocatively expressed than in Follies with songs that assembled a pastiche of every type of melody that has graced the musical stage.
He took both his hits and his misses in stride. And that proved to be a wise and visionary attitude as some of his early also-rans turned out to be hits later down the road.
Our favorites? It's hard to even imagine where to begin but Follies, Sweeney Todd, Company and Pacific Overtures would have to be near the top.
If you probed Sondheim about his work he would often appear to be inscrutable. But he'd be the first to tell you there was no magic to it. It was hard work -- tedious work. And he worked very, very hard at it. It could be a tortuous, frustrating, even exasperating and very, very lonely business. All of that is best examined and revealed in Sunday In The Park With George.
For audiences, of course, there were moments in Sondheim shows that were nothing less than exhilarating. But there were poignant moments as well.
Many felt that Sondheim was enigmatic. But look at his life: the only child of divorced parents, he pretty much adopted Oscar Hammerstein's family as his own and Hammerstein became his caring and understanding mentor.
From an early age, Sondheim likely knew he was different -- set apart, blessed with a certain talent and destined for a solitary adventure into an imaginary world.
For the real of the story of Stephen Sondheim, explore his works. There, his life unfolds and is a luminous gift to all of us -- if you're willing to look, listen, savor and learn!

Why You'll LOVE The Horrors Of This 'Little Shop'

Lest you think Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd invented the grim combination of murder, mayhem and music, think again. Long before Mrs. Lovett's Pie Shop there was another shop that dabbled in Broadway guts and gore and that was the Little Shop of Horrors. Of course, Little Shop of Horrors never made it to Broadway proper. A mere fraction of the size and scope of Sweeney, Little Shop opened off Broadway and there it stayed for a good long time.

Then, in 2015 City Center's acclaimed Encore series revived Little Shop with Jake Gyllenhaal in the starring role as Seymour, the endearing but ultimately menacing nebbish who works at Mushnik's troubled flower shop on skid row. While there, Seymour harbors a crush on Audrey, a coworker and also nourishes a strange plant with an insatiable appetite and a penchant for the macabre. We enjoyed the Encores production but it was difficult imaginng hunky Gyllenhaal as a spindly, bullied nerd. Also, City Center's vastness and huge stage overpowered this basically intimate show.

Now, Little Shop is back in the much smaller Westside Theatre just off Broadway where it's much more at home with a fine cast starring Broadway favorite Jeremy Jordan and featuring the always adept and multi-talented Christian Borle. Jordan actually looks the part of Seymour and Brole plays the heavy to the hilt along with a few other characters. With Tammy Blanchard as Audrey, the love interest and Tom Alan Robbins as shop-owner Mushnik and backed up by the irrepressible Urchin singers (Salome Smith, Aveena Sawyer and Joy Woods) this cast plays the whole show broadly and with such delight at being on stage and in front of a live audience again that they win you over right from the start.

Jordan is one of Broadway's most versatile actors and here, teamed with the bulgy-eyed Borle, he seems to be savoring every moment of Little Shop's journey into what becomes a blood-thirsty mess, albeit peppered with non-stop laughs. Borle and Jordan wring every bit of mugging physicality out of their roles in what is basically a grisly tale wrapped in a cartoon-style musical that can't hide its smirk.

Of course, a major nod must be given to the show's adept puppeteers who help Seymour's plant grow into a mammoth monster that overwhelms not just the story but nearly the entire stage. But since Little Shop never even tries to be a serious morality tale, the fright is all in fun.

And yet, in this era of COVID and biological warfare, well -- you may just see some pertinent warnings.

Prognosis: A delightful, perfectly-mounted hit. Don't miss it! 

We've Got Our Tickets; What About You?

The classic musical "Little Shop of Horrors" is back on stage in New York City.