To purchase Stephen Sondheim's FINISHING THE HAT, click on the image above.
American Theatre has published a really interesting interview with Stephen Sondheim in this month’s edition of the journal. Titled “A Playwright in Song”, the interview deals with his work, his influences, the dramatic language of musicals, pop and rock music, hip-hop, directors, his writing methods and the future of the theatre, about which he states:
It’s an interesting read – enjoy it!
Post a song sung by your favourite female singer in a musical.
The name that immediately springs to mind is Audra McDonald. Bernadette Peters arrives next, but McDonald was here first and she really is, at this point in time, my favourite vocalist when it comes to musical theatre songs. But what clsip should I choose? Everything that this woman sings is stunning! Her work on Ragtime is phenomenal; her covers of Sondheim songs – including her performance of “The Glamorous Life” at the recent 80th birthday concert – are so incredibly moving; her covers of standard Broadway songs often uncover new layers of meaning; and her work on new material created specifically for her by the post-Sondheim generation of musical theatre threatre-makers is definitive. I love listening to the song cycle based on the seven deadly sins created for her by a diverse group of composers and lyricists, so perhaps I should find something from that? Or perhaps it should be a song from her upcoming turn as Bess?
Ultimately, I have turned to a performance of Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg’s “Down With Love” from Hooray for What!, performed at My Favorite Broadway: the Leading Ladies. After a nice, easy start, McDonald cranks the song into a high gear tour de force with a few nods to a couple of other showtunes along the way.
To purchase the DVD of the original Broadway production of INTO THE WOODS, click on the image above.
Joanna Gleason, the Canadian, Tony Award-winning musical theatre actress who originated the role of the Baker’s Wife in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, has just done an interview with BroadwayWorld in which she admits that Into the Woods was her favourite musical of the ones in which she’s appeared. On Broadway, these total only two – Nick and Nora and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – but the singer-actress has performed in musicals since her schooldays at Beverly Hills High School. It’s an interesting read and , although there’s no other mention of Into the Woods, Gleason also mentions other Sondheim roles she would like to do and roles she would like to have done:
I’m gonna wait around and play Mme. Armfeldt one of these days. Probably sooner than later. I love that. I’m pretty happy with the role I played, the Baker’s Wife. And of course there’s any number of roles in Company when I was younger that would have been fun to do. Desirée would have been fun to do. Actually, Mrs. Lovett would have been fun to do, but I don’t…you know, I’ll tell you something, there’s a difference between being able to do something on stage – many of those roles, I know that I could do – but there’s also brilliant casting and I don’t know that in some of the roles I’d be brilliant casting, but I’d be terrific casting, do you know what I’m saying? There is something that I’ve begun to know in the last ten years about what I’m right for and what I would just be good in, but there are roles that you’d be right for and not right for, not more right for than somebody else.
Age-wise, is it realistic to think that only Mme. Armfeldt is left for her? She’s 60 – but she certainly didn’t look it in the Sondheim birthday concert last year and I think she could still do a marvelous Mrs Lovett (and, come to that, a lovely Desiree) in the right setting. Maybe she feels that a role like Mrs Lovett would be too physically taxing for her or something like that? What about Follies – I could see her being great in a role in that show.
Post a song that makes you sad or teary.
The song I have chosen today is “We Do Not Belong Together” from Sunday in the Park with George, which features a score by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. I must admit, it took me a long time to warm to Sunday in the Park with George, mainly because I am not the biggest Mandy Patinkin fan and had to deal with getting passed his mannerisms before I could actually take on board the material itself. I really have a great appreciation for the show and find many part of it incredibly moving, although I think the second act is not as seamlessly constructed as the first. There are other moments that make me teary in Sunday in the Park with George – the sheer beauty “Sunday”, for example – but there is only one part that I find devastatingly sad. “We Do Not Belong Together” makes me weep because of its truth. This song is unflinchingly honest and there is added resonance for me: I once date an artist and I discovered this show in its entirety shortly after we broke up. However, this song is so much more than that. It is a universal statement, perfectly moulded for the mouths of the two characters we see on stage.
I couldn’t find a video clip from the original Broadway production of “We Do Not Belong Together” (in which Bernadette Peters breaks your heart on every note) on YouTube, so here’s a clip from another production:
Post a song that makes you happy.
So many people write off Laurence O’Keefe, Nell Benjamin and Heather Hach’s Legally Blonde as a musical. I admit I rolled my eyes when the show was announced and thought it would be a standard half-hearted movie-to-musical adaptation. But when I imported the cast recording into iTunes and listened to it for the first time, I was introduced to a stage show that improves upon its origins, a feeling that is not lessened when the book is added to the mix or when one sees the production itself. Legally Blonde is a smart new-age musical comedy, one that takes account of the some of the lessons learned by the development of the musical play as well as some of those about musical theatre proclaimed by Sondheim (particularly “content dictates form”). It’s a diva style musical comedy like Anything Goes or Mame and it holds its own against those shows. Is it a perfect show? No. But it is accomplished and delightful, so I refuse to reconcile it to the realm of “guilty pleasures”.
The song that makes me happy from this show is “So Much Better”, seen here in a promotional video for the London production of the show:
Post a song demonstrating how overrated you think a musical is.
Wicked has its moments. Sure, the book lacks focus and the second act is a complete mess-up story-wise, but part of the score is on the right track. It’s in numbers like this one where the wheels come off completely:
Dear Stephen Schwartz, the score for Wicked shouldn’t sound like the soundtrack for low budget porn. But that’s what you get when you recycle trunk songs from the 1970s, making only a few cosmetic changes to make the song sound as if it belongs in the score into which it has been placed. (By the way, the video features the marvelously glam Adam Lambert as Fiyero and Rachel Gonzalez as Elphaba, which means it’s from either the national tour or Los Angeles productions of the show from 2005-2008.)
Post a song demonstrating how underrated you think a musical is.
The choice today is an easy one: Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party. That this brilliant, devastating show lost the Tony Award for Best Score to Aida is unforgivable. (Let’s not even talk about how the Best Musical award that year was awarded to a show that was not even a musical in the first place.) That tons of fangirl-types prefer the Andrew Lippa version perhaps is not surprising; that they don’t realise why LaChiusa’s adaptation is superior is why mediocre shows like Wicked run on Broadway forever for now.
This video is a clip from the Tony Awards, featuring the brilliant Toni Collette as Queenie and a cast featuring Mandy Patinkin and Eartha Kitt.
Post a song from your latest musical obsession.
It hasn’t been a very obsessive obsession and it’s pretty much over, but I have been listening to Brigadoon quite a bit lately, mainly – I admit – to figure out what the score isn’t as appealing to me as I suppose it should be given its classic status. Having listened to it again, my feeling is that – some exquisite numbers aside – this score still doesn’t quite work for me. I’m not sure why, although I have some ideas on the matter. But the bottom line is that – at this point – the effort doesn’t seem worth the time to wade through Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics (which is where I suspect the trouble lies) and Frederick Loewe’s score (which is lovely and lush, but perhaps not as refined as My Fair Lady or Camelot) and work out exactly what it is that doesn’t work for me.
The video I’ve chosen is a clip from the rather dire film version of Brigadoon. Nevertheless, it is a lovely song and my absolute favourite in the score: “The Heather on the Hill”
Post a song from your first musical.
The first musical to which I was exposed was Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s The Sound of Music, which my grandmother used to put on the record player in the afternoons when I had to go and nap. I have a cassette tape of myself singing Liesl’s part of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from that time. I guess I must have been about 4 years old. I don’t know how old I was when I first saw the iconic film, but I really love it. The Sounds of Music is one of the best stage-to-screen adaptations of a musical, with many of the weaknesses of the stage show (which I directed in 2009) fixed in both the screenplay and the score.
The video I’ve chosen is a clip from the 52nd Tony Awards. The Sound of Music was up for “Best Revival of a Musical” that year and this medley includes a the thrilling “Gaudeamus Domino” wedding chorale, “Do-Re-Mi” and “The Sound of Music”.
Musical Cyberspace 