STEPHEN SONDHEIM THEATRE Marquee Lighting

Stephen Sondheim, Patti Lupone and Tom Tuft

Patti Lupone

Nathan Lane

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim's name is now in marquee lights of a Broadway theatre. Earlier this evening, the Stephen Sondheim Theatre marquee lighting took place at 124 West 43rd Street. To honor the most celebrated artist in American musical theatre, some of Mr. Sondheim's collaborators were present including Broadway stars, Patti Lupone and Nathan Lane, as well as librettist, John Weidman. Formerly the Henry Miller's Theatre, the newly constructed venue opened in the fall of 2009 and is operated by the Roundabout Theatre. 

ABOUT STEPHEN SONDHEIM (from Playbill.com)

Sondheim has one foot in the Golden Age of the American book musical (withGypsy and West Side Story) and one in the modern world of the concept musical, which sought to tell stories in fresh ways (Company, Follies, Pacific Overtures). Like his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, he changed the nature of musical theatre forever, influencing subsequent generations of writers.

Sondheim is the winner of an Academy Award, many Tony Awards, multiple Grammy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Some of his other accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kennedy Center Honors (1993), the National Medal of Arts (1996), the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Music (2006) and a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre (2008).

Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics for Road Show (2008), Passion (1994),Assassins (1991), Into the Woods (1987), Sunday in the Park with George(1984), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sweeney Todd (1979), Pacific Overtures (1976), The Frogs (1974), A Little Night Music (1973), Follies(1971; revised in London, 1987), Company (1970), Anyone Can Whistle(1964) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), as well as the lyrics for West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965) and additional lyrics for Candide (1973). Side by Side by Sondheim (1976), Marry Me a Little (1981), You're Gonna Love Tomorrow(1983) and Putting It Together (1993/99) are anthologies of his work, as is the new musical Sondheim on Sondheim. He composed the film scores of "Stavisky" (1974) and "Reds" (1981) and songs for "Dick Tracy" (Academy Award, 1990). He also wrote songs for the television production "Evening Primrose" (1966), co-authored, with Anthony Perkins, the film "The Last of Sheila" (1973) and, with George Furth, the play Getting Away with Murder(1996), and provided incidental music for the plays The Girls of Summer(1956), Invitation to a March (1961) and Twigs (1971). He won Tony Awards for Best Score for a Musical for Passion, Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Follies and Company. All of these shows won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, as did Pacific Overtures and Sunday in the Park with George, the latter also receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Saturday Night (1954), his first professional musical, finally had its New York premiere in 1999 at Second Stage Theatre.

SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM Opening Night

Last night, I attended the opening night performance of the Broadway multi-media musical portrait, SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM at Studio 54 (254 West 54th Street). Conceived and directed by longtime Stephen Sondheim collaborator James Lapine, this unique production is part video documentary, and part Broadway revue ("docu-musical"). It features an eight-person cast -- Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Tom Wopat, Leslie Kritzer, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott. Even though I am not a huge Sondheim fan, I enjoyed the beautiful renditions of dozens of Sondheim compositions, well-known and unfamiliar, that are interwoven with very revealing video footage in which Mr. Sondheim discusses the genesis of the songs being performed. This limited run (to June 13) coincides with the 80th birthday of the Tony Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-honored Broadway icon, Stephen Sondheim. His birthday was March 22. Bergdorf Goodman honors Mr. Sondheim's 80th birthday in its window display (see April 20, 2010 post).

Review from the New York Times (Ben Brantley)

God has spoken on the subject of His existence. And you will be pleased to know that He seems resigned to and amused by the obeisance and sacrifices that are made in His name. Listen, O children of Broadway, to His own words, chanted by a chosen tribe of His disciples at the theater at Studio 54 (once a pagan temple to the gods of disco) as His sardonic image smiles down upon them. “You have to have something to believe in,” they sing, “Something to appropriate, emulate, overrate. Might as well be Stephen, or to use his nickname: God!” Thus does the composer of those lyrics address the question of his divinity in a little number called “God” at the top of the second act of “Sondheim on Sondheim,” a genial, multimedia commemorative scrapbook on the life, times and career of you-know-who. The song was inspired by the title of a 1994 cover story of New York magazine: “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” And the answer, for those of us for whom musicals are truly a religion, is — now as then — yes. Or to use the language of the common folk, “Well, duh.”

Mr. Sondheim turned 80 last month, and the occasion has already been honored by more tributes than are normally accorded the Yankees when they win the World Series, with more to come. This is not overkill. Mr. Sondheim bears a relationship to his vocation that is unlike that of any artist in any other field.

In the world of American musicals he is indisputably the best, brightest and most influential talent to emerge during the last half-century. Even when his shows have been commercial flops, they are studied, revered and eventually reincarnated to critical hosannas. No other songwriter to date has challenged his eminence, and it seems unlikely that anyone will in his lifetime. It is even possible, if sadly so, that he may be remembered as the last of the giants in a genre that flourished in the 20th century and wilted in the 21st.

But such brooding thoughts have little place in a discussion of “Sondheim on Sondheim,” which opened Thursday night. This is a chipper, haphazard anthology show that blends live performance of Sondheim songs with archival video footage and taped interviews with Himself. Conceived and directed by James Lapine, Mr. Sondheim’s frequent (and, to me, best) collaborator over the years, this somewhat jittery production never quite finds a sustained tone, a natural rhythm or even a logical sense of sequence.

It does, however, have a polished and likable eight-member cast (that includes Tom Wopat, Vanessa Williams and the great Barbara Cook); a savory selection of Sondheim material that never made it to Broadway as well as canonic standards; and heaping spoonfuls of insider dope about the creation of shows like “Company” and “Follies” and the changes they underwent on the road. And then there is Mr. Sondheim, who appears in appropriately larger-than-life form on artistically arranged monitors, typically concealing as much as he reveals in quick takes of self-portraiture. It is these interviews that provide the shape and, in many cases, the direct cues for the live action onstage. Occasionally this is achieved with a literal-mindedness that is too cute for comfort. Footage of Mr. Sondheim on the Mike Douglas show talking about why he likes to write about neurotics is followed by Ms. Cook and Tom Wopat singing “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” from “Company” (1970).

More often, though, the performers channel their master’s voice in direct, annotative illustrations of what he’s talking about. Three different versions of the opening number in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (from 1962, Mr. Sondheim’s first full Broadway score) are spliced into his accounts of rewriting them. There are similarly illuminating insights into the labor pains of “Follies” (1971), “Passion” (1994) and “Road Show” (2009), the musical formerly known as “Bounce” (2003).

This format has the disadvantage of often giving the performers the status of audio-visual tools. Mr. Sondheim says he’s always most comfortable when he can create for a specific character instead of an abstract type or emotion. And it’s not easy for singers to reflect that specificity in a show like this one. At its least inspired “Sondheim on Sondheim” has the smiley supper-club blandness of previous Sondheim revues, like “Putting It Together” and “Side by Side by Sondheim.” But there are also blessed if infrequent examples of singers making songs their own. Most often they involve the 82-year-old Ms. Cook, a longtime and exceptionally sensitive Sondheim interpreter. But the vulpine Ms. Williams has her moments too, slithering through the striptease of “Ah, but Underneath” (from the 1987 London production of “Follies”) and singing “Losing My Mind” (from “Follies”) in counterpoint to Ms. Cook’s profoundly wistful version of “Not a Day Goes By” (from the 1981 show “Merrily We Roll Along.”) As an ensemble the cast — stylishly filled out by Leslie Kritzer, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott — is strongest in its haunting choral delivery of two songs from “Assassins” (Mr. Sondheim and John Weidman’s dark journey through American history), the grim contemporary relevance of which requires no epigrammatic explanation. And they are well served by a crisp physical production that includes Peter Flaherty’s witty, perfectly synchronized video and projection designs and Beowulf Boritt’s moving-building-block set.

In the autobiographical “Opening Doors” number from “Merrily We Roll Along” (nimbly performed here by Ms. Kritzer, Mr. Morton and Mr. Scott) a young songwriter is told by an old Broadway pro that “there’s not a tune you can hum” in his work. That was a standard complaint about Mr. Sondheim for decades. Yet when you hear many of the numbers in this revue, you’re struck by how they’ve penetrated and stuck in your consciousness in ways deeper than merely hummable songs allow.

Of course there are also songs that have turned out to be surprisingly hummable, like “Send In the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music” (1973), which is here presented in the first act as a hilarious YouTube collage of widely (and wildly) ranging interpreters, professional and otherwise. Then in the second act Ms. Cook takes up the same song and delivers it with a simple, sweet bereftness that breaks your heart.

It’s a lovely reminder that for all his much-touted cleverness, Mr. Sondheim is great not because he’s a wizard with rhyme, rhythm and key changes. It’s because he senses and conveys the darker currents of pain and loneliness that swirl beneath even the shiniest surfaces. He sees inside us. And there is something kind of Godlike about that.

Bergdorf Goodman Celebrates the 80th Birthday of STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Bergdorf Goodman is devoting five of its world-famous windows to pay tribute to the 80th birthday of composer/lyricist extraordinaire, STEPHEN SONDHEIM. Mr. Sondheim is considered by many to be America's greatest living composer and lyricist. The window display features memorabilia, photographs, posters, lyrics to all the songs from his major musicals, objects representing different musicals, as well as art of AL HIRSCHFELD depicting Sondheim's amazing musicals including Gypsy with Ethel Merman and Jack Klugman, Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum with Nathan Lane and Mark Linn-Baker, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum with Whoopi Goldberg, Into The Woods with Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason, Sunday In The Park With George with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin, Follies with Blythe Danner, Polly Bergen, Marge Champion, and Judith Ivey, West Side Story with Carol Lawrence, Larry Kert, and Chita Rivera, West Side Story with Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, and George Chakiris. The Hirschfeld art from the windows will be auctioned by charitybuzz.com to benefit the New York City Center and the Animal Medical Center-Animal Bond Program. Bergdorf Goodman is located at 57th Street and 5th Avenue.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE

One of the most visually stunning shows currently on Broadway is the new revival of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical called SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE which I saw earlier this evening at Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio 54. This musical chronicles the life of French impressionist painter GEORGES SEURAT during the creation of his now celebrated masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte-1884," although the characters are fictional. The second act is set in New York in the 1980s, when Seurat's great-grandson encounters different artistic struggles in his search for inspiration to create something new in the unfolding world of contemporary art . According to Roundabout, the story is a celebration of the "art of creation and creation of art." Although I am not a big fan of Stepehen Sondheim's music, I immensely enjoyed this critically-acclaimed production. The high-tech animated projection is truly mesmerizing, and DANIEL EVANS (George), JENNA RUSSEL (Dot) and the cast are wonderful. Directed by SAM BUNTROCK, this musical revival runs through June 29.

Review from the New York Times:

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: February 22, 2008

“Look!” says the man for whom seeing is everything, in a voice that both commands and beseeches. “Look!” This directive is issued by the painter Seurat, played by Daniel Evans in the glorious revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” which opened Thursday night at Studio 54. And even if George’s mother, to whom he is ostensibly speaking, pays him no mind, we certainly do.

How could we not look at the rhapsody of images that keeps unfolding before us? Directed by Sam Buntrock, this production uses 21st-century technology to convey the vision of a 19th-century Pointillist to truly enchanting effect.

But in “Sunday in the Park With George,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1985, looking involves much more than registering what’s pretty, what’s shocking, what’s new. The great gift of this production, first staged in London two years ago, is its quiet insistence that looking is the art by which all people shape their lives.

As a consequence, a familiar show shimmers with a new humanity and clarity that make theatergoers see it with virgin eyes. And while “Sunday” remains a lopsided piece — pairing a near-perfect, self-contained first act with a lumpier, less assured second half — this production goes further than any I’ve seen in justifying the second act’s existence.

SWEENEY TODD the movie opening at the ZIEGFELD THEATRE

The new movie "SWEENEY TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" opened at the ZIEGFELD THEATRE today. It was a nice moviegoing experience because of the contagious excitement and enthusiasm of audience members (clearly Sondheim fans) who wildly applauded even before the opening credits appear on the screen. Starring JOHNNY DEPP and HELENA BONHAM CARTER, and directed by TIM BURTON, this visually gorgeous but dark and gruesome movie is based on the Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical of the same name. I was very unfamiliar with the Broadway musical, and did not see the last Broadway revival, but I loved the movie and even appreciated Stephen Sondheim's music in this movie.

The Ziegfeld Theatre which opened in 1969, is arguably the last "movie palace" still showing films in Manhattan. The theatre has 1,131 seats with a raised balcony section in the rear. The interior has red carpeting and is decorated with abundant gold trim. The Ziegfeld is often the venue for a movie premiere in Manhattan. The theatre is located at 141 West 54th Street. Theatre Office Number: 212-307-1862. Pricing:General Admission $12.00, Seniors $8.00,Children $8.00. The theatre is not handicap accessible.

Review from the New York Times (A. O. Scott):

Tim Burton makes fantasy movies. Stephen Sondheim writes musicals. It is hard to think of two more optimistic genres of popular art, or of two popular artists who have so systematically subverted that optimism. Mr. Sondheim has always gravitated toward the dissonance lurking in hummable tunes, and has threaded his song-and-dance spectaculars with subtexts of anxiety and alienation. Mr. Burton, for his part, dwells most naturally (if somewhat uneasily) in the realms of the gothic and the grotesque, turning comic books and children’s tales into scary, nightmarish shadow plays.

And so it should not be surprising that “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” Mr. Burton’s film adaptation of Mr. Sondheim’s musical, is as dark and terrifying as any motion picture in recent memory, not excluding the bloody installments in the “Saw” franchise. Indeed, “Sweeney” is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature. It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme — I am tempted to say evil — genius.

As it was originally performed onstage, with all the songs Mr. Sondheim composed for it, “Sweeney Todd” balanced its inherent grisliness with a whimsical vitality. The basic story is a revenger’s tragedy more Jacobean than Victorian, but Mr. Sondheim nonetheless wrings some grim, boisterous comedy out of both the impulse for vengeance and the bustling spirit of commerce. A barber, wronged by a powerful judge, returns to London and sets up shop, cutting throats as well as hair. The bodies of his victims are turned into savory meat pies by Mrs. Lovett, his energetic partner in business and crime. Cannibalism and mass murder as the basis for a hit show — what a perverse and delicious joke.

It seemed a lot less funny in the recent revival, which starred Michael Cerveris and Patti Lupone in roles originated on Broadway by Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury in 1979. Mr. Burton’s film, in spite of the participation of Sacha Baron Cohen (as a mountebank barber in a skin-tight costume) and Timothy Spall (as a louche bailiff) pretty much casts out frivolity altogether. Mr. Burton’s London is a dark, smoky oil slick of a city. Dante Ferretti’s production design, which owes something to the Victorian city confected for Carol Reed’s “Oliver!,” can make even daylight look sinister. Innocence, represented by a pair of young would-be lovers (Jayne Wisener and Jamie Campbell Bower) has virtually no chance in this place; it is a joke played by fate, something to be corrupted, imprisoned or destroyed.

Mrs. Lovett the pie maker is played by Helena Bonham Carter, a witchy fixture of Mr. Burton’s cinematic universe as well as the mother of his children. If the director has an alter ego, or at least an actor consistently able to embody his ideas on screen, it would have to be Johnny Depp. He was the hurt, misunderstood man-child in “Edward Scissorhands,” the cracked visionary in “Ed Wood” and the cold, creepy candy mogul in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” in each case giving form to an emotional equation that had never quite been seen on film before. As Sweeney, his hair streaked with white and his eyes rimmed in black, he is an avatar of rage.

Mr. Depp’s singing voice is harsh and thin, but amazingly forceful. He brings the unpolished urgency of rock ’n’ roll to an idiom accustomed to more refinement, and in doing so awakens the violence of Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics and melodies. Some of the crowd-pleasing numbers, like “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” have been pared away, but their absence only contributes to the diabolical coherence of the film, which moves with a furious momentum toward its sanguinary conclusion.

Like nearly every other horror-film serial killer — the outcast teenager abused by the cool kids; the decent man whose suffering has been ignored or mocked — Sweeney starts out as a sympathetic figure. Once upon a time, he was a happy husband and father, until his lovely wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) caught the eye of a malignant judge (Alan Rickman), who transported the poor barber to Australia. Now, after many years, he has returned to find that his daughter, now a teenager, has become the judge’s ward. Finding his old straight razors — “my friends” — under the floorboards of his former shop, Sweeney sets out to ensnare the judge, a project that requires the deaths of quite a few customers along the way.

“They’ll never be missed,” sings the practical Mrs. Lovett. Sweeney’s view is harsher, almost genocidal. “They all deserve to die,” he says, looking out over the rooftops of the city. And Mr. Burton depicts those deaths ruthlessly. The initial geyser of blood may seem artificially bright, but when the bodies slide head first from the chair down a chute into the cellar, they crash and crumple with sickening literalness. You are watching human beings turned into meat.

It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself, but it’s been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares. And the unsettling power of “Sweeney Todd” comes above all from its bracing refusal of any sentimental consolation, from Mr. Burton’s willingness to push the most dreadful implications of Mr. Sondheim’s story to their blackest conclusions.

“Sweeney Todd” is a fable about a world from which the possibility of justice has vanished, replaced on one hand by vain and arbitrary power, on the other by a righteous fury that quickly spirals into madness. There may be a suggestion of hopefulness near the end, but you don’t see hope on the screen. What you see is as dark as the grave. What you hear — some of the finest stage music of the past 40 years — is equally infernal, except that you might just as well call it heavenly.