They’re baked into the very concepts of his stagecraft, because that’s how the narratives, some virtually plot-free, demanded expression. This, however, does: Many of the greatest Sondheim Broadway scores deployed then-groundbreaking cinematic techniques - dissolves from one piece of action to another, “wipes” whisking the audience from here to there, past to present, one locale to another, in a flash.
#14 AND UNDER 1973 MOVIE MOVIE#
Movie love hardly makes this artist, and this artist’s passing, unique. What he wanted, Sondheim said later in an interview for Craig Zadan’s book “Sondheim & Co.,” was to “write a horror movie, a background score for a horror film … unsettling, scary, and very romantic.” Elsewhere Sondheim told another interviewer: “During my formative years movies really molded my entire view of the world.” Thirty-four years later, Sondheim wrote another, more extensive Herrmann mash note: “Sweeney Todd.” Three months later Herrmann replied and told Sondheim how nice it was for a composer to get fan mail. Sondheim stayed for a second showing, memorized the concerto as best he could, played it, obsessively. The climax has the composer/murderer (Laird Cregar) premiering his magnum opus, titled “Concerto Macabre,” in a concert hall that eventually goes up in literal flames. 26 death at home in Roxbury, Connecticut.įor Sondheim, a key “aha!” moment came at 15, when he saw the composer-is-a-serial-killer potboiler “Hangover Square” (1945), with its wild, scary Bernard Herrmann score.
Like so many artists’ imaginations, Sondheim’s was fired and fed by the movies he saw in his childhood He liked broad comedy and melodrama best and never had much love for musicals, as he told the New York Times in his last major interview, conducted mere days before his Nov. Since the Eisenhower era Sondheim wrote only one project based on a screen original: “A Little Night Music” (1973), taken from Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 masterwork “Smiles of a Summer Night.” “Passion” (1994) was taken from the 1981 Ettore Scola film “Passione d’Amore” but also from that film’s source material, the 19th century novel “Fosca.” This doesn’t mean the now-common, often wearying practice of dragging a hit film onto the stage and adding songs, even if the story resists full-throated musical expression or a reason for theatrical existence. And the funny thing? The funny thing is that so much of his inspiration, fluidity and achievement sprang from what he called his “basic language”: the movies. Sondheim’s death the day after Thanksgiving, at the age of 91, marks the passing of the American musical theater’s most incisive lyricist and grandest theatrical composer not just of his generation, but of the second half of the 20th century and part of the 21st.
#14 AND UNDER 1973 MOVIE CRACK#
I met my first real friend at college when, down the dorm hall, I heard Gordon (now a crack illustrator and comics artist) singing along to an LP of “Anyone Can Whistle,” going to town on “Everybody Says Don’t.” I thought no one else even knew that song.
Crazy as it sounds, a lot of people’s kids have done Sondheim by now, and not just “Into the Woods.” It was basically the “Bugsy Malone” version of “Follies.” My son was in a high school production of “Sweeney Todd” a few years ago. My friend Stephen, now a director and academic, and I listened to that album a lot.įirst sensation of feeling terrifyingly outmatched by a high school theater production: “Follies” at Racine’s St. First time I ever really listened to an emotionally complicated song lyric: “Sorry/Grateful,” from “Company,” an alarmingly accurate crystallization of so many relationships. First time I fell in love with an original Broadway cast album: age 14, maybe 15, ”A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” checked out from the Racine Public Library, downtown branch in Wisconsin. Stephen Sondheim fans all have their own benchmarks of discovery.
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