Ever since I heard the quintessential prog rock group The Nice do a psychedelic instrumental version of “America” in 1968, I have loved this song. Later on, I was better able to appreciate Sondheim’s lyrics, whose satirical sharpness and superb inventiveness make this the definitive song about migration. Written for Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story (1957), at a time when Sondheim had never written a Broadway show of his own, it was, lyrically speaking, a fabulous debut. Robert Wise’s 1961 film version, currently available on Netflix, is likewise a great revision of the original. ( Read more ...

Along with many others, my first exposure to Stephen Sondheim’s art was through watching the film of Bernstein’s West Side Story as a child. The song which still floors me is the Quintet near the end of Act 1. Bernstein’s ecstatic, dynamic music is  splendid in itself, but the number’s perfection is sealed by Sondheim’s lyrics, each character distinctly voiced, the rhythms and rhymes flawless. “Sperm to worm,” still makes me grin. That ability to articulate different voices, to overlay disparate musical styles is a trademark. Think of the long opening sequence from Into the Woods, Read more ...

Two numbers, one hair-raising slice of music-theatre. When Sondheim's paying homage to the older, revue type of musical, you can extract a string of top hits: Follies, from which Marianka Swain chose "I'm Still Here" yesterday, could yield at least half a dozen more choices, Company almost as many. When his aim is a more through-composed kind of story-telling, with leading motifs recurring and transformed, "highlights" are less easily detached. Sweeney Todd (1979) was his first high watermark in that art, Into the Woods (1986) the next; later shows attempted a more minimalistic palette, with Read more ...

Surely there’s never been a more apt time for Sondheim’s great cry of defiance? “I’m Still Here” is sung by showgirl-turned-actress Carlotta in Follies (1971) – added during the Boston try-out in place of “Can That Boy Foxtrot”. Loosely inspired by Joan Crawford, it’s the ultimate anthem of showbiz survival.Carlotta looks back on a tumultuous career: “Plush velvet sometimes/Sometimes just pretzels and beer”. Musically, it’s a Harold Arlen pastiche, as Sondheim explains in Finishing the Hat, since Carlotta “would see her life as a flamboyant, torchy ballad”. Lyrically, it’s pure Read more ...

Here's an irony worthy of the work of Stephen Sondheim, an artist who clearly knows a thing or two about the multiple manifestations of that word. On the same day that he turns 90, namely today, Broadway is unable to host the keenly awaited American premiere, scheduled for this evening, of the gender-flipped Company that stunned London last year. The city's theatres there (as everywhere else) shuttered by the coronavirus, New York will have to bide its time until audiences can see the director Marianne Elliott's fresh take on the story of a Manhattan singleton, once male and now female, Read more ...

“Every now and then the country goes a little wrong”: so goes one of the many lyrics from the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical Assassins that makes this 1990 Off Broadway musical (subsequently chosen to open Sam Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse in 1992) a piece of theatre very much for our time. Some shows need textual tweaking when they come around again but not this one. If anything, this musical's excavation of an abiding societal fury seems more pertinent than ever today.Building in resonance every time I see it (at least if done well), Assassins has now been revived in a very smart co- Read more ...

This is a golden age of London Sondheim revivals, with Marianne Elliott’s thrilling Company still playing in the West End, and Dominic Cooke’s Follies getting a hugely welcome second run at the National – both testament to a director’s transformative vision. A few key cast changes add extra incentive to this Follies encore, although the sheer level of detail in Cooke’s production should be more than enough to tempt a second (or third, or fourth) visit.Far more atmospheric than plot-driven, Sondheim and James Goldman’s oft-revised 1971 work has flummoxed many. But Cooke’s version, which Read more ...

Will pride of place amongst theatre productions every year go in perpetuity to the work of Stephen Sondheim? One might be tempted to think so given the preeminence during 2017 of Dominic Cooke's breathtaking revival of Follies (due back in the National Theatre repertoire from February) and the equal strength of this year's musical theatre reclamation of choice, Company, the Sondheim title that immediately preceded Follies on Broadway. The chance before long to see these two stagings back-to-back is enough to make any theatre lover's heart skip a beat even as a glance back at 2018 finds Read more ...

The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests this is how the piece was always meant to be. Ah, a weighted paradox – Company is full of them. Successful New Yorker Bobbie (Rosalie Craig, pictured below with Alex Gaumond and Jonathan Bailey) is celebrating/avoiding her 35th birthday, amidst the overbearing friends she both loves and longs to escape Read more ...

“What drivel! What nonsense! What escapist Techicolor twaddle!” No, not a description of Wallis Giunta’s scintillating BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall recital, it’s a lyric from “What A Movie”, Leonard Bernstein’s outstanding stand-alone number from his one-act opera Trouble In Tahiti. Narrating the story of a ridiculously torrid movie the heroine has sat through, Giunta joyously inhabited its every moment and delivered it with complete theatrical assurance. That’s only to be expected; theartsdesk reviewed her stunning performance in the role for Opera North last year. What really impressed here Read more ...

Of Sondheim’s half-dozen masterpieces, Follies is the one which sets the bar impossibly high, both for its four principals and in its typically unorthodox dramatic structure. The one-hit showstoppers from within a glittering ensemble come thick and fast in the first half – stop the show they certainly did last night – and it’s hard not to miss all that when the camera zooms in exclusively on the quarrelling quartet. Dominic Cooke’s less-is-more National Theatre production, full of subtle touches, finds a better solution than any to the nominally climactic “Loveland” sequence and wisely Read more ...

Judy Collins was one of the great folk icons of the 1960s, competing for the spotlight with Joan Baez. Where the latter was instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan to wide prominence, the former was crucial in putting Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen on the musical map. She was first to record their music – on Wildflowers (1967), a seminal collection arranged by Joshua Rifkin, celebrated scholar of Bach, Beatles and Scott Joplin.Collins’ tastes are no less eclectic: she was exploring Brecht and Blitzstein in 1966 and, a decade later, won a Grammy nomination for “Send in the Clowns”, a trans- Read more ...