Color and light, tension and harmony. These design elements should be fundamental to any stage production, but perhaps none more than Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George. In Peter DuBois’s production at the Huntington Theater in Boston (Sept. 9-Oct. 16, 2016), the designers addressed another of the show’s themes: making an artist’s vision […]
Read MoreBoris Aronson: Vision and Execution
In an extraordinary six-year period, Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince brought four landmark musicals to Broadway: Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973) and Pacific Overtures (1976). All four iconic productions of these remarkably disparate shows featured scenic designs by the same man: Boris Aronson. A son of the Grand Rabbi of Kiev, […]
Read MoreMiscast in Canada
The Stratford Festival in Ontario is one of North America’s preeminent theater companies. Producing a rolling repertory of more than a dozen plays and musicals from April through November in four theaters, the festival has earned a reputation for attracting some of the world’s most renowned actors, directors and designers who produce theater that regularly […]
Read MoreSondheim’s Post-modern Reinvention
Like many Stephen Sondheim fans, author Robert L. McLaughlin discovered Sondheim’s musical work when he found a cast album (in his case, Company) at the library while in high school. McLaughlin, now an English professor at Illinois State University, was inspired to act in college and beyond because of his interest in Sondheim: “Seventeen years […]
Read MoreCompany at Boston’s Lyric Stage
How do you solve a problem like Company? While now revered as a benchmark of the post-Golden Age, its own advancing years can be a challenge to those who might wish it would always be what it always was: a contemporary look, as through a martini glass darkly, at the difficulties of interpersonal relationships. Neither […]
Read MoreGift That Keeps On Giving: Jim Walton talks about Merrily’s original production
At the age of 25, Jim Walton originated the role of Franklin Shepard in Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway. Walton talks about the highs and lows of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that came his way after being a New York actor for only two years. Walton has gone on to appear in any number […]
Read MoreSondheim in Trondheim
Rabarbrateateret (“The Rhubarb Theater”) is a theater company situated in the idyllic “old town” Bakklandet in Trondheim, Norway’s third largest city. The company has mounted acclaimed productions of Waiting for Godot and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, among others. Their first Sondheim show was an intimate Sweeney Todd, played in about four square meters in the […]
Read MoreSweeney Todd was “in between” at Glimmerglass
So is it a musical or an opera? One might have expected Sweeney Todd at the Glimmerglass Festival to come down firmly on the side of the latter. But, to borrow a thought from Into the Woods, this summer’s production lived in between. Glimmerglass, the summer opera festival in Cooperstown, New York, presented 12 performances […]
Read MoreOpera or Musical? Sondheim made Sweeney to scare an audience
The big revelation instantly splashed across the media was that Stephen Sondheim’s new musical is to have its premiere Off Broadway at the Public Theater in late 2017 — “ if I can finish the score in time.” But in an onstage conversation at Glimmerglass Opera on July 30, Sondheim made what may be an […]
Read MoreKatie Welsh’s “Informative” Cabaret About a Dozen Sondheim Women
Singer Katie Welsh performed an evening of song, Women in the World of Sondheim, at Feinstein’s 54 Below in New York City on June 10, 2016, accompanied by pianist Emily Whitaker. She explored a dozen female characters from Sondheim’s musicals and how they informed one another when they were put “side by side” with […]
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