“He was a superstar. He was a pin-up,” David Campbell says enthusiastically when asked about John Wilkes Booth. “As a Confederate, he hated the Civil War and was very much a dissenter of Lincoln’s presidency. He wasn’t a crazy man, and the funny thing is, the rhetoric he styles himself in is scarily very much […]
Read MoreSondheim Times Four in California
You would think that at some point in its evolution, a theater company devoted to producing works whose themes concern LGBT issues and whose playwrights represent the LGBT community, would get around to Sondheim. But truth be told, Theatre Out, a small storefront theater company in California’s Orange County, had more than a decade under […]
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 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 […]
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