It’s hard to listen to Barbra Streisand’s latest album, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, without comparing it to her two previous Broadway albums. The liner notes explicitly link her choices of Sondheim material to past successes, dubbing her “the foremost interpreter of his songs” on the strength of her recordings of “Send in the Clowns,” […]
Read MoreSondheim and the Chaotic Age: Ethan Mordden’s Opinionated Guide
Ethan Mordden’s On Sondheim (Oxford University Press, 2016) is indeed an opinionated guide. It also happens to be thorough and authoritative, despite Mordden’s protestation in the preface’s first sentence that he doesn’t intend the book as a reference work. While it isn’t an extensive biography, it is a delightful work that places Sondheim and his musical […]
Read More