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    Stephen Sondheim’s Final Musical is Opening. How Complete Was It?

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    Sondheim said days before his death in 2021 that he did not know when it would be finished, but the musical, now called “Here We Are,” begins performances Thursday.Stephen Sondheim, asked days before his death if he had any sense of when his final musical would be finished, offered a simple answer: “No.”The great composer and lyricist, who was 91 at the time, in late 2021, had been working on and off for years on the show, which was adapted from two Luis Buñuel films. He had written songs for the first act but was struggling with the second. “I’m a procrastinator,” he told me then. “I need a collaborator who pushes me, who gets impatient.”Now, two years after his death, the show, which Sondheim had been calling “Square One” but which was later renamed “Here We Are,” is being presented for the first time, in a 526-seat theater at the Shed, a nonprofit cultural center in Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Performances of the show, which is based on Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” and billed as “the final musical by composer Stephen Sondheim,” are set to begin Thursday and to run until January,So what changed? How did a show that Team Sondheim suggested was incomplete at the time of his death get to a point where it was ready for public consumption?The show’s creative and producing team say that two months before Sondheim’s death, he had agreed to let the show go forward, following a successful reading of the material that existed at that point. They had come up with a rationale for a second act that is light on songs. And they note that, following that reading, Sondheim had appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show and had said, “We had a reading of it last week and we were encouraged. So we’re going to go ahead with it, and with any luck we’re going to get it on next season.”So is the show being staged a finished musical? “Who would consider a musical ‘finished’ until it has gone through a full preview process?” the show’s producing and creative team said in written responses to questions for this article. “What we are putting on stage now is as finished as any production about to play its first preview. It’s ready for audiences, and very much the musical Steve envisioned.”The creative team said that all of the show’s songs, and all of its lyrics, were written by Sondheim, and that “as is the case with every musical, the orchestrator and arranger take the composer’s melodies and motifs and use them to arrange and orchestrate the instrumental interstitial music.”The musical will be based in part on Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Rialto Pictures“There isn’t a note in this score that wasn’t born out of Steve’s compositions, as will be abundantly clear to audiences,” they said.The book, on the other hand, has been revised since Sondheim’s death by its writer, David Ives, and director, Joe Mantello. But the team said that “the three collaborators agreed after the informal reading that took place on Sept. 8, 2021, that Steve’s songwriting for both acts was complete.”There is a long history of work in various stages of completion being released after the death of an artist. Mozart’s Requiem, Puccini’s “Turandot” and Berg’s “Lulu” were all left unfinished when their composers died and are now considered classics.“The work that David and Stephen did should absolutely be seen,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which was working with Sondheim to develop the show until a few years ago. “It’s a jewel, it’s small, it’s incomplete, but it’s absolutely delightful and smart and gorgeous, and it would be a crime for it not to be seen. So I’m entirely in favor of the work being shown in public.”James Lapine, who as a librettist collaborated with Sondheim on shows including “Into the Woods” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” agreed. “I really trust David and Joe, and don’t think they would be putting up something they didn’t feel was finished — not on this scale,” he said. “They’re smart cookies, and if they wanted to do a workshop because it wasn’t finished, they could. But they see it as finished, and Steve gave his blessing, so it’s going to be an addition to the canon.”The show, in Sondheim’s pithy description in that last interview, has a “so-called plot” in which “the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”When Sondheim seemed stymied by the second act, Ives and Mantello suggested that perhaps, once the characters are trapped, they can no longer sing.“Hopefully it won’t feel unfinished,” said the actor Nathan Lane, who took part in the 2021 reading. “It makes sense that these characters, once they’re trapped, they can’t sing any more.”“Here We Are,” like many new musicals, has had a complicated developmental journey.Long before he appeared on Colbert’s show, Sondheim had made suggestions that a production could be imminent. In 2014, during an appearance at the New York Film Festival, Sondheim said that he and Ives had just finished a first draft. In 2016, the producer Scott Rudin, who had been consulting with Sondheim about the show, told the “Fresh Air” interviewer Terry Gross that he hoped it would be staged in 2017. Two months later Sondheim, speaking at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., said he also hoped the show would be staged in 2017, “if I can finish the score in time.”Sondheim had been working on the project off and on for years. Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesThere was a reading and three workshops before the pandemic — all led by the Public Theater — but no productions.“My impression was that Steve hadn’t finished it in his mind to where he wanted it to be exactly, but an unfinished Sondheim song still sounds like a pretty amazing song,” said Michael Cerveris, an actor who took part in two readings at the Public.At one point Sondheim set aside work on the musical; he and Ives returned to another project, called “All Together Now,” and the Public’s rights to the Buñuel films lapsed.Then Mantello and Ives pulled together the 2021 reading, with a starry cast led by Lane and Bernadette Peters. The reading was a one-afternoon event, with no singing — the assembled actors read the words of the script and the song.“It was two acts, and the lyrics were witty and clever, unsurprisingly,” Lane said. Sondheim, he said, “had written an act and the beginning of the second act, and there was some material in the script that was suggesting perhaps he might turn some long monologue into a song — I wasn’t privy to those conversations.”There is uncertainty among some Sondheim biographers about how to view this show.“I’m both eager and apprehensive,” said Daniel Okrent, who is writing a book about Sondheim. “I’m eager because I so admire his work, and I’m apprehensive because of his public statements that suggested he wasn’t very happy with what he had done, or that he didn’t think it was complete.”Several people who spoke with Sondheim in his final years said they were surprised by the turn of events. “He thought it was never going to happen,” said the director Ivo van Hove, who spent time with Sondheim while directing a 2020 Broadway revival of “West Side Story,” “but it’s happening now.”Others would like more transparency from the creative team about how they have pulled this show together, a process partly described by Frank Rich in New York magazine.“I think we’d all like to know more about how the sausage was made, especially the second act sausage,” said D.T. Max, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim.”Sondheim was known for revising many of his shows throughout the preview process, which makes this one unusual. (He wrote “Comedy Tonight,” the opener of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and “Being Alive,” the 11 o’clock number in “Company,” after out-of-town pre-Broadway productions had begun.)“Steve going on Colbert and saying ‘we’re going to do a show’ and then being around for rehearsals and previews and developing and rewriting as always is one thing,” said David Benedict, a writer who is also at work on a Sondheim biography. “It’s a very different proposition when the composer-lyricist isn’t with you.”The show has a sizable budget for an Off Broadway production — the commercial producers who are financing the show (Tom Kirdahy, Sue Wagner, John Johnson and The Stephen Sondheim Trust) expect to raise between $7 million and $8 million, according to a spokesman for the production. The ticket prices are also steep for Off Broadway: Prime seats are being priced at $349.Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, said he had been thrilled when the Sondheim estate approached him last year about staging the musical.“We’re here to support artists who advance their fields,” he said. “I was literally doing back somersaults — for the most important and groundbreaking theater composer and lyricist to have his final work at the Shed is wonderful for us.” More

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      Charles Kimbrough, Actor Best Known for ‘Murphy Brown,’ Dies at 86

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      In a career that included a Tony nomination for “Company,” he specialized in playing uptight characters, notably Candice Bergen’s stuffy straight man.Charles Kimbrough, an actor known for his patrician looks and stately bearing who was nominated for an Emmy Award for portraying a comically rigid news anchor on the hit sitcom “Murphy Brown,” died on Jan. 11 in Culver City, Calif. He was 86.His son, John Kimbrough, confirmed the death.After decades of stage work in New York, including a Tony Award-nominated performance in the original 1970 Broadway production of the Steven Sondheim musical “Company,” Mr. Kimbrough finally got his first taste of mainstream fame alongside Candice Bergen on “Murphy Brown,” the popular series set in a television newsroom that ran for 10 seasons on CBS starting in 1988. (He reprised his character for three episodes of the 2018 reboot.)As Jim Dial, Mr. Kimbrough artfully toyed with the wooden archetype of a 1980s newsman, with his lacquered helmet of hair, Walter Cronkite-like air of seriousness and old-boy swagger (he lovingly referred to Ms. Bergen’s investigative reporter character as “Slugger”).The cast of “Murphy Brown,” from left: Faith Ford, Candice Bergen, Mr. Kimbrough, Grant Shaud and Joe Regalbuto.Byron J. Cohen/CBSHis rigid, pompous manner made him the ideal straight man for the show’s ever-topical plotlines. In one 1997 episode, Jim is tasked with finding marijuana for Murphy, who is seeking to ease the symptoms of her chemotherapy. “Wow, look at all of this, you must have spent a fortune,” Murphy exclaims as she holds aloft a large plastic bag of cannabis. “Damn right I did!” Jim responds. “Nickel bag, my Aunt Sally.”It was hardly the first role that allowed him to explore fussy or priggish characters. In the 2012 Broadway revival of “Harvey,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 play about a man (played by Jim Parsons) who ends up in an sanitarium because of his friendship with a six-foot-tall imaginary rabbit, Mr. Kimbrough played the exacting psychiatrist who is obsessed with the image of his institution.Mr. Kimbrough received strong reviews for his performance in the 1995 production of A.R. Gurney’s “Sylvia” at the Manhattan Theater Club. He played Greg, a middle-class husband struggling with midlife crisis, a wobbly career and his marriage to Kate (Blythe Danner), which grows more complicated after he brings home a new dog, Sylvia, played in very human form by Sarah Jessica Parker.Not that Mr. Kimbrough ever sought to play stiffs. “Unfortunately, I’m really good at playing jackasses of one kind or another,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I’ve always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity.”Mr. Kimbrough with Tracee Chimo, left, and Jessica Hecht in the 2012 production of “Harvey” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Starting when I was 30,” he continued, “I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attaché case in my hand. If there was a stiff-guy part, the director would brighten up when I came in. That wasn’t the response I wanted. I was in anguish.”It was not always so. As a younger actor, “he played a wide variety of characters who were much more dynamic,” John Kimbrough said in a phone interview. “Some of my earliest memories are of watching him in ‘Candide’” — a 1974 production of the Leonard Bernstein musical, in which Clive Barnes of The New York Times described Mr. Kimbrough’s performance as “brilliant” — “he played five different characters, and he was a dynamo, jumping in and out of costume changes.”That was not his only kinetic performance. As Mr. Kimbrough put it in a 2002 interview with Newsday: “When I first came to New York I’d played these sweaty, physical guys who bounded all over the stage. I didn’t do a show when I wasn’t soaking wet at the end.”Even so, he had a natural feel for playing emotionally repressed characters, in part because of his own family background.“He came from a buttoned-up Midwestern family, and so he had grown up with people very much like the characters he played,” his son said. “They felt very deeply, but kept it hidden beneath a facade of manners and propriety. Somehow he was able to communicate that feeling to audiences, even as the guys he played were keeping it all inside.”Charles Mayberry Kimbrough was born on May 23, 1936, in St. Paul, Minn., the older of two children of Charles and Emily (Raudenbush) Kimbrough. When he was a young child, the family moved to Highland Park, Ill., near Chicago, where his father sold commercial heating equipment.A lover of music, particularly opera, Mr. Kimbrough majored in music and theater at Indiana University and later received a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama.Moving to New York, he endured the typical struggles of a young actor until he got his big break as Harry, a hard-drinking husband fighting off the lure of the bottle, in the Harold Prince production of “Company,” the celebrated Sondheim musical about a single man, his girlfriends and the couples he knows as they navigate the complexities of loneliness and love in New York City.In a roundabout way, Mr. Kimbrough found love himself through the production, albeit three decades later. In 2002, years after his divorce in 1991 from his first wife, Mary Jane (Wilson) Kimbrough, an actress he had met at Yale, he married Beth Howland, who had played alongside him in “Company” as an anxiety-ridden bride, and who later found fame as Vera, the flighty diner waitress, on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” which debuted in 1976.Ms. Howland died in 2016. In addition to his son, Mr. Kimbrough is survived by a sister, Linda Kimbrough, and a stepdaughter, Holly Howland.Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Kimbrough continued to work steadily, appearing on television shows like “Kojak” and in films like “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979), with Alan Alda, while also paying the bills as a wholesome American in television spots for Imperial margarine and Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs.But it was only with “Murphy Brown,” his son said, that he found the degree of fame where fans recognized him on the street. And his success allowed him to make peace with being typecast as stodgy.He came to realize that “stuffiness is not dullness,” Mr. Kimbrough told Newsday. “And that gave me a new lease on life.” More

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      With ‘Company,’ Antonio Banderas Brings Sondheim to Spain

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      Many Broadway blockbusters make their way to Madrid, but Banderas wants to push the envelope with serious, complex musicals that are little-known in Spain.On a recent Friday night, a fashionable Madrid audience leaped to its feet at the end of a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” The crowd cheered the 40 onstage actors and musicians, but the most enthusiastic ovations were reserved for Antonio Banderas, the production’s director and star. For the past nearly three hours, the Spanish actor had crooned, belted and twirled his way through the first Spanish-language production of the groundbreaking 1970 musical.Banderas’s “Company” started life a little more than a year ago in Málaga, the actor’s hometown in southern Spain, where he founded a musical theater company, Teatro del Soho, in 2019. After a stop in Barcelona earlier this year, the production is ending its run in Madrid, where it is playing through Feb. 14, 2023, at the Teatro Albéniz.“I actually am an actor because of musical theater and musical movies,” Banderas, 62, said in an interview the next day. As an adolescent in 1970s Málaga, he explained, he grew up with the great musicals of the era, including “Hair,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell.”That early love was the inspiration behind Teatro del Soho, a nonprofit that Banderas compared to the Public Theater in New York, which aims to bring musicals other than blockbuster Broadway fare to Spanish theatergoers. (The company’s most recent production is Stephen Schwartz’s “Godspell.”)Over the past two decades, Madrid has emerged as the musical theater capital of the Spanish world. Among the 14 shows running there are “Tina,” “Mamma Mia!,” “We Will Rock You” and “The Lion King” (“El Rey León”). Now Banderas is trying to push the envelope with serious, complex works that are little-known here — and “Company” has been on Banderas’s mind for a long time.In 2003, Banderas was starring in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, playing Guido, a filmmaker having a creative crisis. Banderas recalled Sondheim visiting his dressing room during the run, and drawing similarities between Guido and Bobby, the protagonist of “Company.” He also told Banderas that there was more to that show that met the eye: “I love to create plays with enigmas,” the actor recalled Sondheim saying.After the meeting, Banderas said he immersed himself in Sondheim’s catalog. “Company” in particular became something of an obsession.Banderas received the composer’s blessing to change the age of the musical’s main character, Bobby, from 35 to 50.Javier NavalWhen “Company” premiered in 1970, it looked like nothing else on Broadway: Formally daring, and laced with irony, it is often described as a “concept musical” and has little plot to speak of. Instead, Sondheim and George Furth, who wrote the book, serve up a series of loosely connected scenes about a commitment-phobic bachelor and his friends.Banderas’s main change to the book is an age switch for Bobby — the role he plays — from 35 to 50. The composer-lyricist signed off on that before his death in 2021 at age 91, Banderas said.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing?‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.Everything in his production followed from having an older Bobby, Banderas said. The show’s vignettes are like hallucinatory episodes, as Bobby sifts through memories and dreams of his youth; regrets take on a haunting dimension because of “the proximity of death,” Banderas added.“It was always very shocking to me how much everything was thoroughly focused on Bobby,” Banderas said. “Bobby is a charismatic character, but he’s also an egotistical coward.”In Banderas’s staging, Bobby sometimes sits center stage as the large cast rotates around him. Behind them, the New York City skyline looms majestically. “I created a glittering universe and he’s in the center, as the sun,” Banderas said.Banderas has cast most of the show’s other parts with local performers. “Twenty years ago, you couldn’t find this amount of actors and actresses in Spain,” for musical theater, he said. He also insisted on using the show’s original orchestration. “I have 26 musicians here, which is not profitable,” he said, but added, “I love that sound.” (For comparison, the 2021 Broadway revival of “Company” used a 14-person band.)To create a convincing Spanish-language version, Banderas turned to Roser Batalla and Ignacio García May, a duo who had previously worked together on “A Chorus Line.”“Every Sondheim is a challenge,” said Batalla, a translator and actress from Barcelona who was in a Catalan-language production of “Company” there 25 years ago. The lyrics and music are so closely bound in the show and, indeed, in all of Sondheim’s work, she added.Banderas and the actress Marta Ribera lead the cast.Javier Naval“You have to maintain not only the rhymes and syllables and the cadence of the music, but also give the information at the right point,” said Batalla, who has translated other Sondheim shows into Spanish and Catalan.She recalled meeting Sondheim in Barcelona, in 1995, at a performance of “Sweeney Todd,” which she had translated into Catalan. “He said, ‘As long as all the ideas get to the audience, I’m OK with it.’ He never asked us for the back-translation of any of the shows,” she said.“Company” holds some thorny problems for translators. Batalla pointed to “Getting Married Today,” a punishing, rapid-fire song for a hyperventilating bride — and a high point in most performances — as a particular challenge. “It’s very quick and it needs to be understood,” she said. Spanish had relatively few monosyllabic words to recreate the song’s patter, she added, but the language’s flexible syntax helped offset the difficulty.She left some culturally and geographically specific references to 1970s New York in place, Batalla said: Since American culture is so dominant, those still resonate with Spanish audiences. “We’ve been seeing movies by Woody Allen all our life long,” she said.May, a noted Spanish playwright, said the main challenge in translating the dialogue was finding a “high-class Spanish” that matched the snappy, urbane tone of the book. He weighed “every word, every verb, every nuance, so it could be as close to the English as possible,” he said.Critics here have largely been convinced: The daily newspaper El País hailed the production as “one of the best musicals ever seen in Spain.” For Banderas, the reception is a validation of his passion and commitment.“When we put together Teatro del Soho, it was to do the musicals that actually don’t get to Spain,” he said. In addition to his work there, Banderas recently teamed up with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create Amigos Para Siempre, a joint venture to license, produce and develop theatrical work for the world’s Spanish-speaking markets.Banderas called it an opportunity to “create a platform of Broadway in Spanish to the world.” “But it’s going to take time,” he added.CompanyThrough Feb. 14, 2023, at he Teatro Albéniz, in Madrid; companyelmusical.es. More

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      Tony-Winning ‘Company’ Revival Will End Broadway Run July 31

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      Despite picking up 5 prizes at this month’s Tony Awards, the Sondheim-blessed revival was facing a tough summer at the box office.A Tony-winning, gender-swapped, Sondheim-blessed revival of “Company” will end its Broadway run on July 31.The production, directed by Marianne Elliott, has been noteworthy for the ways in which it inverts the 1970 original. The pathbreaking musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth, has always been about a single person turning 35 while surrounded by paired-off friends, but in the current production that character is a woman named Bobbie, whereas in previous productions it was a man named Bobby.The show was the winningest musical at this month’s Tony Awards, picking up the prizes for best musical revival, best director (Elliott), best featured actress (Patti LuPone), best featured actor (Matt Doyle) and best scenic design (Bunny Christie). But its sales have been decent, rather than outstanding, and the lead producer, Chris Harper, said he had decided now was the time to wrap up.“Listen: It’s no secret to you or anyone else — it’s tough out there, and summer was going to be hard and September even harder,” Harper said in an interview. “I wanted to celebrate the final six weeks and go out on a high.”Harper said it was too early to say whether the revival, which was capitalized for up to $13 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, would recoup its costs. The show, like many others, received $10 million in federal assistance from the Small Business Administration during the pandemic. It grossed $640,297 during the week ending June 12, playing to houses that were 74 percent full.Harper said the show is planning a North American tour to start in the fall of 2023.“It’s been glorious, and I feel so completely proud of the production,” he said. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do a Sondheim in a radically new way, and to have him be so proud of it was amazing. So this is sad, but it’s also a moment to celebrate what it has achieved.”The revival, starring Katrina Lenk, began previews on March 2, 2020, and then 10 days later was forced to shut down, along with the rest of Broadway, because of the coronavirus pandemic. It resumed previews on Nov. 15, 2021, and Sondheim attended that performance; he died 11 days later, at the age of 91; in a final interview, he expressed unfettered enthusiasm for the production.The revival finally opened on Dec. 9, 2021; at the time of its closing it will have played 300 performances.The production, conceived by Elliott, began its life in London, where it won the Olivier Award for best musical revival. LuPone, a beloved Broadway figure who plays an alcohol-addled older friend to Bobbie, also appeared in the London production, and her rendition of the classic “The Ladies Who Lunch” song on both sides of the Atlantic was a highlight. Doyle, who joined the cast in New York, plays a groom with wedding day jitters and sings another well-known Sondheim song, “Getting Married Today”; in the original, that song was sung by the bride-to-be in a heterosexual couple, but in this revival the couple is same-sex.“Company” is the fourth Broadway show this month to announce an unanticipated closing, following “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Tina” and “Come From Away.” More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Wins Best Musical as Tonys Celebrate Broadway’s Return

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      “A Strange Loop,” a scalding story about a gay, Black theater artist confronting self-doubt and societal disapproval, won the Tony Award for best new musical Sunday night, giving another huge accolade to a challenging contemporary production that had already won a Pulitzer Prize.The soul-baring show, nurtured by nonprofits and developed over many years, triumphed over two flashy pop musicals, “MJ,” a jukebox musical about the entertainer Michael Jackson, and “Six,” an irreverent reconsideration of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, in a six-way race.“A Strange Loop” garnered widespread praise from critics; on Sunday night, Michael R. Jackson, the writer who spent nearly two decades working on it, acknowledged how personal the project was as he collected his first Tony Award, for best book of a musical.“I wrote it at a time when I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to move forward. I felt unseen. I felt unheard. I felt misunderstood, and I just wanted to create a little bit of a life raft for myself as a Black gay man.”The ceremony — the 75th Tony Awards presentation — provided an opportunity for Broadway to celebrate its return and its perseverance, hoping that a dash of razzle-dazzle, a dollop of contemporary creativity and a sprinkling of nostalgia will help lure theatergoers back to a pandemic-scarred industry now in full swing but still craving more customers.The season that just ended was a tough one: It started late (most theaters remained closed until September), and was repeatedly disrupted (coronavirus cases obliterated its old show-must-go-on ethos, prompting cancellations and performer absences). With tourism still down, it was also short on audience.Patti LuPone won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for “Company.” It was her third Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our industry has been through so much,” Marianne Elliott, who won a Tony Award for directing a gender-reversed revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical comedy “Company,” said in her acceptance speech. “It felt at times that live theater was endangered.”But in the glittering ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, a parade of performers celebrated all that went well: Theaters reopened, long-running shows returned, and an unusually diverse array of plays and musicals arrived to entertain, provoke and inspire theatergoers.The best play Tony went to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a sweeping saga about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers banking business. Using three shape-shifting actors, contained within a spinning glass box of a set, the play journeyed all the way from the Wall Street giant’s humble origins in 1844 to its ignominious collapse in 2008. The show, written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, picked up not only the Tony for best play, but also for the play’s director, Sam Mendes; its set designer, Es Devlin; and the great British actor, Simon Russell Beale, who thanked audiences for showing up, despite pandemic protocols and public health concerns.“You trusted us,” he said. “You came with open arms. It wasn’t easy at that point to come to the theater because of all those regulations. But you welcomed us.”“The Lehman Trilogy” won out against four other contenders, “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.”“Take Me Out” emerged victorious in the best play revival category, a particularly strong field that included productions of “American Buffalo,” “How I Learned to Drive,” “Trouble in Mind” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Written by Richard Greenberg, “Take Me Out” first ran on Broadway in 2003 and won the best play Tony that year; this year’s revival, presented by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, was directed by Scott Ellis. It is about what happens when a baseball player, portrayed in this production by Jesse Williams, comes out as gay; Jesse Tyler Ferguson picked up his first Tony for his portrayal of the player’s investment adviser, who is also gay.“Company,” a musical first staged in 1970 that wittily and sometimes bitterly examines married life, won the Tony for musical revival, besting a much-praised revival of “Caroline, or Change,” as well as a starry revival of “The Music Man” that, thanks to the appeal of leading man Hugh Jackman, has been the top-selling show on Broadway since it opened.The award for “Company” reflected not only admiration for the reimagined production but also respect for Sondheim, its composer and lyricist, who is revered as one of the most important figures in American musical theater, and who died in November. The “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, introduced a tribute to him, saying, “I stand here on behalf of generations of artists he took the time to encourage.”The ceremony was hosted by Ariana DeBose.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tonys, hosted by Ariana DeBose and broadcast on CBS, honored not only shows, performers, writers and designers, but also the understudies who saved so many performances this season. And DeBose, who this year won an Academy Award as Anita in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” paid tribute to the season’s extraordinary diversity, saying, “I feel like the phrase Great White Way is becoming more of a nickname as opposed to a how-to guide.”She noted the season’s high volume of work by Black writers, which came about as producers and theater owners scrambled to respond to demands for more representation and opportunity for Black artists after the national unrest over racism during the summer of 2020. This year’s class of Tony nominees featured a large number of Black artists, reflecting the fact that work by Black writers led to more jobs for Black performers, designers, directors, and more.The season being honored — the first since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close in March of 2020 — featured 56 productions, including 34 eligible for Tony Awards because they opened between Feb. 20, 2020 and May 4, 2022. (The others were returning productions, many of them long-running hits.)The Covid challenges were costly: 6.7 million people attended a Broadway show during the 2021-22 season, down from 14.8 million during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic; total grosses were $845 million, down from $1.8 billion.The Tonys served as a chance for Broadway to try to entice television viewers to become Times Square visitors. But one challenge: Viewership for all televised awards shows has been steadily falling. The Tonys audience had a recent peak in 2016, at 8.7 million viewers, when “Hamilton” was a contender; in 2019, there were 5.4 million viewers, and last year, when the Tonys held a ceremony in September to coincide with the reopening of theaters, just 2.6 million tuned in.Michael R. Jackson won the Tony for best book of a musical for “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s winners featured some Broadway veterans, including Patti LuPone, picking up her third Tony Award for her ferocious turn as an alcohol-addled married friend of the chronically single protagonist in “Company”; and Phylicia Rashad, winning her second Tony for playing a factory worker in “Skeleton Crew.” Among the other performers who collected Tony Awards: Joaquina Kalukango, for her starring role as a 19th-century New York City tavern owner in “Paradise Square”; Matt Doyle, who played a groom with a zany case of wedding day jitters in “Company,” and Deirdre O’Connell, who won for her remarkable lip-synced performance as a kidnapping victim in the play “Dana H.”“I would love for this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award, or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’” O’Connell said. “Please let me, standing here, be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”“A Strange Loop” tells the story of a Broadway usher, named Usher, who is trying to write a musical about a Broadway usher trying to write a musical; his thoughts, many of them self-critical, are portrayed by six performers, who each appear in multiple guises. The musical began its life Off Broadway, with a 2019 production at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions. After winning the Pulitzer, it had another pre-Broadway production at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. It had support throughout those nonprofit runs from the producer Barbara Whitman, who is now the lead producer of the commercial run on Broadway; she was also a lead producer of the Tony-winning “Fun Home.”The Broadway production, which opened in April, has seen an uptick at the box office since being nominated for 11 Tony Awards (it won two), but has room for growth: During the week that ended June 5, it filled 89 percent of the 912 seats at the Lyceum Theater, grossing $685,772, with an average ticket price of $105.“Six” and “MJ,” although unsuccessful in the six-way race for best new musical, are doing substantially better at the box office, and did notch some big victories at the awards ceremony.“Six” picked up the Tony Award for best score during the first minutes of the ceremony. Its music and lyrics were written by two young British artists, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who came up with the idea while undergraduates at Cambridge University, and who were discovered by a commercial producer following a buzz-building first run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The musical’s costume designer, Gabriella Slade, also won a Tony for her Tudor-style-meets-contemporary-clubwear outfits.“MJ” also landed key prizes, including for the lead performance by Myles Frost, a 22-year-old in his first professional stage role, and for the crowd-pleasing choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, who also directed the musical.The other contenders, “Girl From the North Country,” featuring the songs of Bob Dylan; “Mr. Saturday Night,” starring Billy Crystal as a washed-up comedian; and “Paradise Square,” about race relations in Civil War-era New York, appeared to be less of a factor in the competition.Simon Russell Beale won the Tony Award for best actor for his work in “The Lehman Trilogy,” which won best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat first hour of the awards ceremony, viewable only on the streaming channel Paramount+, was hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, both of whom are currently starring in Broadway plays — he in a revival of “American Buffalo,” and she in a new farce called “POTUS.” They began the evening with a Broadway-is-back tribute, written by Criss, extolling the virtues and challenges of theater (the song included a plea for no slapping, in a dig at the Oscars).A lifetime achievement award was given to Angela Lansbury, a beloved star of stage, film and television who was also a five-time host of the Tony Awards, more than any other person. Lansbury, who is 96, was not able to attend in person, or even to accept by video; instead the actor Len Cariou, who starred with Lansbury in the original production of “Sweeney Todd,” for which they both won Tony Awards, paid tribute to her and introduced a video of career highlights. Then the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus performed the title song from “Mame,” which was the show in which she won the first of her five competitive Tony Awards.The Tony Awards, named for actress Antoinette Perry, are presented by the Broadway League, a trade association that represents theater owners and producers, and the American Theater Wing, a theater advocacy organization. The awards have been presented since 1947; there was no ceremony in 2020, and last year’s September ceremony honored shows from the truncated prepandemic season.This year’s awards were spread among 11 shows, with none coming anywhere near the record 12 prizes picked up by “The Producers” in 2001. The biggest hauls went to “Company” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” each of which won five awards; “MJ” won four, and “A Strange Loop,” “Dana H.,” “Six” and “Take Me Out” each won two. Taking home one prize each were “Girl From the North Country,” “Paradise Square,” “Skeleton Crew” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” More

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      Tony Awards Predictions: ‘Strange Loop’ and ‘Lehman’ Look Strong

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      We surveyed voters ahead of this year’s ceremony on Sunday. They are strikingly split in the races for leading musical performers.After a strange year on Broadway, it looks as if it could be a “Strange” night at the Tony Awards.Our annual survey of Tony voters — well, it was annual, until the coronavirus pandemic disrupted everything — suggests that Michael R. Jackson’s meta-musical “A Strange Loop” is favored to win the all-important race for best new musical at this year’s Tony Awards, which will take place on Sunday night. If there is an upset, it will come from “MJ,” the biographical musical about Michael Jackson.Over the past few days, I have connected with 181 of the approximately 650 Tony voters to talk about their choices in eight key categories. This is not a scientific poll — voting continues through Friday; the voting pool is distorted, and diminished, by coronavirus cancellations that left many ineligible to vote in some categories; and numerous voters have been scrambling to catch up with missed shows while hoping to vote at the last minute. To see actual statuettes handed out, you’ll have to tune in to the award show Sunday, which starts with a one-hour streaming segment on Paramount+ at 7 p.m. Eastern, and then continues at 8 p.m. with a three-hour segment broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.But interviews with a large subset of voters make clear which races are locked up, and which are insanely close.The race for best play is all sewn up.The best play Tony Award seems certain to go to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a riveting history lesson that chronicles the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers financial empire. The play was originally written by an Italian playwright, Stefano Massini, and then adapted by a British writer, Ben Power.The survey suggests that “Lehman” will win easily — a supermajority of voters believe that it was the best play of the season, and those who do not support it are splitting their votes among the other four contenders, making any other outcome improbable.A plurality of voters also favor one of the “Lehman” stars, the great English actor Simon Russell Beale, in the unusual seven-nominee race for best leading actor in a play. Beale’s career has been spent mostly on the British stage, and this would be his first Tony Award.Simon Russell Beale, center, with Adam Godley, left, and Adrian Lester in “The Lehman Trilogy.” All three are competing for a best actor Tony Award.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhy is “Lehman” winning? The show, with a meaty subject that both explicates and implicitly critiques New York City’s hugely important financial industry, was a showcase for its three main actors, each of whom played many roles, and it had a showpiece set, designed by Es Devlin, that contained the action within a rotating glass box.Directed by Sam Mendes, it arrived on Broadway with a lot of buzz. After productions in Europe, it had been staged Off Broadway, at the Park Avenue Armory, in 2019, and that production was the talk of the town, becoming a best seller for the nonprofit, with some seats reselling for several thousand dollars.The road to Broadway was bumpy: “The Lehman Trilogy” began previews at the Nederlander Theater less than a week before theaters shut down in March 2020; it then resumed previews 18 months later and finally opened last October. The run sold well, particularly given that much of it overlapped with the pandemic surge associated with the Omicron variant, and it ended Jan. 2 before the production moved to Los Angeles for another brief run.Read More About the 2022 Tony AwardsHosting Duties: Ariana DeBose, who will host the ceremony, vows that this edition will celebrate the often unsung actors who have stepped in during the pandemic.Ruth Negga: The actress, who is nominated for her role as Lady Macbeth in Sam Gold’s staging of the play, infuses the character with intensity, urgency and vitality.Hugh Jackman: The actor may potentially win his third Tony Award for his role in “The Music Man.” He shared some thoughts on his life between film and theater.Choreography: Musicals like “MJ” and “Paradise Square” take on dances of the past but miss some opportunities to elevate the dancing; “For Colored Girls” effectively weaves language and motion.The play faced some criticism from those who felt that it soft-pedaled the relationship between the Lehmans’ early business practices and slavery; the production sharpened its references to race via script revisions made during the theater shutdown.Among new musicals, ‘A Strange Loop’ is the favorite.“A Strange Loop” also arrived on Broadway with a big head of steam: During the pandemic, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on an Off Broadway production staged by Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 Productions in 2019.The musical is about a young aspiring musical theater writer who is Black and gay, and who is haunted by a mostly self-critical inner dialogue that springs to life in the show.The musical, written by Michael R. Jackson and directed by Stephen Brackett, garnered the strongest reviews of the season, and picked up 11 Tony nominations, more than any other show.Voters praised the show’s originality and its raw honesty. As is true with every show, this one also has its skeptics — some voters find the songs unmemorable, or the explicitness off-putting — but in the Tony race, it is benefiting from the fact that there is no consensus about any of the other nominees.Some industry veterans have suggested that Tony voters who live outside New York might be reluctant to support “A Strange Loop” because its sexual content could make it challenging to produce on tour. But that does not appear to be a decisive factor: “A Strange Loop” is favored by half of the voters I spoke with; about one-fifth are supporting “MJ,” the musical about Michael Jackson, which they uniformly praised as entertaining, and the other contenders have less support.“Six,” the fan favorite that was all the rage in 2020, when it came within a few hours of opening before theaters shut down, seems to have lost some heat among voters who no longer think of it as a new show because its run began before the pandemic. But shed no tears for “Six”: it is proving to be hugely successful, with strong box office grosses and a thriving touring market.Several acting races are down to the wire.Voters are remarkably divided in the races for best leading musical performers.In the race for lead actor in a musical, the voters are evenly split between two young actors, Myles Frost, 22, and Jaquel Spivey, 23, each of whom is making his professional stage debut this season. Frost is nominated for his convincing depiction of a driven Michael Jackson in “MJ,” and Spivey is nominated for his soul-baring performance as the self-doubting protagonist in “A Strange Loop”; both have wowed audiences, in very different ways. Each of them has support from about one-third of voters.In the race for lead actress in a musical, the voters are torn between Sharon D Clarke, who played the pained but powerful maid at the heart of a revival of “Caroline, or Change,” and Joaquina Kalukango, who plays a determined tavern owner in the new musical “Paradise Square.”Joaquina Kalukango, left, of “Paradise Square” and Sharon D Clarke of “Caroline, or Change” are in a tight race for lead actress in a musical.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the race for best actress in a play, Deirdre O’Connell, who uncannily lip-synced recorded interviews with a kidnapping victim in “Dana H.,” has a modest edge among the voters I talked to. But the margin was not big enough to predict what will happen with any confidence; the other leading contenders appear to be LaChanze, for her performance as a truth-telling actress in “Trouble in Mind,” and Mary-Louise Parker, for her performance as a woman abused by her uncle in “How I Learned to Drive.”‘Company’ leads in the musical revival category, but the best play revival is harder to predict.The death of the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, one of the most important writers in musical theater history, was among the biggest theater stories of the last season, and it appears that Tony voters are now inclined to honor the final Broadway production that he worked on with the prize for best musical revival.About half of voters say they are choosing the gender-reversed revival of “Company,” which Sondheim strongly supported before his death. The show, first produced in 1970, previously centered on a man contemplating his single life as he turns 35; this version, directed by Marianne Elliott, puts a woman in the same predicament.The revival of “Company” appears to be the leading contender in the best musical revival category.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Company” appears to have twice as much support as its nearest competitor, the revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Nominated for 11 Tonys as Broadway Lauds Comeback

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      “The Lehman Trilogy,” as well as revivals of “Company” and “For Colored Girls,” led in their respective categories as the industry tries to recover from the long pandemic shutdown.A musical about making art and a play about making money dominated the Tony Awards nominations Monday, as Broadway sought to celebrate its best work and revive its fortunes after the lengthy and damaging coronavirus shutdown.The race for best musical — traditionally the most financially beneficial prize — turned into an unexpectedly broad six-way contest because the nominators were so closely divided they had to expand the number of nominees.Out of the gate, the front-runner is “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a composer who is Black and gay battles demons and doubts while trying to write a show. Even before arriving on Broadway, the show, written by Michael R. Jackson, had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama after an Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons; it opened on Broadway late last month to some of the strongest reviews for any new musical this season, and on Monday it picked up 11 Tony nominations, the most for any show.“I feel really grateful, and I feel validated for putting in all the years and all the hours,” Jackson said after learning the news. “It feels amazing to know better things are possible.”“MJ,” a jukebox musical about Michael Jackson, was nominated for 10 Tonys. Myles Frost, center, was nominated for best actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesScoring the most nominations is not always predictive of winning the prize, and “A Strange Loop,” which is adventurous in form and content, will face tough competition from “MJ,” a biographical jukebox musical about Michael Jackson; “Six,” a fan favorite about the wives of Henry VIII; “Girl From the North Country,” which combines the songs of Bob Dylan with a fictional story about a boardinghouse in the Minnesota city where Dylan was born; “Mr. Saturday Night,” about a washed-up comedian hungering for a comeback; and “Paradise Square,” about a turning point in race relations in 19th-century New York.Both “Paradise Square,” which picked up 10 nominations, and “Girl From the North Country,” with seven, have struggled at the box office, and will now hope that their multiple Tony nominations will help reverse their financial fortunes. For “MJ,” its 10 nods are a form of vindication after several influential reviewers criticized the show for sidestepping sexual abuse allegations against the pop star.“The Lehman Trilogy,” which arrived on Broadway with an enormous — albeit pandemic-delayed — head of steam following rapturously reviewed productions in London and Off Broadway, picked up eight nominations to dominate the best play category. The play, which follows the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers, was written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, and featured a dazzling production centered on a rotating glass box designed by Es Devlin. All three of its leads — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor.“The Lehman Trilogy” was nominated for 8 Tonys, including best play. All three of its leads — from left, Adam Godley, Simon Russell Beale and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor in a play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Lehman Trilogy” vies with four other dramas for best play. Among them are two dark comedies — “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer winner who was also nominated for writing the book for “MJ,” and “Hangmen,” by Martin McDonagh, an acclaimed British-Irish playwright who has now been nominated five times but has yet to win. The other contenders are “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s play about factory workers at an automotive plant facing shutdown, and “The Minutes,” Tracy Letts’s look at the unsettling secrets of a small-town governing body.The Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are an annual celebration for American theater, but they are particularly important now as a potential marketing tool for an industry that is still grossing less, and selling fewer tickets, than it was before the pandemic forced theaters to close for a year and a half. The awards are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.“This Tony Awards will mean so much more than honoring the performances and the artistic work that’s been done this season — it’s also celebrating the resilience of the community, and that this much work is being done and being seen,” said Rob McClure, an actor who scored a Tony nomination (his second) for his comedic and chameleonic performance in the title role of “Mrs. Doubtfire.”Billy Crystal was nominated for best actor in a musical for his performance in “Mr. Saturday Night,” based on his 1992 film. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWell known performers scoring nominations included Uzo Aduba, Billy Crystal, Rachel Dratch, Hugh Jackman, Ruth Negga, Mary-Louise Parker, Patti LuPone, Phylicia Rashad and Sam Rockwell. But several other big stars now working on Broadway were overlooked by nominators, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Laurence Fishburne and Daniel Craig, as well as Beanie Feldstein, starring in “Funny Girl” but unable to escape the long shadow of Barbra Streisand.This season saw an unusually large number of works by Black writers, and that created more opportunity for Black performers, directors, and designers, some of whom were nominated for Tonys. Among them are two performers new to Broadway, Jaquel Spivey, the star of “A Strange Loop,” and Myles Frost, the star of “MJ,” now facing off against Crystal, Jackman and McClure in the leading actor in a musical category.“Black playwrights have had an amazing presence this season, and I hope that continues,” said Camille A. Brown, who scored two nominations Monday, for directing and choreographing the revival of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf.” Reflecting on her own show, she said, “Having seven Black women on a Broadway stage has a lot of meaning, and speaks to the importance of sisterhood and love and Black women holding space for one another.”“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf” was nominated for seven Tonys, including for best revival of a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe seven Tony nominations for “For Colored Girls” are a bittersweet triumph for a production that has been languishing at the box office and had already announced an early closing date. The revival picked up more nominations than any other show in the race for best play revival, a strong category in which many eligible shows won positive reviews.It will now face off against four others: “American Buffalo,” David Mamet’s drama about a trio of scheming junk-shop denizens and “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s look at homophobia in baseball, as well as two plays that had never previously made it to Broadway despite being considered important parts of the playwriting canon, “Trouble in Mind,” Alice Childress’s look at racism in theater; and “How I Learned to Drive,” Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning drama about child sexual abuse.The competition for best musical revival is small, but strong. There were four eligible shows, and only three scored nods: “Company,” “Caroline, or Change,” and “The Music Man.” Excluded was the revival of “Funny Girl” which fared poorly with critics, but has been doing fine at the box office.“Company,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, was nominated for 9 Tony awards, including best revival of a musical. Patti LuPone, a nominee at left, performed with Katrina Lenk. Matthew Murphy/O & M Co./DKC, via Associated PressThe nine nods for “Company” pack an especially emotional punch because its composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, died soon after attending the first post-shutdown preview. “The longer he’s not with us, the more I miss him,” said LuPone, who picked up her eighth Tony nomination — she’s won twice — for her work in the production.The nominations were chosen by a group of 29 people, most of whom work in the theater industry but are not financially connected to any of the eligible productions, who saw all eligible shows and voted last Friday. There were 34 eligible shows, 29 of which scored nominations; the five left out were all new plays.Up next: a group of 650 voters, including producers and performers and many others with an interest in the nominated productions, have until June 10 to vote for their favorites, and the winners will be announced at a ceremony on June 12. The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, is to be hosted by Ariana DeBose; the first hour will be streamed on Paramount+, followed by three hours broadcast by CBS.Broadway’s grosses are down in part because tourism remains down in New York City, and in part because of ongoing concerns about the coronavirus. Many of the nominees interviewed Monday said they hoped the spotlight of the Tony Awards would lure more patrons back to Broadway.“Anyone that’s doing theater right now has been hit really hard by the pandemic,” said Marianne Elliott, a two-time Tony-winning director who scored another nomination for “Company.” “It’s gratifying to see that Broadway is coming back. To have the Tony nominations for all of these shows is just a celebration of what we do, and it’s lovely to be here.” More

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      How Stephen Sondheim’s Work Did (and Didn’t) Translate to the Screen

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      A new series of adaptations, documentaries and more examines the different ways the composer-lyricist left his mark on movies.Stephen Sondheim, the unparalleled composer-lyricist who died in November, may have changed musical theater forever, but as a new program at the Museum of the Moving Image argues, he left his mark on film as well. Whether it’s Elaine Stritch’s screen-shattering performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch” in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” or Madonna’s slinking around and cooing “Sooner or Later” in “Dick Tracy,” Sondheim’s work has given film audiences memorable moments.The museum program, See It Big: Sondheim, assembled by the guest programmer Michael Koresky, the film curator Eric Hynes and the assistant curator, Edo Choi, offers a survey of adaptations of Sondheim’s work and other examples of his contributions to film, including a murder-mystery screenplay and the score to a French new wave film. I spoke with Koresky about Sondheim’s gifts to cinema and why it’s so hard to adapt his work. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Sondheim let people adapt his work freely, which your program shows.He said in many interviews that he is OK with someone massaging and changing and doing things for their own sake, and I think that just shows his generosity and his experimentation ability to allow others to be experimental. You can see that all the way through to 2021. With the Spielberg version of “West Side Story,” you could tell that he was sort of delighted to find that it had this new life.I think it’s up to us, as Sondheim lovers, to [say] when something isn’t working. But because of that, it takes something really different and experimental and strange to be a truly successful adaptation, which is why I think that “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” is probably the best “adaptation” of a Sondheim musical.What about that film is able to articulate the skill and artistry of Sondheim in ways that some other attempts do not?Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91. Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows. Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview. His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers. ‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing? ‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.I think with Sondheim, witnessing the artistic process is part of the whole experience, creation is baked into the actual production. When you’re really attuned to the lyrics and the melodies, you’re thinking about how this possibly could have come about. So you’re constantly aware of the richness of the text and the complexity. For a documentary to just be about that literally: You’re seeing people do things over and over again, you’re getting a glimpse into an aspect of musical production that you probably never would have the chance to see. Pulling the strings and looking becomes part of the text. His musicals are so much about their own construction, so I can’t think of a better film based on Sondheim.Was there a particular piece that you wanted to start this series as a kind of guiding ethos for what you wanted the program to say about his legacy?For me, it was the 1966 television program “Evening Primrose,” which didn’t end up in the program, only because it was impossible to find. I grew to love “Take Me to the World,” which is a song I discovered in a piano book. That show typifies everything that I love about Sondheim: the melodies, the strange subject matter, the weird sources of adaptation, the really idiosyncratic, disturbing, bizarre and beautiful. I wanted that to be the discovery for people.We started with the 2021 “West Side Story” because we want to give people the chance to see it on the big screen, since so many people missed seeing it last December.What is it that makes it so difficult to adapt Sondheim to the screen? There aren’t, with very few exceptions, great screen interpretations of his work that aren’t filmed theater productions.He gives you something that you think you understand. Even with “Into the Woods” (the 2014 film), it’s like, “Oh, it’s a deconstruction of fairy tales.” But that’s really not enough to go on. There’s something really profound going on there about sadness and loneliness that is probably really hard to square with the genre trappings. They’re tricky because he’s always doing two things at once. And when you make a film, filmmakers often focus on the spectacle, not realizing that the spectacle has to be elided. That’s really hard to do in film.I was thinking today about which Sondheim works I wish there were movies of. I never want “Sunday in the Park With George” to be a movie, just by virtue of what it is, how it’s produced, what it’s about. What it’s doing feels so New York stage, it would be so strange.Could you talk about Sondheim and Madonna’s cinematic work in “Dick Tracy”?For me, as a little gay boy with his Madonna “I’m Breathless” cassette tape in 1990, it was the essential thing. Period. “Dick Tracy,” the gruff lantern-jawed masculine comic book detective, just does not interest me. But I remember those songs. It’s one of those things that’s a queering agent. “Dick Tracy” really feels like a hybrid of a lot of different sensibilities. I like the way that Sondheim and Madonna’s contributions help to negate the uber-masculinity of the text.And we have to talk about “The Last of Sheila” (1973), which he co-wrote with Anthony Perkins.That’s a tricky one. It’s interesting that they chose an intricate, whodunit murder mystery plot, because how else would you intelligently funnel this Sondheim complexity and idea of overlapping narratives, characters, themes into a genre film? I think that’s what makes it delightful. With Sondheim you see the gears working without it taking you out of the film. It’s a movie about game playing, in which you’re constantly being asked to size up the people involved. It’s very mechanical in a fun way.And in a nasty way that I love, too.One of the game cards in the film reads, “You are a homosexual.” And the way they talk about it is surprisingly casual and sort of progressive. There’s the idea that this is an accusation. But when it’s revealed, there’s a real casualness about it. It’s surprising for “closeted” — at the time — gay men to write.See It Big: Sondheim runs through May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More