Sondheim, Stephen

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    Lea Salonga Is Never Getting Tired of Sondheim

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    Nobody doubted that Lea Salonga could sing.She had won a Tony Award at the age of 20 for her breakout role as the besotted Vietnamese teen Kim in “Miss Saigon,” and sung her heart out as Éponine, and later Fantine, in Broadway productions of “Les Misérables.” She provided the crystalline vocals of not one but two Disney princesses: the warrior heroine of 1998’s “Mulan” and the magic carpet-riding Princess Jasmine in 1992’s “Aladdin.”But could the singer handle Sondheim — a composer heralded for creating some of the most challenging, idiosyncratic work seen on the American stage — on Broadway? Could she inhabit a character like Momma Rose, the monstrous, pathologically ambitious stage mother from “Gypsy”? Or Mrs. Lovett from “Sweeney Todd,” the butcher/baker who breaks down the marketing challenges of hawking pies filled with human meat, in a Cockney accent, no less?“Some of it’s hard,” Salonga admitted.But she is doing all that and more in “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” currently playing at the Ahmanson Theater here in Los Angeles after a 16-week run in London’s West End. Scheduled to begin previews on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater next month, the show features more than three dozen songs from some of Sondheim’s biggest musicals, including “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “A Little Night Music” and “Into the Woods.” The tribute revue also stars Bernadette Peters, who, no stranger to Sondheim, put her own indelible stamp on the character of Momma Rose in 2003.Salonga, center, stars in “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends” with, from left, Jasmine Forsberg, Beth Leavel, Bernadette Peters, Kate Jennings Grant, Bonnie Langford, Maria Wirries and Joanna Riding.Matthew MurphySalonga, Peters said, “has one of the great Broadway voices, and she just brings down the house.”For Salonga, “I’m getting the chance to sing some of the most incredible lyrics ever written. I’m getting to dip, not just a toe, but my entire body, into this incredible work.”“Nobody was surprised how terrific she was as a performer,” said the show’s producer Cameron Mackintosh, who also cast Salonga in “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Merle Louise Simon, a Sondheim Mainstay, Is Dead at 90

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      She originated roles in four of his Broadway musicals between 1959 and 1987, and won a Drama Desk Award for her performance in “Sweeney Todd.”Merle Louise Simon, an award-winning stage actor and the only person to play roles in the original Broadway productions of four Stephen Sondheim musicals, died on Jan. 11 in Lake Katrine, N.Y., in Ulster County. She was 90.Her daughter Laura Simon confirmed the death, in a nursing home.Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)Ms. Simon in 1987, in the Broadway production of the Sondheim musical “Into the Woods.”Martha Swope, via Billy Rose Theatre Division/New York Public Library“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”When “Gypsy” opened, Ms. Simon had a minor role. But she was promoted in early 1960 to be the understudy to the actress playing June, one of two daughters pushed into show business by their ambitious mother, Rose, played by the powerhouse Ethel Merman.Soon after becoming the understudy, Ms. Simon went on for the actress in the role, who was ailing, and ended up becoming the full-time June.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,’ by Richard Schoch

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      An incisive new book, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” examines the extraordinary career of the master of the musical.HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, by Richard SchochIn the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming essay collection, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “not, then, a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”The Sondheim perspective is the subject of 11 essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one on “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “How (Not) to Deal With Injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” and so on through the Sondheim playlist. This conceit of art as self-help is common enough — Jane Austen has come in for a lot of it, as have Shakespeare and the 19th-century Russian novelists — as to practically be a subgenre at this point, in which publishers take a subject they are nervous may be too nerdy or niche for a general audience and try to reframe it in more popular terms. It rarely works, trying to turn apples into bananas — there are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto “life lessons” in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside out, that is, as someone who has wrestled with how to perform and direct him. And what a joy the author’s take on it all is. I was happy simply to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, close reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send In the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a bit in range” that required “short phrases firmly closed off with consonants.” This is why Judi Dench — not a singer, either — performed the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s 1995 revival of “A Little Night Music,” and why Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Trevor Nunn’s 2009 Broadway revival, did not. (On hearing the opening bars, I recall, Zeta-Jones assumed a stricken Torch Song expression as if something terrible was about to happen — which, of course, it was.)Laurence Guittard and Judi Dench in the 1995 London production of “A Little Night Music.”Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock PhotoStritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home, abject, self-loathing, from the cast recording of “Company” after her ninth flubbed take of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” reminding us that Sondheim favored cranky, brilliant leading ladies who drove everyone mad until they hit their mark. He takes us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, writing in relation to Gypsy Rose Lee, “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme of Sondheim’s, raising questions of where in his characters the composer resides. That Sondheim, a gay man who by his own account didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of straight marriage remains curious. But while Schoch uses the example of the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly of his own coming out in his 30s, he doesn’t get into Sondheim’s life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lady Gaga’s ‘Joker,’ and a Tour of Musical Clowning

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      Clowns, harlequins, jokers and Pierrots have served as the main characters in countless songs over the years, but they’re rarely there to conjure cheap laughs.Dear listeners,Today — after announcing it just a few days ago — Lady Gaga released “Harlequin,” a companion album to the forthcoming film “Joker: Folie à Deux,” in which she stars as the troubled Harleen Quinzel. Fans clamoring for the next “Bad Romance” will have to wait a little longer: She’s promised that her next album, slated for release in February 2025, will be her return to pop. In the meantime, “Harlequin” is a satisfying showcase for the jazzier and more traditional side of Gaga — and another example of music’s continued obsession with clowns.Clowns, harlequins, jokers and Pierrots have served as the main characters in countless songs over the years, but they’re rarely there to conjure cheap laughs. More often, the musical clown is a tragic figure, whether he’s shedding tears like Smokey Robinson or hanging his head like the titular fool in an Everly Brothers classic. Gaga’s “Harlequin” fits into this lineage in its own way: There’s a manic brightness to many of her performances (which include standards like “Smile” and “Get Happy”) that barely conceals an underlying darkness and despair.Today’s playlist is a brief tour through the musical history of clowning, sans the abrasive sounds of Insane Clown Posse. (My apologies; I’m just not a Juggalo.) It contains one of my favorite tracks from Lady Gaga’s new album, along with material from Jenny Lewis, Emeli Sandé and a certain timeless ballad written by Stephen Sondheim. On the off chance you’re one of those people who is afraid of clowns, I sincerely hope it does not inspire any nightmares.Just like Pagliacci did,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Lady Gaga: “The Joker”One of the most striking tracks on “Harlequin” is this rendition of “The Joker” — no, not the Steve Miller Band song, but a showstopping number from the 1964 musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd.” (It’s been covered by quite a few artists over the years, perhaps most memorably the great Shirley Bassey.) Gaga can of course nail a theatrical tune like this in her sleep, but she brings a fresh energy to “The Joker” by giving it a kind of rock operatic arrangement, complete with electric guitar and a punkish growl in her voice. “Perfect Illusion” apologists, our moment has once again arrived.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jonathan Tunick Unveils a Grand Orchestration of Sondheim’s ‘A Little Night Music’

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      Jonathan Tunick, Stephen Sondheim’s longtime collaborator, unveiled a grand orchestration of “A Little Night Music” that deserves more than a concert.Near the end of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “A Little Night Music,” the orchestra swells to what he is said to have called his Max Steiner moment, something out of “Casablanca” or “Gone With the Wind.”Désirée and Fredrik, former lovers who reconnect but nearly miss out on happiness again, come together and kiss. The instruments respond with a grand, emotive reprise of the show’s 11 o’clock number, “Send in the Clowns.”At a concert performance of “A Little Night Music” at David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the premiere of a new orchestration by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick, the 53-piece Orchestra of St. Luke’s let out a fortissimo tutti. Strings and winds soared with the melody, but there was more: resonant, staggered chords to support it in the low voices, and florid counterpoint. It was a moment fit not only for the movies but for the opera house, which, perhaps, is where this new orchestration belongs.Not all musicals are fit for stages beyond Broadway, but some are. And there has been a resurgence, since Sondheim’s death in 2021, of large-scale revivals of his work. (This, after years of skillfully stripped-down productions by John Doyle.) “Sweeney Todd” returned to Broadway with Tunick’s original orchestration for nearly 30 players, crackling with detail and musical drama. Last week, “Follies” was presented at Carnegie Hall with a similarly sized ensemble and a starry cast in concert.The version of “A Little Night Music” on Thursday had nearly double those forces. If anyone can be trusted with that task, it’s Tunick. He and Sondheim first collaborated on “Company,” in 1970, and Tunick orchestrated the composer’s final, unfinished show, “Here We Are,” last year.Tunick, center, was Sondheim’s longtime collaborator, starting with the 1970 musical “Company.”Joan MarcusWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Outsiders’ Wins Tony Award for Best Musical, ‘Stereophonic’ Best Play

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      “The Outsiders,” a muscular musical based on the classic young adult novel, was named best new musical at the Tony Awards on Sunday night, while “Stereophonic,” a behind-the music play about a band making an album, was named best new play.Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” completed a four-decade journey from flop to hit by winning the best musical revival prize, while “Appropriate,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s family drama about a trio of siblings confronting an unsettling secret, won best play revival.Here are the highlights of the 77th Tony Awards ceremony, which took place at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and was hosted by Ariana DeBose:We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Was a Flop in 1981. Now It’s a Tony Winner.

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      “Merrily We Roll Along,” long considered one of the most storied flops in Broadway history, found redemption on Sunday when it won the Tony Award for best musical revival, belatedly establishing it in the pantheon of Stephen Sondheim masterpieces.The award, although widely expected, nonetheless represents a miraculous rehabilitation for a troubled title. The original production, in 1981, closed just 12 days after opening, dogged by terrible reviews and reports of audience walkouts. The current production — which features a major movie star, Daniel Radcliffe, alongside two popular Broadway performers, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez — has been a profitable hit met with near-universal acclaim, sold-out houses and high average ticket prices.“Merrily,” about the implosion of a three-way friendship over a 20-year period, features music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by George Furth. It is based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and the original production was directed by Hal Prince. The debacle was notorious enough that it became the subject of a 2016 documentary, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.”But the show lived on and has been repeatedly reworked in the decades since because, despite its difficult birth, a cadre of passionate fans has long found it profound and, with a widely admired score, worthy of reconsideration.Much has changed, in addition to rewrites, to transform the show from failure to success. The show unfolds in reverse chronological order, a device that was less familiar to audiences in the early 1980s than it is now. To portray characters who start the show in their 40s and end it in their 20s, the original cast was made up of adolescents and young adults. Later productions have gone the other way, generally relying on actors who are older, which has proved more emotionally effective for theatergoers.The current production’s starry, appealing cast, who also performed in a 2022 Off Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop, helped make the show a must-see even before audiences discovered that they liked the story and the songs and found the show both affecting and artful.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Daniel Radcliffe on Breaking the Spell in ’Merrily We Roll Along’

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      Daniel Radcliffe caught the first batch of Tony nominations during the announcement at 8:30 a.m. He texted congratulations to his “Merrily We Roll Along” co-star Jonathan Groff, who was nominated for best actor in a musical.But then dad duty called before his own category, featured actor in a musical, was announced at 9:00.“I was in the middle of doing breakfast and trying to put my son down for his morning nap, so I got a text from a member of the cast letting me know I was nominated,” said the actor, 34, who stars as the lyricist and playwright Charley Kringas in the acclaimed revival of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.”Radcliffe’s Tony nomination — for his fifth Broadway role since his 2008 debut in “Equus” — is the first of his career. And it’s extra special, he said in a phone conversation from his New York apartment on Tuesday, because not only Groff, but his other “Merrily” co-star, Lindsay Mendez, was also nominated, for featured actress.“People in your line of work probably get bored of actors talking about how much they love each other, how much they enjoy working with each other,” said Radcliffe, who is best known for playing Harry Potter onscreen. “And we do say it a lot, but this group is really awesome — Lindsay, Jonathan, the whole cast. I feel so lucky.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You recently were the ring bearer at Lindsay’s wedding, for which Jonathan served as the officiant. How did that come about?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Eureka Day’ and Sondheim Revue Join Broadway’s Next Season

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      Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga will star in Sondheim’s “Old Friends” in Manhattan Theater Club’s Broadway season, which also includes “Eureka Day.”Manhattan Theater Club, one of the four nonprofit organizations that operate houses on Broadway, is planning to stage a vaccination comedy called “Eureka Day” and the Sondheim revue “Old Friends” at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater next season.“Eureka Day” predates the pandemic — it was first staged in 2018 in Berkeley, Calif., where it takes place, and the disease at issue is mumps, not Covid. The play, by Jonathan Spector, is set at an exuberantly left-leaning private day school; the characters are school board members who find their tolerance tested by the anti-vaxxers among them.The initial production was at the Aurora Theater Company; in 2019, there was an Off Off Broadway production presented by Colt Coeur that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised, saying it “is not only one of the funniest plays to open this year, it is one of the saddest.” There have been several other productions since; most prominently, in 2022, the show was staged at the Old Vic in London, with Helen Hunt starring.The M.T.C. run, which is to begin performances on Nov. 25, will be a new production, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. (She won a Tony for directing “August: Osage County.”) Casting has not yet been announced.“Old Friends” is a posthumous tribute to the acclaimed composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021. (“Old Friends” is the title of a song in the Sondheim musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”) The revue, a passion project for the megaproducer Cameron Mackintosh, was first performed for one night in 2022, and then had a 16-week West End run that ended earlier this year.The New York production, like the London production, will star the Tony winners Bernadette Peters (“Song and Dance”; “Annie Get Your Gun”) and Lea Salonga (“Miss Saigon”) and will be directed by Matthew Bourne (who won two Tonys for “Swan Lake”) in collaboration with Julia McKenzie, an English actress and frequent Sondheim performer. The New York production is to begin March 25, 2025, following a run at Center Theater Group’s Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More