Sondheim, Stephen

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      Stephen Sondheim Belongs in the Pantheon of American Composers

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      “You know, I had the idealistic notion, when I was 20, that I was going into the theater,” Stephen Sondheim once said. “I wasn’t; I was going into show business, and I was a fool to think otherwise.”It was a remark characteristic of Sondheim, the titan of musical theater whose decades’ worth of credits as a composer and lyricist included “West Side Story,” “Company” and “Into the Woods.” Here he was as many had seen him in interviews over the years: unsentimental and a bit flip, self-effacing to the point of selling himself short.Because among musical theater artists of his generation, Sondheim, who died in 2021 at 91, was arguably the most artistic — challenging, unusual, incapable of superficiality in a medium often dismissed as superficial. He was, perhaps to his disappointment, not the best businessman, with shows that rarely lasted long on Broadway. And his work was better for it.Sondheim has always had a dedicated fan base, but right now his musicals are true hot tickets with substantial real estate on New York stages. Recently, it was possible to take in four Sondheim shows in a single weekend: “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway, “The Frogs” in a starry concert presentation by MasterVoices, and “Here We Are,” his unfinished final work, completed and in its premiere run at the Shed.From left, Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe in “Merrily We Roll Along” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTogether, they form a portrait that helps in considering Sondheim’s place among American composers. I say American because Broadway, alongside jazz, is the most homegrown of this country’s music, and his work constantly pushed the art form further. Where so many of his colleagues have operated within standard structures, he, even in writing a 32-bar song, seemed to always ask, “What else is possible?”It’s also important to consider Sondheim as a distinctly American composer because his writing reflects a creative mind repeatedly fixated on the idea of his homeland, with an ambivalence by turns affectionate and acerbic. It’s there in his lyric contribution to “Gypsy,” arguably the Great American Musical, which the musicologist Raymond Knapp has described as “a version of the American dream that leads, as if inevitably, to striptease.” And it continues, with an unconventional patriotism in “Assassins” and a revealing journey across state lines and years in “Road Show.”In that sense, Sondheim is not only one of the finest American composers, but also one of the most essential.“He and Lenny are at the top of that list,” Paul Gemignani, Sondheim’s longtime music director, said, referring also to Leonard Bernstein. “Most Broadway composers are writing pop tunes. Steve never wrote a pop tune. ‘Send in the Clowns’ got lucky.”Sondheim seemed fated to create musical theater at a higher level than his colleagues. Like Bernstein, he was pedigreed: His mentor, for lyric writing, was Oscar Hammerstein II, of Rodgers and Hammerstein; for composition, the modernist Milton Babbitt. Yet he emulated neither.In an interview with the Sondheim Review, Sondheim said that he was trained by Hammerstein “to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.” But he thought of them in more classical terms: “sonata form — statement, development and recapitulation.”And while Sondheim composed with the spirit of an avant-gardist, he was more of a postmodernist than Babbitt, though he described Babbitt as a closet songwriter who admired Kern and Arlen as much as Mozart and Schoenberg.“The first hour of each of our weekly sessions would be devoted to analyzing a song like ‘All the Things That You Are,’” Sondheim recalled, “the next three to the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, always concentrating on the tautness of the structures, the leanness and frugality of the musical ideas.” Genre didn’t matter; craft did, which is why one of their most influential lessons entailed how a Bach fugue built, as Babbitt put it, an entire cathedral from a four-note theme. Sondheim would later do the same in the score of “Anyone Can Whistle.”As a university student, Sondheim wrote some juvenilia as a lyricist-composer — most intriguingly, fragments of a “Mary Poppins” musical that predates the Disney movie by over a decade. But, after a false start, his first professional credit was as the lyricist on “West Side Story.” “Gypsy” followed, with music by Jule Styne, but it wasn’t until “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” that Broadway saw its first show with both music and lyrics by Sondheim.He was often asked which came first, the music or the lyrics. The most accurate answer is probably sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, but with a deference to clarity of text. Like Wagner, who wrote the librettos of his operas, Sondheim wanted his lyrics to be heard and understood; his vocal lines resemble those of Janacek and Debussy, whose dramas unfurl with the rhythm of speech.Hal Prince, left, and Sondheim in 1988.Kyle Ericksen/Getty ImagesSondheim’s most prolific, and ambitious, period began with the concept musical “Company” (1970) and his collaborations with the eminent producer and director Hal Prince. Gemignani said that, together, they “never compromised on bringing their ideas to life.” It was during this period that Sondheim emerged as a postmodernist in the vein of John Adams, with a deep well of references presented with a wink or sincerity, but above all with dramaturgical purpose.That might be why “Follies,” from 1971, has been called a “post-musical musical.” Its score abounds in pastiche — what is “Losing My Mind” if not a Gershwin tune from an alternate universe? — and artful irony, such as dissonances that betray the darker truth of “The Road You Didn’t Take.”For “Pacific Overtures” (1976), Sondheim took a similar approach to Puccini in “Turandot,” by putting authentic sounds — in this case, Kabuki music — through his own idiomatic prism. But, like Puccini, he suggests rather than represents, unable to escape a Western perspective while purportedly telling a story from a Japanese point of view. It’s a contradiction that doesn’t serve the musical as well as the more globalist style of “Someone in a Tree,” a song that brought a simplistic American Minimalism to Broadway.Inspired by the spareness of Japanese visual art, Sondheim composed an analogue in a song that does little more than develop a single chord, over and over. As Philip Glass and Steve Reich were applying a world-music sensibility to the classical sphere, Sondheim wrote his own kind of repetitive phase music. “It’s not insignificant that when I met Steve Reich,” Sondheim later wrote, “he told me how much he loved this show.”He was on culturally surer ground with “A Little Night Music” (1973), in which the idea of variation is applied to waltz-like melodies in three. He wrote that his favorite form was the theme and variations, and that he respected Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” This musical came closer to that piece than anything else Sondheim wrote, with a hint of Sibelius.“The Frogs,” presented by MasterVoices, at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center in November.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesSondheim’s sound, like that of any good postmodernist, was both consistent and chameleonic, never more so than in “Sweeney,” which displays his genius and misguided musical beliefs in equal measure.Aside from “Passion” (1994), it is Sondheim’s most operatic work in sensibility and craft, yet he bristled at the idea of “Sweeney” being called an opera or an operetta and once wrote that “when ‘Porgy and Bess’ was performed on Broadway, it was a musical; when it was performed at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, it was an opera.” (That’s not true. It was always an opera, and played on Broadway at a time when many operas did.)All told, “Sweeney” is a hybrid of music theater, one that brings in yet another medium: cinema. Sondheim believed that, with all due respect, “John Williams is responsible for “Jaws,” not Steven Spielberg.” His score for “Sweeney” is similarly rich with edge-of-your-seat underscoring, while the lyrics are both ingenious and inherently melodic. Sondheim was proud of the opening line of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” and rightfully so: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” sets a mood of theatrical artifice and anachronism, with a piercing consonance in the T’s as unsettling as Nabokov’s “tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth” in “Lolita.”Josh Groban, left, and Annaleigh Ashford in “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere, it must be said, that the sound of Sondheim would not be such without a crucial collaborator: Jonathan Tunick, his orchestrator to this day. (The scores of all four shows I recently attended were arranged by him.) Sondheim composed at his piano, then sang through while accompanying himself; from there, Tunick teased out the textures of his playing into entire instrumental ensembles.In an interview, Tunick said that you can’t overthink the process. “I was able to tell a great deal, not only from the actual notes but from the way he played them,” he added, “the way he phrased, the way he attacked a chord.” He described the transformation as, more than anything, “Dionysian.” At its fullest, the arrangement on Broadway now, the “Sweeney” score abounds in colorful flourishes and bone-rattling horror, the fluttering in the winds in one song as delicate as the low brasses are chilling at the start of “Epiphany.”If “Sweeney” reflects a worldview, a pretty dismal one, that speaks to America only allegorically, a more direct view of the country emerges in later works. “Merrily” comments obliquely on the period of history it covers, with the space-age promise of Sputnik giving way to cynical neoliberalism. And American themes are even more overt in the shows that brought Sondheim back together with John Weidman, the book writer of “Pacific Overtures”: “Assassins” (1990) and “Road Show,” a troubled musical that went through multiple revisions and titles before premiering in its final form in 2008. Both shows are flawed — “Road Show” structurally, and “Assassins” for its disturbing pageant of mental illness — but reflect the promise and tragedy of the American dream.“Assassins” goes so far as to propose “Another National Anthem,” which reads as a litany of disenfranchisement from a cast of characters who all feel let down by a system that was supposed to work for them; it’s not far from the complaints that fueled distrust of government today and the rise of Donald J. Trump.Micaela Diamond, left, and fellow cast members in the premiere run of “Here We Are” at the Shed.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore barbed yet is “Here We Are,” in its sendup of elitism and the privilege of both apathy and revolt. For better and worse, the score has a valedictory spirit, recalling earlier work without quoting it exactly, and the lyrics contain satirical observations that wouldn’t be out of place in “Company.”My generation of theater fans came of age loving “Into the Woods,” which, because of its enduring popularity as theater for children, will remain onstage far into the future. But the Sondheim works most likely to last, from a purely musical perspective, are those that least readily show their age, and happen to be classical-leaning and postmodern: “Follies” is timelessly Broadway; “A Little Night Music,” universally elegant; “Sweeney,” perennially effective.Gemignani called “Sweeney” Sondheim’s “Porgy and Bess.” Like that show, it has played in Broadway theaters and opera houses alike. And like that show, it’s the masterpiece of a great American composer. More

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      MasterVoices Puts on a Starry Show With a Shoestring Budget

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      This essential organization gives fresh, entertaining life to music theater curiosities. What if it had more money?There’s a lot of Stephen Sondheim in New York at the moment: the premiere staging of his last musical, “Here We Are,” and star-studded revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.And for one weekend this month, there was also one more show of his on: “The Frogs.”This endearingly weird, Aristophanes-inspired musical — created with Burt Shevelove and famously premiered at a Yale University swimming pool in 1974 — hasn’t been onstage in New York since a heavily revised 2004 revival that Sondheim conceived with Nathan Lane, who also performed the role of Dionysos.Few local institutions have the skill or interest to pull off “The Frogs” — with its bookish references and ironic-then-impassioned music — but it’s typical, delightful fare for MasterVoices and its artistic director, Ted Sperling, who mounted and conducted a concert staging of the musical at the Rose Theater. (Lane was there, too, now as a host guiding the audience through the show.)MasterVoices, a nonprofit chorus that mounts theatrical productions of seldom heard repertoire, lends its performances generously sized orchestras, a rarity on Broadway, as well as its chorus, which for “The Frogs” consisted of an all-volunteer group of 130 singers. Sondheim’s ensemble material was in moments gleefully tongue-in-cheek, as when extolling Dionysos with a lightly psychedelic, 1960s-style tune; at others, it sounded genuinely serious about the role of art in wartime.Nathan Lane, who conceived a revised version of “The Frogs” with Sondheim in the early 2000s, returned to the show with MasterVoices.Erin BaianoSperling had a command of this material befitting his experience: His first professional gig in New York, after college, was as a rehearsal pianist for Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” (He also played synthesizer on the original cast recording: “All that harpsichord-sounding stuff is me,” he said with a self-effacing laugh during a recent interview.)In that conversation, shortly after the three-performance run of “The Frogs,” Sperling discussed how MasterVoices — previously known as the Collegiate Chorale — approaches its adaptations of rarely heard material.For starters, this scrappy organization can attract top talent like Lane because “we’re only asking them for two weeks of their time,” Sperling said, “not asking them to commit to a year’s run on Broadway.” As a result, “we are able to present all kinds of pieces that I don’t think other people can right now.”MasterVoices has independence and pluck: It managed to stay active during the pandemic by producing an online adaptation of Adam Guettel’s cult favorite song cycle “Myths and Hymns.” It has collaborated with the New York Philharmonic, as when it offered a thrilling performance of the Italian modernist Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Il Prigioniero” in 2013.At New York City Center in 2019, the group and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s put on an intoxicating performance of Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s rarely heard “Lady in the Dark.”That range is a legacy of the original Collegiate Chorale — a group that, at its 1941 founding, was one of the first racially integrated classical ensembles. “Even the very early programs that I’ve been able to take a look at start with Bach and end with a Broadway tune,” Sperling said. “The DNA of the group has always been to try to be the people’s chorus, and something that represented a large swath of our community and that would have a broad appeal.”In recent seasons, I’ve heard MasterVoices give witty, precise accounts of George Gershwin’s political parody “Let ’Em Eat Cake” and Bizet’s original, comic opera version of “Carmen.” Any organization that can do justice to such a wide range of material has my immediate affection. But I’m far from the only fan: The “Frogs” run was sold out.But should more people have the opportunity to see them sing? The chorus’s budget for this season — in which they’ll also present Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” next April — stands at a slight $1.9 million. Sperling, who is in his 10th year with the group, has some ideas of what he would do with more money, beyond simply expanding the number of performances.“I’d love to have a family of young singers who are professionals — and expert — who could be the backbone of our choral sound, and also step out and do smaller solo work,” he said. “And maybe also help us spread the joy of choral singing in our community, by being teaching artists.”The MasterVoices chorus is made up of volunteer singers, 130 of whom performed in “The Frogs.”Erin BaianoSperling wouldn’t mind a permanent home, either. In recent years, MasterVoices has bounced around from New York City Center to Carnegie Hall and Jazz at Lincoln Center, often renting spaces on its own. For “The Frogs,” Sperling noted, the crew loaded into the Rose Theater on Friday morning, just in time for a performance that evening. “I’d love to have a little more rehearsal time for everything we do,” he said. “It always seems like we’re doing it at the very edge of what we’re capable of.”Given those constraints, the group’s capability is all the more impressive. The MasterVoices version of Weill’s “Lady” included an updated book by Chris Hart and Kim Kowalke; that version has since been used in a celebrated production of the musical in the Netherlands. And because New York doesn’t have a comic opera company, MasterVoices fills a crucial, consistently entertaining niche. “I love that we can present these pieces that would not sustain a commercial Broadway run,” Sperling said, “or might not even fit in the opera house, necessarily, right now.”He added that he would like to add more projects to the season, which could raise MasterVoices’ visibility. They wouldn’t have to be at the scale of “The Frogs,” either: “I’d be interested in doing some smaller pieces that are part of that repertoire that I’m so eager to bring back to New York.”That might include William Bolcom’s early musical “Casino Paradise,” whose original production Sperling worked on. But, given the flexibility and inventiveness of MasterVoices, the possibilities are extensive.“I feel like there are a lot of operas out there that have been extremely popular around the country but have not found a home in New York yet,” Sperling said. “I’m on a mission to find out which ones of those would be a good fit for us.” More

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      Joanna Merlin, Known for Her Work Both Onstage and Off, Dies at 92

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      Soon after appearing in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” she began a new career as a prominent casting director.Joanna Merlin, who, after originating the role of Tzeitel, the eldest daughter, in the hit Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” became a renowned casting director, notably for Stephen Sondheim musicals including “Into the Woods” and “Follies,” died on Oct. 15 at her younger daughter’s home in Los Angeles. She was 92.Her older daughter, Rachel Dretzin, said the cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease.The idea of becoming a casting director came from Hal Prince, the powerful producer of “Fiddler,” after she had left “Fiddler” to raise her two young daughters. He had interviewed several candidates and told Ms. Merlin that most of them “just didn’t like actors,” she told Backstage magazine.“He felt that since I was an actor and a mother, that I might be a good choice,” she added. “He understood that I was raising children and told me that he didn’t care what hours I put in, just as long as I got the work done.”She set to work in 1970, casting replacement actors in “Fiddler” during its last two years on Broadway. For the next two decades, she cast six musicals that were composed by Sondheim and produced (and usually directed) by Mr. Prince on Broadway: “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Side by Side by Sondheim” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”From left, Ms. Merlin, the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the director Harold Prince and the playwright George Furth during a casting session for the 1981 Broadway musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsHer casting credits also include two other Sondheim musicals, “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita”; and “On the Twentieth Century,” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Cy Coleman. All those shows except “Into the Woods” were directed by Mr. Prince.“What I found so interesting with Joanna,” James Lapine, who directed “Into the Woods” and wrote its book, based on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, said in a phone interview, “was her determination to pursue nontraditional casting in the theater, which for me, at a young age, was something I hadn’t thought much about.”Ms. Merlin’s pursuit of diverse casting led Mr. Lapine to choose a Black actress, Terry Burrell, to replace the white one who had played one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, and Phylicia Rashad, who is Black, as a replacement for Bernadette Peters in the leading role of the Witch.In 1986, Ms. Merlin was a founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (now the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), which seeks more opportunities for actors of color and actors with disabilities.Ms. Merlin, noting that there were many talented, nonwhite actors, told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1990. “The reason they should be cast is because they’re good,”Ms. Merlin also cast six films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987), for which she won the Casting Society of America’s Artios Award. She also won an Artios for “Into the Woods.”Ms. Merlin, far right, with Zero Mostel, center, and three other “Fiddler on the Roof” cast members (from left, Maria Karnilova, Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes) backstage after the show’s opening night in 1964. Associated PressJo Ann Dolores Ratner was born on July 15, 1931, in Chicago. Her parents were Russian immigrants: Her father, Harry, owned a grocery store, and her mother, Toni (Merlin) Ratner, helped in the store and became a sculptor in her 60s.She moved to Los Angeles with her parents and her sister when she was 15.She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year in the early 1950s and, after acting in plays in the Los Angeles area in the early and mid-1950s, appeared in her first movie role, a small part in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956).After some more screen work and roles in Off and Off Off Broadway plays, Ms. Merlin made her Broadway debut in 1961 in Jean Anouilh’s “Becket,” as Gwendolen, the mistress of Thomas Becket, one of Britain’s most powerful figures in the 12th century, who was played by Laurence Olivier. Later that year, she returned to Broadway to portray Sigmund Freud’s wife in Henry Denker’s “A Far Country.”After four unsuccessful auditions for a role in Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which was staged by Jerome Robbins, she auditioned eight times for Mr. Robbins when he was casting “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964. Although she lacked a strong singing voice, she was cast as Tzeitel, the oldest daughter of Tevye the milkman, the show’s principal character.The syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons wrote that when Ms. Merlin was pregnant in 1965 with her daughter Rachel, Zero Mostel, who played Tevye, told the stage manager: “Joanna’s baby just kicked. Send baby a note — not to kick.”She left the show in 1965 after Rachel was born, returned as Tzeitel a year later, and departed again in 1967 when she was replaced by her understudy, Bette Midler (who was also Rachel’s babysitter). After Julie’s birth in 1968, Mr. Prince made his offer.She continued to act, mostly in films and on television. Her roles included the dance teacher in “Fame” (1980), Julia Roberts’s mother in “Mystic Pizza” (1988) and an old Jewish woman in a short film, “Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn” (2008), which she and Ragnar Freidank adapted from a one-woman play by Ellen Cassedy.TV viewers might be most familiar with Ms. Merlin’s recurring role in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” She played Judge Lena Petrovsky 43 times from 2000 to 2011. No other actor has played a jurist more often in the “Law & Order” franchise. She also appeared, as two different defense lawyers, in five episodes of “Law & Order.”Ms. Merlin as a lawyer in a 1994 episode of “Law & Order.” She also played a judge in 43 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” setting a record for the franchise.Jessica Burstein/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesHer career as an acting teacher began in 1998 at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a year later she began holding workshops dedicated to the acting technique of her teacher, Michael Chekhov.In the foreword to her book, “Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide” (2001), Mr. Prince wrote: “Her taste is impeccable. In no instance can I remember her recommending anyone less than interesting for a role.”In addition to her daughter Rachel, a documentary filmmaker, and her daughter Julie Dretzin, an actress, Ms. Merlin is survived by five grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Marty Lubner, ended in divorce. Her marriage to David Dretzin ended with his death in 2006 after a car accident in which he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her sister, Harriet Glickman, died in 2020.For “Pacific Overtures,” which takes place in Japan after Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s visit in 1853 and which had an all-Asian cast, Ms. Merlin engaged in “what may be one of the most poignant talent searches undertaken for a Broadway show,” according to a 1976 article in The New York Times.Racism and economics often forced Asian actors out of the profession at the time. So when she had no luck finding actors in New York, she worked with Asian community and theater groups, Asian newspapers and the State Department to fill the roles. A third of those ultimately signed for the production were nonprofessionals.Among them was the actor Gedde Watanabe, who was a young street singer in San Francisco when she approached him and invited him to audition.“I didn’t believe her,” Mr. Watanabe said. More

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      ‘Here We Are’ Review: The Last Sondheim, Cool and Impossibly Chic

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      This inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show is a worthy and loving farewell to the great musical dramatist.Stephen Sondheim had a genius for genre. Some of his best works were adapted from very niche sources like penny dreadfuls (“Sweeney Todd”), epistolary novels (“Passion”) and Roman comedies (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”). Leaning hard into their specific styles, he mined their expressive potential in songs that could hardly be improved and never sounded alike.Still, for him and for others, surrealism was often a genre too far. Musical theater is surreal enough already. (Why did that taciturn man suddenly start singing? Who are those dancing women in lingerie?) Building a show on a willfully irrational source risks doubling down on the weirdness, leading to “Huh?” results like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and Sondheim’s own “Anyone Can Whistle.”So as we waited what seemed like decades for what would turn out to be his last musical, never quite knowing if he’d ditched it or not, the dribbles of information he and his collaborators let drop suggested that the new show — eventually titled “Here We Are” — might be misbegotten.Not only are the two Luis Buñuel films that Sondheim and the playwright David Ives took as their inspiration maximally surrealist, they are also surreal in different, seemingly incompatible ways. “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) is a sunny romp about a group of friends who, seeking a meal, are mysteriously unable to find one. “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) is a much darker affair, about a dinner party no one can leave. Both movies ridicule aristocrats who are underfed yet over-sated: people for whom nothing is ever enough. But one is like the silky tartness of a lemon meringue pie and the other like chicken bones stuck in your throat.The best good news about “Here We Are,” the combo platter Buñuel musical that opened on Sunday at the Shed, nearly two years after Sondheim’s death in November 2021, is that it justifies the idea of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello’s breathtakingly chic and shapely production, with a cast of can-you-top-this Broadway treasures, it is never less than a pleasure to watch as it confidently polishes and embraces its illogic. Musically, it’s fully if a little skimpily Sondheim, and entirely worthy of his catalog. That it is also a bit cold, only occasionally moving in the way that song would ideally allow, may speak to the reason he had so much trouble writing it.There are just a few songs in Act II, which, inspired by Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” takes a darker turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe first act, about an hour long and with perhaps seven numbers — though it’s hard to count because they weave in and out of the dialogue — introduces us to Ives’s American versions of Buñuel’s French gourmands from “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) is a crass tycoon and Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) a society decorator; their Saturday morning is interrupted when four of their circle arrive at the couple’s hyper-sleek apartment, insisting they’ve been invited for brunch.The interlopers include Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos), a plastic surgeon celebrating his 1,000th nose job, and his wife, Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray), an agent, she brays, for “a major entertainment entity.” Along with them are Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), the horndog ambassador from a Mediterranean country called Moranda, and Fritz (Micaela Diamond), Marianne’s sour younger sister, a revolutionary with champagne tastes.Ives quickly and amusingly delineates the six with specific and almost universally obnoxious traits. Raffael, who butchers his English, and Claudia, quick to pull rank, have a weekly assignation behind Paul’s back; Paul and Leo run a drug cartel with Raffael’s ambassadorial assistance. Fritz is a pill. As they go on the road in search of a meal, accompanied by a Sondheim vamp that starts out marvelously jaunty and ends like water swirling down a drain, each reveals worse and worse traits, except for Marianne, who is too dim to be venal. When she asks her husband to “buy this perfect day” for her, it seems less acquisitive than sentimental.The changes of scenery as they visit various establishments featuring outré waiters (Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare) in ever more ludicrous wigs (by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell) are accomplished with swift grace on David Zinn’s shiny white box of a set, as neon marquees descend from the flies and then descend further to form tables or banquettes. (Zinn’s costumes are also telegraphic, including Leo’s velour sweatsuit and Claudia’s sky-high purple Fendis.) The theme-and-variations format is enchanting, allowing Sondheim, the great puzzler, to treat songs almost as anagrams. Eventually, along with three other characters they pick up — a colonel (Francois Battiste), a soldier (Jin Ha) and a bishop (David Hyde Pierce) — the crew lands, by now starving, at Raffael’s embassy, where they dine as Act I ends.Here the musical hinges into “The Exterminating Angel,” only instead of a completely different set of characters (Buñuel’s were Spanish, living under Franco), Ives, in a neat piece of joinery, continues with Leo and Marianne and the others. It is they who find it impossible to leave after dinner, and wind up, in Act II, sleeping, bickering and eventually fighting over food scraps as their metaphysical entrapment persists for days. Ives also complicates Buñuel’s antifascist, anti-bourgeois glee, in which plutocrats are exposed as pigs, by implicating the revolution as well; Fritz turns out to be less of a threat to her own way of life than she intended.Clever as all that is, the windup has problems, as is true for many new shows finding their final shape. To make the characters in “Here We Are” worthy of punishment in the second act has meant making them too obviously awful in the first. Their brutishness throughout also lets us off Buñuel’s hook: His movies are about people whose sophistication and disposable income we should recognize, but “Here We Are,” which sometimes feels like a butterfly box, is about people we don’t dare to.In the first act, inspired by Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” the characters visit various establishments, each distinguished with swift grace by neon marquees that descend to form tables or banquettes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHad Sondheim written more songs for Act II — there are just a few, bunched at the beginning — that problem might have been eased. In any case, Mantello and Ives decided to reframe the dearth as an opportunity. Before his death, Sondheim apparently agreed with them that the lack of songs in fact made structural sense: Once trapped in a repeating nightmare of deprivation, these characters would have no reason to sing. But then why retain the ones he’d already written?Perhaps because the songs he did write are everything you could want them to be. There are fewer trick rhymes than usual, but laugh-out-loud jokes nonetheless. A rhapsodic love song for the soldier and a paean to superficiality for Marianne — “I want things to gleam./To be what they seem/And not what they are” — have the familiar Sondheimian depth and luster to crystallize complex insights.Though we sorely miss that in Act II, and especially at the attempted triple lutz of an ending (which is probably two lutzes too many), Ives, the author of “Venus in Fur” and innumerable clever comedies, has done much to compensate. Some of his dialogue scenes — including a riveting colloquy between the questing Marianne and the questioning bishop — have the shape, rhythm and sorrowful wit of a Sondheim song. (Jones and Pierce are standouts in the excellent cast.) Also lovingly filling in blanks are the musical supervisor, Alexander Gemignani, and Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, who have arranged themes from the earlier part of the show as instrumental interludes to take up the slack in the later part.You can understand their care. Pending the discovery of some unpublished juvenilia or yet another iteration of the penultimate “Road Show,” this is the last Sondheim musical we will ever have. That alone makes the production historic, a pressure that happily does not show in the product, which is fleet and flashy. Natasha Katz’s lighting, Tom Gibbons’s sound and Sam Pinkleton’s droll choreography do a lot of the heavy lifting for Mantello’s agenda.More important, “Here We Are” is as experimental as Sondheim throughout his career wanted everything to be. To swim through its currents of echoes of earlier work — some “Anyone Can Whistle,” some “Passion,” some “Merrily We Roll Along” — is to understand the characters’ monstrous insatiability. We, too, will always want more, even when we’ve had what by any reasonable standards should already be more than enough.Here We AreThrough Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ Finally Found in the Dark

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      Jonathan Groff, supported by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, is thrillingly fierce in the first convincing revival of the cult flop Sondheim musical.To be a fan of the work of Stephen Sondheim, as Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, is “to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He meant not only that Sondheim’s songs are so often crushingly poignant but that the experience of loving them can feel unrequited. The shows they are in — he was reviewing the original production of “Merrily We Roll Along” — don’t always love you back.That was in 1981, when “Merrily,” with a problematic book by George Furth, suffered an ignominious Broadway debut of just 16 performances after 44 previews. No matter that Sondheim, responding to the story of a songwriter, had written his most conspicuously tuneful score to date, prompting pop recordings by Frank Sinatra (“Good Thing Going”) and Barbra Streisand (“Not a Day Goes By”). It was universally deemed a debacle.The debacle ended the working relationship between Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, whose five shows together in the 1970s — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd” — had redefined the American musical. With “Merrily,” they thought they were taking the form even further, with a complicated backward chronology and a cast of mostly inexperienced actors who played 40-ish adults at the start and grew into themselves at the end.After the show’s death by a thousand pans, Sondheim, saying he’d rather make video games, threatened to leave the theater entirely. Luckily, that didn’t happen — and “Merrily,” too, refused to give up, instead undergoing a seemingly endless series of unsatisfactory “improvements” that only seemed to confirm the hopelessness of making it matter.But with the opening of its first Broadway revival, after 42 years in the wilderness and the death of Sondheim in 2021, “Merrily” is no longer lost. Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff have given the show the hard shell it lacked. Now heartbreaking in the poignant sense only, “Merrily” has been found in the dark.When we meet him after the uplift of the gleaming overture, Groff, as the composer Franklin Shepard, is alone in an empty and unappealing liminal space. (The deliberately ugly sets, perhaps uglier than necessary, are by Soutra Gilmour.) He is wearing, and will throughout the show, a solemn undertaker’s outfit — black pants, black tie, white shirt. Even as everyone else changes with the times, in vivid costumes (also by Gilmour) that mark each notch on the timeline from 1976 to 1957, Frank always remains what he was: a one-man show. “Merrily” is the funeral he throws for his own ideals.Groff, right, with Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe as friends whose relationship sours in the Sondheim-Furth musical, which is getting its first Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe contrast between the pleasures that music can provide and the damage obvious in Frank’s demeanor immediately frames what follows as a solo psychodrama. Yes, Charley Kringas, who writes the words, and their friend Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theater critic, are there throughout, trying to encourage his better angels and corral his worse ones. But despite high-wattage, laser-focused performances by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, they have no effect on him; they are clearly Frank’s pawns, willing or otherwise.How he destroys Mary, and nearly Charley as well, not without their assistance, is revealed as the musical’s formerly absent spine. In the first scene, a 1976 party for “Darkness Before Dawn,” a hack hit movie Frank has produced now that he no longer writes music, Mary is dispatched with barely a blink, or drunkenly dispatches herself.In the next scene, as Charley enumerates Frank’s misplaced priorities in a 1973 television interview — Radcliffe handles the song “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” superbly — Groff’s coldblooded rage is terrifying. Collateral damage along the way includes Frank’s first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke); his second, Gussie (Krystal Joy Brown); his probable third, Meg (Talia Simone Robinson); his producer, Joe (Reg Rogers); and even his adorable young son. Who but a monster would betray such a punim?“Merrily” is thus no longer, as it seemed in 1981, the story of the gradual, almost inevitable dimming of youth’s sweet illusions but rather the story of their falsity in the first place. Frank is only devoted to Mary and Charley when he doesn’t have access to anyone more useful. To think he turned into that monster is a mistake: He always was one, as Sondheim clearly understood. “That’s what everyone does,” Mary sings once the three-way friendship has collapsed. “Blames the way it is/on the way it was/On the way it never ever was.”Friedman has thrown in her lot with the coruscating insight of the songs, making a tactical decision — successful but not without consequences — to deprioritize everything else, including the score’s brassy élan. “Merrily” Kremlinologists will want to know that the version onstage at the Hudson Theater, though slightly bigger than the Off Broadway version that opened at New York Theater Workshop in December 2022, is still somewhat underscaled for Broadway. It has a cast of 19 instead of 17 and an orchestra of 13 instead of nine.In Maria Friedman’s unsparing production, our critic writes, the trajectories for the secondary characters at last make some sense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt takes more than even those larger numbers to deliver the Golden Age thrill that is, after all, the show’s milieu. (The original orchestra had 20 players.) Other than the costumes, the minimal design is more practical than inspiring; the sound of the band (playing new orchestrations by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick) is especially unbalanced. The choreography by Tim Jackson too often seems charades-like. Some of the solo singing could be more effective, technically and thus emotionally.And then there is, as always, the book. Friedman has apparently made her peace with Furth’s final Frankensteined version; though its pieces are coarsely sutured and don’t quite line up, at least the thing walks. If in seeking to sweeten the main story it still leans too heavily on thin satire for laughs — morning news shows, Hollywood sycophancy — the trajectories for the secondary characters, especially Beth and Gussie, who are now more than cannon fodder, at last make some sense.In this production, though, it wouldn’t matter much if they didn’t. Radcliffe’s wit and modesty, combined with Mendez’s zing and luster, provide perfect settings for what is now (as it has never been previously) the inarguably central performance. Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust.I don’t know whether that’s what Furth intended, but Sondheim is brutally clear about the insidiousness of great talent. In Frank, it eats everything it can find, eventually including itself. “Who says ‘Lonely at the top’?” he sings amid the end-stage cynicism of his loveless Bel Air party. “I say, ‘Let it never stop.’”What a strange and daring thing for the great and greatly missed Sondheim to dramatize, and for Friedman to forefront. I’d call it heartbreaking if the result weren’t finally such a palpable hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; merrilyonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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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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      As Broadway Rebounds, ‘Some Like It Hot’ Gets 13 Tony Nominations

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      As Broadway’s rebound from the pandemic shutdown picks up pace, Tony nominators showered much-sought attention on a wide variety of shows, from razzle-dazzle spectacles to quirky adventurous fare.“Some Like It Hot,” a musical based on the classic Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness a gangland slaying and dress as women to escape the mob, scored the most nominations: 13. But it faces stiff competition in the race for best new musical — ticket buyers have not made any of the contenders a slam-dunk hit, and there does not appear to be a consensus among the industry insiders who make up the Tony voting pool.Three other musicals picked up nine nominations apiece: “& Juliet,” which combines pop songs with an alternative narrative arc for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers; “New York, New York,” a dance-driven show about a pair of young musicians seeking success and love in a postwar city; and “Shucked,” a pun-laden country comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. “Kimberly Akimbo,” a critical favorite about a high school student with a life-altering genetic condition and a criminally dysfunctional family, picked up eight nominations.The Tony nominations also feature plenty of boldfaced names. Among the stars from the worlds of pop music, film and television who earned nods are Sara Bareilles, Jessica Chastain, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban, Sean Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendell Pierce and Ben Platt. Another went to one of Broadway’s most-admired stars: Audra McDonald, who, with nine previous nominations and six wins, has won the most competitive Tony Awards of any performer in history.The musical “Shucked,” the rare Broadway show about corn, got nine nominations. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s Tony Awards come at the end of the first full-length season since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close for about a year and a half. Given that tourism remains below prepandemic levels, many workers have not returned to Midtown offices, and inflation has made producing far more expensive, the season has been surprisingly robust, with a wide range of offerings.“Entertainment is like food — sometimes you’re in the mood for an organic small plate, and sometimes for a burger and fries, and the best thing about New York is we’ve got the variety,” said Victoria Clark, the Tony-nominated star of “Kimberly Akimbo.”Broadway shows this season had grossed $1.48 billion as of April 30, according to figures released Tuesday by the Broadway League. That’s nearly double the grosses at the same point last season — $751 million — but lower than the $1.72 billion at the same point in 2019, during the last full prepandemic season.Other key metrics are better, too: 11.5 million seats have been filled on Broadway this season, compared with 6 million at the same point last season, but still down from the 13.8 million that had been filled by this point in 2019.The Tony nominations, which were chosen by a panel of 40 theater industry experts who saw all 38 eligible shows and have no financial interest in any of them, are particularly important to shows that are still running, which try to use the vote of confidence to woo potential ticket buyers.“It’s all about what’s going to make a show run longer and create more jobs for more people,” said Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of “Some Like It Hot.” “Hopefully we’ll sell more tickets, and the show will be more of a success.”The Tony nominations can also boost the employment prospects, and the compensation, of artists. And, of course, they are a tribute to excellence. “It means something when your peers and your colleagues see beauty in something you make,” said James Ijames, whose play “Fat Ham” was among the nominated productions.“Between Riverside and Crazy” was among the nominees for best new play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a complicated place, dominated by commercial producers but also with six theaters run by nonprofits, and the work this season, as is often the case, featured everything from experimental plays tackling challenging subjects to more mainstream fare that aims primarily to entertain.Among the five nominees for best new play, three have already won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, including “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s story of a retired police officer trying to hang onto his apartment; “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s exploration of caregiving and disability; and “Fat Ham,” Ijames’s riff on “Hamlet,” set in the North Carolina backyard of a family that runs a barbecue restaurant.The two other Tony-nominated plays are each significant in their own ways: “Leopoldstadt” is Tom Stoppard’s autobiographically inspired drama about a European Jewish family before, during and after World War II, while “Ain’t No Mo’” is Jordan E. Cooper’s outlandish comedy imagining that the United States offers its Black residents one-way tickets to Africa.The nominations for “Ain’t No Mo’” were especially striking given that the show struggled to find an audience and closed early. “I’m just so elated, I can barely find the words,” said Cooper, who was nominated both as writer and actor. “There was a lot of turbulence, but we landed the plane.”Stoppard is already the winningest playwright in Broadway history, having won Tony Awards for four previous plays (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia”). He is now 85 years old, and “Leopoldstadt” is his 19th production on Broadway. Stoppard said he was proud of the nomination, but sorry the play had come to seem so timely at a moment of rising concern about antisemitism.“Nobody wants society to be divided,” he said in an interview, “and I like to think ‘Leopoldstadt’ works against a sense of human beings dividing up and confronting each other.”Jordan E. Cooper in his comedy “Ain’t No Mo’,” which was nominated for best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf the 38 Tony-eligible plays and musicals this season, 27 scored at least one nomination, leaving 11 with no nods. Among the musicals snubbed by the nominators were “Bad Cinderella,” the critically drubbed new musical from one of the most successful musical theater composers of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a progressive rethink of “1776,” about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, which was revived with a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers.One of the musicals that did not score any nominations, a revival of “Dancin’,” quickly declared plans to close: A little more than nine hours after the Tony nominations were announced, the revue’s producers said its last performance would be May 14. Among the seven plays shut out was “The Thanksgiving Play,” which is thought to be the first work on Broadway by a female Native American playwright, Larissa FastHorse.The season featured shows examining a wide variety of diverse stories, and the nominations reflect that.At a time when gender identity issues have become increasingly politicized in the nation, nominations were earned by two gender nonconforming actors: J. Harrison Ghee, a star of “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell, a supporting actor in “Shucked.”Helen Park, who is the first Asian American female composer on Broadway, was nominated in the best score category for the musical “KPOP.” “The more authentic we are to our respective cultures and stories,” she said, “the richer the Broadway soundscape and Broadway landscape will be.”Five plays by Black writers were nominated in either the best play or best play revival category, and four of the five nominees for leading actor in a play are Black.“I broke down in tears,” Pierce said about learning that he was among those nominees, for playing Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” in which the traditionally white Loman family is now African American. “I did not know how profoundly moving it would be. It was the culmination of years of hard work and a reflection on how much effort and toil went into the challenge of playing the role.”This was a strong season for musical revivals, and the nominated shows include two with scores by Stephen Sondheim — “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd” — as well as the Golden Age classic “Camelot” and “Parade,” which is a show about the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.“Into the Woods” was one of two Stephen Sondheim revivals to earn nominations.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re so happy audiences are taking to it, and we hope that Sondheim would be happy this morning as well,” said Groban, starring as the title character in “Sweeney Todd.”The nominated play revivals are also a compelling bunch: a hypnotically minimalist version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” adapted by Amy Herzog and starring Chastain as a Norwegian debtor trapped in a sexist marriage; a bracing production of Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” about two brothers ominously named Lincoln and Booth; a rare staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” featuring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan; and a ghostly performance of “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s classic drama about a family wrestling with the meaning, and monetary value, of an heirloom.The 769 Tony voters now have until early June to catch up on shows they have not yet seen before they cast their electronic ballots. The awards ceremony itself will be held on June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in a ceremony hosted by Ariana DeBose.Julia Jacobs More

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      Review: The Many Thrilling Flavors of a Full-Scale ‘Sweeney Todd’

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      Sondheim’s masterpiece, restored to its proper size and sung to the hilt by Josh Groban, makes a welcome Broadway return.How do you like your “Sweeney Todd” done?Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the score, favored the musical thriller take: the one that focuses on gore and shock. Blood spouts everywhere when Sweeney, “the demon barber of Fleet Street,” slits the throats of his customers; when his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, grinds the corpses into meat pies, you wince at every crunch.Also rather nice: the social critique version promoted by Harold Prince, the director of the original production in 1979. In that one, Sweeney, seen as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, isn’t so much a villain as a victim. The greed of the overlord class, mimicked by the grasping Mrs. Lovett, is what makes mincemeat of the proletariat.Or perhaps you prefer your “Sweeney” intimate, with razors so close you recoil. Or psychological and stripped to the bone, with barely a set and Mrs. Lovett on tuba.If there are so many worthy “Sweeney” options, that’s because the show isn’t just one of the greatest American musicals but several. Sondheim’s score, a homage to the sinister soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann, cannibalizes the book (by Hugh Wheeler) and the book’s remoter sources (a 1970 play by Christopher Bond, a 19th-century penny dreadful) until only their bones remain. But in return you get arias so beautiful, and musical scenes so intricately layered, that every possible genre seems to be baked inside.Now comes a new special on the menu: the ravishingly sung, deeply emotional and strangely hilarious “Sweeney” revival that opened on Sunday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, and directed by Thomas Kail, it has a rictus on its face and a scar in its heart.Gaten Matarazzo, left, and Ashford dancing on a table (and Groban’s Sweeney, with a client, on the set’s upper level). Thomas Kail’s production favors naturalistic detail within an expressionistic palette, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe “gorgeously sung” part is no surprise with Groban, whose quasi-operatic pop baritone perfectly encompasses the range of the role, and whose technique makes sure every word is bell clear. That some of the songs are thus even prettier than usual is all to the better; Sondheim’s technique of setting the most grotesque moments to the most romantic music — as when, in “Pretty Women,” Sweeney prepares to murder the judge who raped his wife and abducted their baby daughter, Johanna — is beautifully served.And though it can’t be said that Groban invokes terror, that’s partly the result of Kail’s attention to naturalistic detail within an expressionistic palette. Even dwarfed (and unfortunately sometimes obscured) by Mimi Lien’s awesomely vast sets, we always see Sweeney as a human being, albeit a strange one. Perfectly matching Sondheim’s first description of the character — “His skin was pale and his eye was odd” — he looks almost overexposed and, squinting throughout, as if he needs glasses. Some of the production’s humor comes from his growing resemblance to an impassive suburban husband whose job happens to be murder, as Ashford’s Mrs. Lovett tries to domesticate him.But most of the humor comes from Ashford herself, a brilliant comic for whom comedy is not the end but the means. Her Mrs. Lovett — despite a tip of the wig to Angela Lansbury, who originated the role — is not the music-hall zany Lansbury created, but a brutal schemer for whom zaniness is a useful cover. As she hilariously enacts her romantic dramas with a noncompliant Sweeney, you see that she is also trying to protect herself from his mania by getting his mind off avenging his wife and reclaiming Johanna. Later, as the evil begins to crowd in closer, the jokes go dry on her tongue.It’s a great, very specific performance — and very well sung — if occasionally pushed too hard histrionically and often too hard to hear. (Both she and Jordan Fisher, beamish as the sailor who falls in love with Johanna, seem to be under-amplified.)That the rest of the cast is also so specific is a Kail trademark even more in evidence here than it was in his staging of “Hamilton.” The evil judge (Jamie Jackson), his oily beadle (John Rapson), a “half-crazed beggar woman” (Ruthie Ann Miles), a rival barber (Nicholas Christopher) and the barber’s abused assistant (Gaten Matarazzo, who sings an especially haunting “Not While I’m Around” with Ashford) all find curious ways, within the confines of the archetypes they must inhabit, of suggesting that the archetypes got that way for a reason. And as the grown-up Johanna, Maria Bilbao makes fascinating sense of an often-bland character by turning her into a bird, twisting with tics and scratching as if to escape the cage of her own skin.Jordan Fisher and Maria Bilbao as the young lovers Anthony and Johanna.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRuthie Ann Miles as the Beggar Woman.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese details help compensate for the extremity that has been somewhat leached from the title character. Steven Hoggett’s choreography, much more central than in other productions, has a similar effect, filling the stage with strange, disorienting gestures: extreme leaning, ratlike huddling, abdominal contractions that look like retching. Mrs. Lovett’s upward mobility can be traced, as if on a graph, in the lines of Emilio Sosa’s costumes. Natasha Katz’s extraordinary lighting is likewise expressionistic, its silvery beams often stabbing the gloom like a set of knives.These effects are certainly large. (Sweeney’s trick barber chair is a production in itself.) But the original staging included the framework of an actual iron foundry, so nothing here feels out of scale. And scale is one of the reasons we’ve had so many so-called Teeny Todds: The work is usually deemed too difficult and expensive to pull off at the size Prince imagined and that Sondheim, in his gigantic score, achieved. Even with a few discreet cuts, the nearly three-hour show is about 80 percent sung, which is why some people call it an opera.Certainly Kail’s production makes a convincing new case for “Sweeney” as a Broadway-size property, with its cast of 25 (I’ve seen it with as few as nine) and its orchestra playing Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations for 26. (You can’t believe the difference three trombones make in creating the sound of doom, especially compared to none.) Under Alex Lacamoire’s musical supervision, the musicians’ performance, like that of the ensemble in the choral numbers, is glorious.Full disclosure: My parents, responding to an ad in The Times in 1978, invested $1,800 in the original production, and after 10 or 15 years earned a profit of, I think, $80. But even putting that windfall aside, I have never not loved “Sweeney.” In a pie shop or a foundry, I am always transported, largely by the music, to a place where grief twists people into nightmares, and others find ways to monetize that.I hope the current producers likewise find ways to monetize Kail’s production, because what is Broadway for if not a “Sweeney” that, however rare, is this well-done?Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet StreetAt the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Manhattan; sweeneytoddbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More