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- Volume 13, Issue 2, 2019
Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 13, Issue 2, 2019
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Climb High: Sondheim at the gateway to his career
More LessSondheim has long identified his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, as one of the most influential figures in his life, both personally and creatively. In one interview, he called Hammerstein ‘a surrogate father’ and disclosed that ‘[h]e taught me how to structure a song, what a character was, what a scene was; he taught me how to tell a story, how not to tell a story, how to make stage directions practical’. The vehicle for this training was a four-part project: Hammerstein challenged the young Sondheim to write four musicals with specific criteria. The first three of these were abandoned before completion but Sondheim wrote a full script, music and lyrics for Climb High, working on the project from 1950 to 1953 with the obvious hope of having Hammerstein produce it on the stage (a frustrated ambition). Yet very little has been written about the work and Sondheim himself has been at pains to downplay its importance in his overall output. In this article, I exploit archival documents from Sondheim’s papers at Madison, Wisconsin to shed new light on the process of writing the piece, as well as its many anticipations of Sondheim’s mature work. In this way, I will place Climb High in the context of Sondheim’s creative development: a flawed but fascinating document of a writer at the gateway to his professional career.
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Whose turn is it? Where Gypsy’s finale came from, and where it went
More LessPreviously untapped primary sources and recent interviews with key members of Gypsy’s creative team allow for a more nuanced understanding of the creation and long-lasting impact of the show’s finale, ‘Rose’s Turn’. In 2010, when Stephen Sondheim described the number’s creation as ‘the high point of my theatrical life’, he signalled an unusually central role for the credited lyricist, but sources also point to a complex and intensive collaboration among many creators across a year leading up to the show’s opening. Moreover, manuscript sources and video-recorded performances show how book writer Arthur Laurents continued to adjust the number’s staging and surrounding dialogue in subsequent productions that he directed. Meanwhile, grasping Sondheim’s role helps to throw into relief how he himself applied the lessons of ‘Rose’s Turn’ to the denouements of his later shows where major characters discover self-knowledge, rather than romantic confirmation, in the finale. From this perspective, ‘Rose’s Turn’ may be construed as offering a paradigm shift that resonated on Broadway for at least five decades.
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The last word: Rewriting musical theatre history with Sondheim
More LessDecades before he emerged as Broadway’s éminence grise, Sondheim, who is ‘nothing if not critical’, offered penetrating but occasionally self-serving self-criticism of his own work, in particular the West Side Story lyrics. With the publication of Finishing the Hat in 2010, the first volume of his collected lyrics, Sondheim has refined and consolidated his unsystematic criticisms directed against many of his illustrious predecessors into a formidable collection of diatribes from which few reputations, with the exception of Sondheim’s, come away unscathed. In the Hammerstein sidebar of Finishing the Hat, readers learn details that support what Sondheim meant when he famously remarked in a 1973 Newsweek article that his mentor and de facto father was a lyricist of ‘limited talent’, partly offset by an ‘infinite soul’. In a manner not unlike Igor Stravinsky’s largely successful effort to deprive his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov of influence and stature, Sondheim has buried his spiritual father under a ‘bright canary yellow’ sky. For 50 years, he has also rarely lost an opportunity to demonize his grumpy metaphoric Uncle Dick (Richard Rodgers) as ‘a man of infinite talent – and limited soul’. After begrudgingly agreeing to write the lyrics to Rodgers’s music on Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965), Sondheim’s unwavering negative assessment of this show’s artistic merits, as well as the dispiriting collaborative experience of creating it, has succeeded, despite growing dissent, in seriously damaging the critical reputation of this worthy, if imperfect, musical. Clearly Rodgers, the composer of Carousel, the only musical Sondheim granted a place on the same playing field as Porgy and Bess, remained a source of creative anxiety for Sondheim. The article will argue that Sondheim’s personal and artistic animosity has not only led to a potential misrepresentation of Rodgers’s indispensable contributions to the field but to a rewriting of Broadway reception history that bears closer examination and challenge.
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‘Give me time’: Sondheim, a clever maid and ‘The Miller’s Son’
More LessSondheim claimed that ‘The Miller’s Son’ ‘sums up’ A Little Night Music. It occupies the 11 o’clock slot, yet it seems to have no plot function. It is sung by a secondary character, the flirtatious maid Petra, less to herself than directly to the audience. Normally such an ‘I am/I want’ song would introduce a character, but it is Petra’s valedictory and her only solo number. It contains one of just two vocal passages in the show set in duple metre and the only number begging to be ‘belted’. To save the song from being cut in Boston, Sondheim insisted that the role be recast. Yet he has said little about the number. Although Sondheim made the maid the mistress of his show by empowering her to voice its theme, might not its poetic complexity, rhetorical cleverness and spiralling trajectory recommend it as one of his brilliant but ‘wrong’ songs?
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Dramaturgical problems: Rethinking the history of Merrily We Roll Along (1981)
More LessThe musical Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sondheim’s sixth consecutive collaboration with director Hal Prince, was revised extensively during a month of poorly received preview performances but still closed after just two weeks of mixed reviews and poor sales. Believing in the show’s promise, over the next eleven years Sondheim and co-author George Furth rewrote it repeatedly, making Merrily possibly the most revised work in Sondheim’s Broadway canon. Correspondence and successive drafts of the script in collections at the New York Public Library document this process and include intriguing ideas such as several possible endings for what is now the first scene, a fraught party. The article will discuss these documents as well as Sondheim’s published version of the lyrics with commentary in 2010, and two differing stagings in 2012 of the prologue and party scene. Another central area of exploration concerns how directors of revivals such as James Lapine (in 1985 and 2012), Paul Kerryson (in 1992), Michael Grandage (in 2000) and Maria Friedman (in 2012) helped reshape the staging, and, to a limited extent, the words and music. The complexities of this collaborative revision process challenge Sondheim’s assertion in 2010 that the script was finalized by 1992.
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- Interview
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A conversation with John Doyle about the musicals of Stephen Sondheim
Authors: Stacy Wolf and John DoyleOn 13 March 2017, in the Matthews Acting Studio at 185 Nassau St at Princeton University, John Doyle, who teaches at Princeton, did a public interview with professor of theatre Stacy Wolf about his work on Sondheim’s musicals. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.1 In the interview, Doyle talks about how he developed the technique of actor–musicianship and the directing process for several of Sondheim’s musicals. Doyle was among the first directors to reinvent Sondheim’s musicals.
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- Review-Article
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Sondheim scholarship: An overview
More LessThe article outlines critical approaches to the work of Sondheim and his collaborators since John Lahr’s sceptical journalistic article in 1979. The article underlines how the pioneering scholarly work of Joanne Gordon (Art Isn’t Easy, 1990) and Stephen Banfield (Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 1993) established the reputation of Sondheim’s major stage musicals as modern classics. Gordon’s hermeneutic analysis of his books and lyrics between 1962 and 1987 introduced the notion of Sondheim as an auteur, while Banfield’s masterly scrutiny of Sondheim’s compositional process illustrated his skill as a ‘dramatist in song’, providing a definitive guide to comprehending Sondheim’s music as a key factor in the affect of the stage musicals. A consideration of three edited collections on Sondheim’s work leads to a discussion of recent scholarly books, including McLaughlin’s Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical (2016), which focuses on postmodern approaches to representation in each of the musicals up to 2008.
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- Performance Reviews
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 18 (2024)
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Volume 17 (2023)
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Volume 16 (2022)
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Volume 15 (2021)
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Volume 14 (2020)
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Volume 13 (2019)
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Volume 12 (2018)
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Volume 11 (2017)
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Volume 10 (2016)
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Volume 9 (2015)
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Volume 8 (2014)
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Volume 7 (2013)
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Volume 6 (2012)
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Volume 5 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 4 (2010)
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Volume 3 (2009)
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Volume 2 (2008)
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Volume 1 (2006 - 2007)
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