Sondheim
Into the Woods, Opera North, West Yorkshire PlayhouseThursday, 09 June 2016
Opera North’s ongoing Ring isn’t taking up much of the chorus’s time, which presumably is one of the reasons that many of its members have decamped half a mile east to collaborate with the West Yorkshire Playhouse in an eye-popping new staging of... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Beethoven, Mahler, SondheimSaturday, 14 November 2015
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 8, 21 and 32 Boris Giltburg (Naxos)These three piano sonatas neatly sum up Beethoven’s early, middle and late style. Each one is in the key of C, and they’re dispatched with some intelligence by the young Israeli pianist... Read more... |
Sweeney Todd, Welsh National OperaFriday, 09 October 2015
If nothing else, Stephen Sondheim’s best-known work will put you off pies; it will put you off barbers; and it may in the end put you off Sondheim. Popular though it seems to be with planners and programmers, it’s sluggish and heavy going as drama... Read more... |
You Won't Succeed On Broadway If You Don't Have Any Jews, St James TheatreFriday, 28 August 2015
Well, here’s an oddity. You Won’t Succeed... is too fragmented for musical theatre, too bombastic for cabaret, and about as profound as a first-draft Wikipedia page. Channelling the self-referential levity of the Monty Python show from which it... Read more... |
Follies, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 29 April 2015
God love Christine Baranski: Eight years after the Tony and Emmy-winning actress played the supporting role of Carlotta Campion in a semi-staged 2007 production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies in New York, along came the leggy, eternally lithe... Read more... |
Gypsy, Savoy TheatreThursday, 16 April 2015
Vaudeville is alive and well in the silvered Lilliputian cave which might have been made for it (not that Victorian Savoyards could have had any inkling). If you find yourself, like last night’s showbiz audience, beguiled to cheering point by the... Read more... |
Sweeney Todd, London ColiseumWednesday, 01 April 2015
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere of Sondheim's "musical thriller": Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras, two pianos or a handful... Read more... |
Sweeney Todd, Harrington's Pie and Mash Shop, Shaftesbury AvenueMonday, 23 March 2015
Stephen Sondheim's ever-elastic masterpiece is downsized to largely dazzling effect in its latest iteration, which has been transferred intact to a Shaftesbury Avenue pop-up after premiering last autumn within the surrounds of an actual pie-and-mash... Read more... |
Into the WoodsFriday, 09 January 2015
Woods and forests were given a fresh impetus as a psychic terrain for the cinema by Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the other sylvan spaces so ethereally or threateningly rendered in The Lord of the Rings films and, to a lesser extent, by the Mirkwood of... Read more... |
Gypsy, Chichester Festival TheatreSunday, 19 October 2014
There’s a moment of stunned silence in Imelda Staunton’s storming Mama Rose at the Chichester Festival Theatre, a long, long, moment where neither speaking nor singing she conclusively demonstrates what a difference a great actress makes in this... Read more... |
Forbidden Broadway, Vaudeville TheatreTuesday, 16 September 2014
“It takes a star to parody one,” wrote theartsdesk’s Edward Seckerson, nailing the essence of this immortal spoof-fest’s last incarnation at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Star quality was assured given the presence of Damian Humbley, peerless in... Read more... |
Putting It Together, St James TheatreThursday, 16 January 2014
“God,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, “is in the details.” Of course, he didn’t actually coin the phrase but throughout his published collections of lyrics he cites it as one of his three guiding principles. But to witness detail you need to be up close.... Read more... |
