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The vast majority of Broadway ballads springs from boy-meets-girl, boy-loves-girl romance. But you know that Stephen Sondheim; he’s always looking for ways to expand musical theater horizons. So while the new anthology, Send in the Clowns: The Ballads of Stephen Sondheim – now available for digital downloads — does offer odes to love, it shows […]

In “Comedy Tonight,” one of Broadway’s best opening numbers (for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962), Stephen Sondheim wrote “Weighty affairs will just have to wait” – a nice example of his deft wordplay. But this week, we’re talking about an eighty affair that just cannot wait. We must […]

I’ve often seen it happen, soon after Stephen Sondheim has taken the stage and is interviewed by a moderator. Eventually the moderator opens the floor to questions, and inevitably, someone asks, “Mr. Sondheim, of all your shows, what’s your favorite?” Just as inevitably, Sondheim answers, “I don’t have a favorite, but I have a least […]

You may recall that last week I listed 25 of the best songs that cast albums offer that soundtracks do not – because, more often than not, the film versions dropped these musical gems. Although there are well more than a hundred that fit that category, I whittled my personal favorites list down to 50 […]

So the film version of Nine didn’t do so well, did it? For many of us, the biggest problem was that so much of the score was cut. “Only with You, “The Grand Canal,” “Simple,” “Not since Chaplin,” “The Bells of St. Sebastian,” “Be on Your Own,” “The Germans at the Spa,” “Getting Tall” and […]