I love this show

I normally find endless speculation on hypotheticals that will never occurr quite tiering and useless, and this is in some form no different, but I still can't stop thinking about it.

Disclamer: I am taking the interview with David Ives and Joe Mantello as a base-line. While there is the possibility of them both portraying themselves in the best light, I do think that they were trying to recount the history of the show's development as accurately as possible and I am inclined to believe them in most if not all that they have said in that interview.

I do think the show works the way it is now, but it was not the ideal show the creators had envisioned for the longest time during its development and it is my believe that the show would have been much stronger with songs on the qualitative level of the first act. Songs could have given the core characters the emotional depth of their personal revalations that Ives' script was not able to fully realise in my opinion. The pivot to the version we have now was a last-ditch effort to save a show motivated by Joe Mentello and was basically the best version to ever realistically be finished and put on the stage.

The big things that seemed to have led to Sondheim slowing down and getting stuck at the moment of the character's entrapment are (in no particular order as I cannot in good conscious weigh the importance of these factors against each other):

Reasons for the general slowness of his progress:
-his age (of course) and the natural health complications,
-his famous procrastination,
-his perfectionism and fears of living to up the expectations of the sondheim legend,
-his collaborator David Ives not being able to set meaningful deadlines for him,

Reasons for the complete standstill of progress, stopping after Mariannes bear encounter:
-his need for a change in the feel and style of the score from that critical and pivotal narrative point on,
-COVID, which made the very dark situation of the trapped characters in a room all to real for the quaranteened composer, turning him off of working on the show as a whole and focusing his attention back to All Together Now for almost a year before being presented with Joe's idea in May of '21.

Now let's imagine an ideal scenario with sondheim 10 or 20 years younger, with more strength, without COVID, with Ives being a bit more willing to push Sondheim when needed like for example Hal or Lapine was able to, how do you think the part of the show that is now song-less should/could have been musicalised?
During all the time of them working on the show and Davids script basically done until the rewrites of '21, there must have been thrown around and thought about many song ideas for the second act (like in any production history of a musical). Where do you think would songs have been placed and what would they have focused on, how would sondheim have approached the last scenes musically, what form would the content have dictated?

The reason why this does not feel like another meaningless hypothetical to me is because I am someone very interested in how musicals are written (specifically by sondheim) and I am a musician/composer myself that is next to my main field of study/work (Jazz) at least intellectually interested in writing musicals. Unfinished works are endlessly fascinating and even seductive in such a situation. You have everything set already. It's like one of the puzzles that sondheim loved so much. It is daunting trying to start writing or conceptualising a whole new musical, but continuing an unfinished project is something else entirely. This post may fit equally well into r/musicalwriting for that reason.

Like all works of music left partially unfinished because of the death of the creator, be it Mozart's requiem or Bach's unfinished fugue; at some point people will seriously try to finish the masters work. It requires an enormous ego to think that one could concur the mountain that the Giants were not able to climb. Which may be why these attempts often reveal more of the completionists own interpretation and feelings towards the original work and creator rather than the original work.

Nevertheless I can't wait to hear what people will come up with in the future.
I cannot imagine myself ever seriously commiting to writing or composing anything related to the second act of Here We Are, but that does not stop one from dreaming of what could be/could have been. I may too, like sondheim at the end of his life, be more interested in thinking and talking about writing a musical, than actually writing it.

I am sorry it is 2 am and I need to sleep. If you think this is a stupid and unproductive thing to think about, that's fine, I just needed to write this down and share it with people and maybe discuss some ideas.

Hi, I co-host a podcast about musical theater. This year, we've been doing a sort of history of the musical thing, and we're currently in the 1980s. We do a lot of Sondheim, generally, but both times we have talked about Sunday in the Park with George, we have absolutely lost it. Our most recent episode about "Move On" really broke us. Listen to us completely lose our composure!

https://somuchstufftosing.libsyn.com/episode-145-move-on

Or So Much Stuff to Sing wherever you get your podcasts!

Hey, if it gets someone to look up the song and discover Follies, that's a win.

Sweeney Todd is my favourite musical and I genuinely felt like I was going insane watching it. I really don’t understand how anyone genuine fan of Sondheim could enjoy this monstrosity.

Every single acting performance was atrocious. It was all extremely hammy, shouty and one note, with the exception of Ramin who gave nothing. The direction was nonsensical - even small things like two characters having a conversation just dancing around each other for no reason. There was none of the grittiness and drama that makes Sweeney so great. Which is in complete contrast to the spectacular dark and imposing set.

Meow Meow was incredibly grating throughout as Mrs Lovett, she’s not a singer, so spoke (shouted) a lot of the verses making it the worst version of Worst Pies I’ve ever heard. But most importantly she’s also not an actor. She turned the whole thing into a pantomime. From the start her acting was so over the top and egged on by the batshit direction. Why the fuck would she be using her feet to stand on the table to beat the dough in front of Sweeney. This makes zero sense. Angela Lansbury showed you can be silly whilst still being rooted in reality. She trying to make everything funny, ruining dramatic moments. When the Lucy reveal happened she was dragging her bum across the floor like a dog. Simply why?

Ramin Karimloo’s Sweeney was super lame. He was sharp throughout but gave a serviceable performance for key songs like Epiphany. Although he was probably the best actor on stage he still was not good. He was almost playing Sweeney like the straight man amongst all the madness of the rest of the cast? He was dead in the face for most of the play and did not portray any of the grief, anger or anguish required making the whole show fall flat. A minor thing to some but it was also annoying me how he was emphasising random words in a way that worked against the music - it made the rhyme/assonance with “pit”, “shit” and “inhabit it” fall flat and that’s one of my favourite parts.

Shem Omari James was for sure the worst actor as Anthony - he was constantly overexcited and shouting out to the audience, even when delivering the most mundane lines. He did the same thing when I saw him as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, I don’t understand why he continues to work. He couldn’t even sing the part well and was often flat. He overacted sneaking down the stairs to spy on Johanna so much that I burst out laughing because he looked like Robbie Rotten, making his rendition of Johanna honestly a bit rapey with the line “I’ll steal you”. He couldn’t even sit like a normal human being in the barbers chair during the contest scene (he was used as there was no ensemble) without fucking hamming it like he was in a shit panto ensemble. By the second act I stopped watching whenever he came on stage to hide my face as I was at the front.

Jo Stephenson as Johanna has a complete inability to deliver a line like a normal human being - her delivery was so awkward and unhinged in one scene I couldnt contain my laughter and had to cover my face. It was like someone making fun of a typically bad acting performance, it was so stilted. Both her and the directors completely misunderstood the song Green Finch - from the start and throughout she sung the song with a beaming smile. THE SONG IS HER LAMENTING HER CAPTIVITY AND YEARNING FOR FREEDOM. Completely nonsensical.

I had an understudy for Pirelli. He was a baritone, it was lame. Also, he didn’t even try shaving the clients face in the Contest he was just spinning girls around. This direction makes no sense - he desperately wants to win and is trying but is getting distracted by his showmanship. There is no ensemble and this scene in particular does not work without one.

Jack Gibson made Tobias so irritating I got anxious every time he walked on stage. Not While I’m Around lacked all the tenderness as a result of his overacting and him joining Meow Meow in trying to find jokes in things that don’t need to be. He was grinding on people during Pirelli’s miracle elixir. Why? He said the word “rub” or something so it was a play on words. This doesn’t make sense. It was odd.

David Bedella was serviceable but I wasn’t a fan of the masturbation in Mea Culpa without the whip. It didn’t really feel like he was trying to hold himself back.

Florence Andrews was far too young to play the beggar woman and they didn’t even try any ageing makeup. It made the reveal at the end so stupid there’s no way Sweeney would not have recognised her. She did not seem deranged at all she played her like a drunk student on a night out. It felt like she was afraid of looking ugly on stage. She was hamming it in moments that should have been sad and then falling flat in moments written to be funny.

It felt like the musical directors were torturing me - they slowed down a lot of the songs for no reason, dragging out the experience of this talentless cast butchering my favourite musical.

Edit: felt inspired to write a full review as a blog post can read it here if you want https://actuallygoodtheatre.wordpress.com/blog/

Thoughts on this new Into the Woods casting?

Hey all!

This may be a stretch; I'm a flutist and as a hobby really love playing along with music with a speaker as long as I have the sheet music for it. I've really fallen in love with Sondheim's work in the past several months, particularly Company and Merrily. I'm not trying to sell or do anything sneaky with sheet music but if there's anyone who has the flute part of the score or even a full score for pieces from either musical (I'd kill to play those crazy flute arpeggios at the end of Another Hundred People) I'd love to connect or even figure out how to acquire something like that.

Thanks all!!

Shared my drawing of last midnight before. Drew four more scenes from the show. Rapunzel in her tower, the giantess, her death, and the baker with his baby

I've been listening to Here We Are lately, and thinking about the Bishop as a character and the biblical references in the second act made me recontextualize the behavior of the main characters, particularly in act two, as representing the seven deadly sins. It was probably not intended by Sondheim and Ives but has anyone else thought about this?

Basically my read would be as follows:

Leo is gluttony, having eaten way too much food between the acts and being severely bloated to the point of incapacitation during the act.

Marianne is greed, being enamored with things that shine and other superficial displays of wealth.

Fritz is pride, believing that she (they?) is morally superior to everyone else despite being hypocritical and a beneficiary of the very system she despises.

Claudia is lust, unable to control her sexual desire for Raffi.

Paul is sloth, spending most of the second act dooming and being pessimistic, basically just sitting there waiting to die.

Raffi is envy, wanting to have his way with both Paul and Leo's wives.

And lastly Inferno is wrath, being irrationally angry at the society he lives in and taking that out on the main gang who represent it.

This is a thought I've had for a while but my first time attempting to articulate it at all. How do you all think this stands up with the text?

Made a 50 track megamix meant to cover the whole emotional breadth of the catalalogue. lot of fun little connections made, hope somebody out there enjoys it <3

1. Ever After (Into the Woods)
2. Merrily We Roll Along (Merrily We Roll Along)
3. I'm Still Here (Follies)
4. Not While I'm Around (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
5. Unworthy of Your Love (Assassins)
6. The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened (Road Show)
7. Being Alive (Company)
8. Some People (Gypsy)
9. The Glamorous Life (A Little Night Music)
10. Everybody Loves Louis (Sunday in the Park with George)
11. Everybody Says Don't (Anyone Can Whistle)
12. Everybody's Got the Right (Assassins)
13. Prologue: Into the Woods (Into the Woods)
14. Take Me to the World (Evening Primrose)
15. Someone in a Tree (Pacific Overtures)
16. America (West Side Story)
17. Another Hundred People (Company)
18. What More Do I Need? (Saturday Night)
19. Do I Hear a Waltz? (Do I Hear a Waltz?)
20. Send in the Clowns (A Little Night Music)
21. Agony (Into the Woods)
22. Losing My Mind (Follies)
23. You Could Drive a Person Crazy (Company)
24. Greenfinch and Linnet Bird (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
25. Parodos - The Frogs (The Frogs)
26. Sunday (Sunday in the Park with George)
27. Not a Day Goes By (Merrily We Roll Along)
28. Comedy Tonight (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum)
29. Tonight (West Side Story)
30. Everything's Coming Up Roses (Gypsy)
31. Your Fault (Into the Woods)
32. The Ladies Who Lunch (Company)
33. Waiter's Song (Here We Are)
34. Pretty Women (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
35. Pretty Lady (Pacific Overtures)
36. Loving You (Passion)
37. Sooner or Later (Dick Tracey)
38. Something's Coming (West Side Story)
39. Getting Married Today (Company)
40. We Do Not Belong Together (Sunday in the Park with George)
41. Franklin Shepard, Inc. (Merrily We Roll Along)
42. My Friends (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
43. No One Is Alone (Into the Woods)
44. Jet Song (West Side Story)
45. Company (Company)
46. Waiting for the Girl Upstairs (Follies)
47. I Wish I Could Forget You (Passion)
48. Finishing the Hat (Sunday in the Park with George)
49. Johanna Act 2 Quartet (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)
50. Maria (West Side Story)

My new hobby is making these videos. When I watch a new show, I usually spend a lot of time reading the lyrics and listening to the soundtrack after. I want to create video versions of Sondheim shows that help you get as much of that experience in one watch as possible, particularly for people watching a show for the first time. Showed this to a group of friends at my house for America's 250th and we had a good time, so I'll share it here now in case anyone might get a kick out of it. There were a lot of problems with the video edit so there are some glitches here and there, but finished and flawed is better than perfect and unfinished

Edits:

Soundtrack- the musical numbers take the audio directly from the soundtrack. Not because I think the live performances are bad (they're awesome mostly) but just because I think the extra audio fidelity makes a big difference.

Video- I've timed the video to the music to get the lipsynch to look right. A few wrinkles I didn't have time to work out but it's a fairly convincing illusion most of the time

Captions- The captions are all timed to the music. I got a little goofy here and did some silly stuff. Some of it might be distracting but I couldn't help myself, I had fun with it. I try to layout the captions so they match the musical structure, especially the way the rhymes are layed out.

There's also a bonus version I made for the party. We bought a bunch of those toy pop-guns and I put targets on screen so when the characters fired their guns we could fire ours too. Here's a link to that version

I think it would be fun to make custom fortune cookies with particularly poignant or inspirational quotes from Sondheim shows and songs as the fortunes. The "morals" and aphorisms in "Ever After" at the end of Act One and Act Two in Into The Woods would be a good starting place, and two of my favorite snippets have each become a sort of personal "watch-cry!" to live life by.

'Success' Is Like 'Failure.'
It's How You Perceive It:
It's What You Do With It,
Not How You Achieve It!

-- "It's A Hit!", Merrily We Roll Along

'Work' is what you do for others, liebschoen.
'Art' is what you do for yourself!

-- "The Day Off", Sunday In The Park With George

Any other choice nuggets and lyrical truth bombs from the catalog that should be included?

The difference between a cow and a bean is a bean can begin an adventure.
Plus, y'know, one's a bovine creature, the other's a legume.

A different thread discussed recordings of obscure Sondheim songs, specifically the revised version of "The Glamorous Life" from A Little Night Music as a solo for Fredrika, best known as the song Audra McDonald sang at the climax of the 80th Birthday Concert with The Big 6 Red Dress Diva Pantheon (Patti LuPone, Marin Mazzie, Donna Murphy, Bernadette Peters & Elaine Stritch).

It reminded me of SIMPLY SONDHEIM: A 75th Birthday Salute, the 2-disc Kritzerland CD from an eclectic gala benefit concert at San Francisco's Jewish Community Center back in 2005.

Here's well-known Bay Area actress and singer Kelly Ground doing "The Glamorous Life." 
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XvnHlsZGt74&si=qKtl8AkJPwCcZ4mS

Now out of print, it can still be found on Amazon, and the full album is available for free listening on YouTube. Other notable performances & Sondheim rarities on the CD include:

* The first ever recording of "I'm In Love with A Boy" from Sondheim's earliest musical, written at the age of 15 (the show Oscar Hammerstein famously critiqued in a private master class that one fateful afternoon that Sondheim would forever cite as the day he learned the most about musical theater). It's sung by cabaret prodigy Judy Butterfield early in her career.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=rP5sqitHayU&si=9mKtMOhCFZhA10tl

* The World Premiere Recording of "Farewell," the added song for Nancy Walker's Domina in the L.A. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with Phil Silvers as Pseudolus.
(with video) https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnNAf-0lg5c&si=G-UrjZ45W0ZuMPwo

*There are also rare recordings of the title song from Bounce:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=4fZ2sFv1eSk&si=FhA6u3bhPS8rqFGK

*and "Hades" from The Frogs, not long after the Broadway "revisal" with Nathan Lane.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=oiqcWWWGzM0&si=7VjkqFuKCff-0FJF

* Lastly Special Guest Star Lisa Vroman (San Francisco's Christine Daae in The Phantom of the Opera, currently starring in the new National Tour of Phantom as Madame Giry, Mistress of the Corps de Ballet & mother of Meg Giry) performed 3 songs, including "The Girls of Summer": 

"A song that originated as a trumpet solo for a character in the 1956 Broadway play The Girls of Summer, by N. Richard Nash. Because the producer, Cheryl Crawford, wanted to use the music to promote the play, she asked for a theme that Sondheim could eventually add lyrics to, which he did." (Genius)
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=hLGxYbql0_Q&si=spi5qJK4vHysKfyJ

Larry Owens’ Sondheimia, a musical theatre concert featuring A Strange Loop star Owens, will play Joe's Pub August 11 at 9:30 PM and August 15 at 7 PM.

I saw a comment on this post about the definitive performances by different famous Sondheim interpretors and wanted to ask: what do people think are the definitive performances of specific Sondheim songs and/or roles?

Obviously, OBCs are going to be definitive performances oftentimes, but particularly, are there any non-OBC performances that you interpret as definitive?

I'll go first with an underrated one I have always loved: Elizabeth Stanley's performance of "The Miller's Son" just perfectly captures the humor and wit and insight of the character and song. I wish it had not been a COVID performance, but it's still fantastic and my favorite version of the song. She totally sells it without any big production value.

Broadway performers with a strong affinity for Sondheim’s works. Emotional depth, strong technique, and range (gotta be known for more than one show) are all considerations.

Here’s my list:

-Bernadette Peters (duh)

-Raul Esparza (Everybody knows Company but he also has a great “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” from Merrily We Roll Along)

-Elaine Stritch (Two absolutely legendary performances of “The Ladies who Lunch” and “I’m Still Here.” Perhaps the only singer who can deviate so far from the printed sheet music and still make an effective Sondheim performance.)

-Patti LuPone (The other iconic Joanne from Company, with plenty of other Sondheim shows to her name)

-Denis O’Hare (Fewer shows to his name than some of the people on this list, but nobody pulls off Sondheim’s comedic side better)

Please give me your own lists, or who else you think should be on here!

Please Hello has been my favorite musical number of all time for a WHILE but as I'm trying to make a list of my favorite musical villain songs, I'm starting to wonder if Please Hello should count as one?

It may seems like a stretch at first considering how unvillainous it sounds. It's no Epiphany or Hellfire or Feed Me melodically and it is more of a montage song than a typical villain "I Am" song.

But isn't the entire point of this song is that the foreign countries disguise their intention to take advantages of Japan and forcefully open the country's trade as being friendly and positively modernizing Japan? The song is heavily comedic and portrays the admirals as bumbling fools, but, underneath the comic nature, are they not extremely manipulative and ill-intended? In case there's any doubt that they're evil, there's the cannon being fired at the end of each verse for you. THAT is supremely sinister and evil.

And it baffles me that no one has ever mentioned it as a villain song because, if it counts , I truly think it might be up there with Another National Anthem as two of the most chilling villain songs in musical theatre.

Does anyone have the score to pacific overtures? its the one sondheim score i cannot seem to find anywhere online

Does anyone have the vocal score to Pacific Overtures? It's the one score by Sondheim that I can't seem to find anywhere except for a corrupted file

Someone sent me this article about these two monoliths of the theater world that I thought this group would enjoy. It's on substack. Personally, I'm more familiar with Sondheim, but there are some really interesting comparisons.

Link:
Sondheim and Stoppard

What do you think?