#from sondheim talking about Another Hundred People

[monsieurenjlolras]

how am I just now finding out about the Documentary Now episode Original Cast Album: Co-Op. this was made for me.

[septembersghost]

this post is for a niche audience but i've been thinking about another hundred people from company all day - a song about how people come and go constantly, traversing the same paths without crossing, or suddenly drawn together, then passing back out of your life again, this never ending cycle of arrival and departure, discovery and loss. whispers of what if, what if, what if at every road not taken. another hundred people just got off of the train...it's a city of strangers, some come to work, some to play, a city of strangers, some come to stare, some to stay, and every day, some go away...it's an ode to new york, but like everything sondheim, it's not nearly that simple, because it's also about the human condition. in the middle of the song, bobby sits in the park with kathy, and we know, somehow, that kathy could be the person, maybe should be his person, but they can never say that. they sit together on a bench, everything unsaid, not on the same page, and she says she's like the park, verdant and peaceful in the middle of the bustling city, but forever out of place. he tries to counter, she's like the park because she's lovely. she tells him - very importantly, perhaps the first moment when someone is asserting who he is on his own, not in relation to them, their friendship, what role he plays for them (because bobby is always playing a role for everyone, filling a space, being bon vivant) - that he's a good man, and has meant so much to her. and there's warmth and so much grief in it, her voicing this because he's about to become a part of her past.

"i'm getting married," she says. and sharply, in shock, he responds: "did you just suddenly fall in love?"

she never answers this. it's not the point. she defers she'll be a good wife. "i want real things." as if what bobby is isn't real, isn't possible. it's not her city. she was always passing through, waiting for the train. "there's a time to come to new york, and a time to leave. enjoy your party." it's this quietly devastating thing, walking away and leaving him there to go to a party, where he'll sparkle and amuse and distract, but not be quite real.

it's a major catalyst in the story, but doesn't get as much attention as the bigger moments - the romantic idealism he hits in marry me a little, thinking love can be weightless, without consequence (love me just enough, cry but not too often, play, but not too rough. keep a tender distance, so we'll both be free...we won't give up a thing, we'll stay who we are... passionate as hell, but always in control...how gently we'll talk, oh how softly we'll tread, all the stings, the ugly things, we'll keep unsaid, we'll build a cocoon of lobe and respect, you promise whatever you like, i'll never collect! right?). it's still not real, it's still not the realization he needs to come to, but it's his first imagining of what that might represent.

and then joanne offers him sympathy, and then joanne offers him an affair, and it would be so easy, despite how terrible it would be for them, for everyone they know. she gives him the simplicity, the attention. she says, "i'll take care of you." and bobby says, "but who will i take care of?" it's so achingly clear, when it hits him. when that door comes unstuck.

and it's only that which gets him to being alive. something that isn't simple or easy, but real, even though it means sacrifice and vulnerability and potential pain. someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep. someone to make you aware of being alive. make me confused, mock me with praise, let me be used, vary my days.

it's such a beautiful slow burn awakening and maturity, all these subtle transformations and realizations that make bobby come to this place where he can step forward to desire something of his own. where he can risk his hand. and it doesn't really start for him until someone else leaves. until the magic of the party is faded, and it's just him alone, blowing the candles out, and deciding to let his guard down.

we don't know what he'll find, who he'll love, what his wanting even looks like. that's a journey he takes without the audience. because he has to do that on his own. the point isn't knowing, the point is that he's finally brave enough to try. every day, some go away, but some people stay. make a wish. want something.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Paul Higgs: Baby Daze

Tomorrow I will return you to your regularly scheduled whump programming. Today... this is what wanted to be written.

CW: Teen pregnancy, some crass language surrounding said pregnancy, brief gun reference, some organized crime references

Approximately eighteen years before Tristan Higgs became another casualty of WRU…

-

"Well, look who’s here! Billy Higgs’s boy, come to see us after school, then?" Sean Malley claps him on the back and Paul nearly stumbles forward, just barely catching himself as he crosses the threshold from the sun-warmed walkway with straggly weeds growing stubbornly up through the cracks into the chilly shadowed warehouse. His sneakers scrape along the ground, but he stays standing.

He's hardly even as big as a stick compared to his dad's work buddies, all older guys with thick muscled forearms and sleeves rolled up to their elbows. He’s never had much muscle on him at all, but then his dad didn’t have much in old photos either. Maybe he’d get some as he got older, if he worked here. If they let him. "How’s things, hm? Keeping your grades up?”

Paul smiles, a slightly strained expression. The smile is automatic, it’s what everyone expects with small talk. At school he mostly doesn’t even bother with it, but with his dad’s friends… well, a smile’s polite. Right? Friendly. 

He tries to look more friendly. He needs them to say yes to what he’s about to ask for.

“They’re fine,” He says, squinting as his eyes adjust to the change in light. “Same as always, A’s and B’s.”

Mostly B’s, but they don’t need to know that.

“Good, good.” Sean slides an arm around his shoulders, jovial as always. Paul tries not to be visibly uncomfortable at the touch. Everyone is always touchy, in the world, and he’s never liked it much. Except with Ronnie, but… that’s different. “So, talk to us, Paulie. What's got Billy’s boy mucking around here at the Garden with the old-timers?" 

It's not actually much of a garden, unless you count the dandelions in the sidewalks and the bits of scraggly grass along the edges of the pavement as your rows of plants. Instead, the big warehouse stretches wider than two Walmarts, chopped off into pieces by the standalone temporary walls inside that don't reach the ceiling. 

The ‘Garden’ is a place where things happen that no one with a badge is ever supposed to see. There's shouting, good-natured calling out of sums and figures and code words Paul doesn't know, bouncing and echoing in a constant chaos of sound. Metal scrapes, an odd clicking Paul vaguely recognizes but can’t quite place until he thinks of his dad cleaning his guns now and then at night, carefully putting them back together once he’s done. 

All that noise lays heavy like a blanket over his skin. He pushes past it - he's got a reason to be here, and he won't let Ronnie down. He can’t let her down.

"I'm here to work," He says, going for strong and loud. He doesn't change expression when the men around him laugh. 

He doesn't think their laughter is meant to be unkind, and besides, he doesn't really care if it is. These men have all known him since he was born - if anyone’s going to give him what he needs, it’ll be them. "My dad told me I could pick up some shifts this weekend as a lookout, that you pay cash at the end of the shift, right away. That I could get a couple hundred if I’m good at it, maybe five if I do some running, too.”

"Oh he said that, did he?" Sean meets eyes with Cilly, whose real name Paul has never learned. He isn’t entirely sure anyone here has ever given him their real legal name. Not even Sean. "Will might've let the family know first before he sent his boy here, hm? 

"Well, it's. It's important I get cash. Um. Fast. I just spoke to him, probably he'll call you in a bit thinking he's giving you a warning." Paul tries for another smile, and hopes it's warm enough. A bit of coppery strawberry blond hair falls over his green eyes as he looks hopefully from man to man. 

He's not even eighteen yet, but really, isn't that even better for a lookout? He knows where they do their business, he knows who to watch for, and he doesn’t look like he’s one of them at all. He's paid attention, sat up at night making maps of where they work and what they do. He knows they’ve gotten into business with WRU, even, the big Facility up in Berras has been sending people down here now and then. He’s good at this sort of thing. He knows he can do this. He’s going to make a living at this one day, and everyone starts somewhere.

He just… has to convince them. These men aren't unreasonable, and they're family. Well, sort of. In a way. In that they all commit crimes with his dad. And some of them actually are real family, although he’s not always sure exactly who.

"What d'you need cash for that can't wait for your parents to come back from Florida, then?" That's Cilly, scratching idly at a red spot on his face, sipping a mug of hot tea like they're at a kitchen counter and not a fold-out table by a warehouse door. The others all have takeout coffee cups, but not Cilly. 

Paul's mom buys him new mugs on all her vacations. A gentleman among thieves, she said once. 

Nah, Paul's dad had said. Just a thief. But he puts on airs for you. 

All the more reason to show him my appreciation, Bill. 

The mug he’s drinking from now was one of Paul’s mom’s presents to him. It has a little palmetto tree on the side and Nothin’ Could Be Finer written in swirling script. It came from a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina when Paul was seven. 

He hated that trip. He never liked sand. Or the ocean. Or the noise of all the people everywhere in the street. He would have been happy with a book on the couch in the condo if they’d have let him stay there. 

"They're not in-"

"Think they're in Georgia," Conor pipes up, the oldest with hair gone nearly gray, cousins to the real boss, a man Paul has met maybe three times and knows only as Mr. Sondheim - which isn’t even a little bit his actual name. 

Conor makes Paul’s skin prickle, the way he thinks maybe a cat feels when it sees a mean-looking dog across the street. Paul's dad came home once with blood he had to wash off his hands and a shirt he had to throw out. When Paul asked, he said only, Conor's temper is going to get someone who matters killed one day. Too bad his grandson's as bad as he is. "Aren't they?"

"Nah," Sean says, shaking his head. "Florida. Definitely Florida."

"Actually," Paul starts. "They're in-"

"I thought Texas," Cilly says, almost thoughtful. He interrupts Paul thoughtlessly, and Paul’s face colors a little with embarrassment. He feels like the odd man out in a conversation meant to be about him. 

"They went to Alabama," Paul finally says, soft. Thinking no one’s listening, but they all look at him then. That's worse than when they weren't paying attention at all. He never meets any one person's eyes, instead focusing on Sean Malley's forehead, a spot that'll look like eye contact without having to be it. He's never liked having to look too many people in the eye. 

Or anyone, actually. 

"Ah, all right then. Alabama. Well. What couldn't wait for them to get back from Alabama, Paulie-Wol?"

No one's called him Paulie-Wol since he was eleven - and he hated it then. He blushes even darker. He's always been easy to make blush, and they laugh again. It's a little meaner this time. He has to not care. It’s important not to care, so they’ll let him work. 

Paul Higgs straightens his narrow shoulders and pulls a crumpled but of paper, shiny on one side, out from his back pocket. "This is why. I need money. Fast. For this."

He can't help how his voice dips, hushed, almost in awe. Sean is the first to take the little piece of paper, eyes widening in surprise at what he sees, before he hands it to Conor, who whistles through his teeth. Cilly takes it next, with a soft exhalation that's either curse or prayer. 

With this group, it could be either. Or both. Paul’s dad always says God doesn’t care overmuch about the difference.

"You're a bit young, aren't you? To need money for this?" Sean asks, and he's… concerned, Paul thinks, and he tries to square himself up even taller. “What’re you, Paulie, fifteen?”

"S-seventeen. It’s-... we didn’t plan on it, Sean, it just happened." This time when his face stays red, heat burning under the smattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose, they don't laugh. All their smiles are gone, too.

They've gone serious, these men who aren't quite blood but might as well be. They aren't laughing at or with or because of him. They look worried about him.

"Paulie," Conor says, shaking his head. "Paulie, you know better than this. Don't they teach you how to make sure this shit don't just happen? Thought we’d stop having teenagers knocking each other up once we got past the eighties.”

"They did. I had a whole health class where we-... but it doesn’t matter, it still. Happened, okay?" The absolute last thing he wants to do is talk to these old guys about Ronnie, and why, and when. If they ask him he’ll melt into the floor, and die, and just be dead right here and now.  

“So, when you say you need money… Are you looking to drive her up to Berras?”

“No, that’s not... We talked about it, but she said she already thought about it and made her decision. This isn’t… Don’t look at me like that. I like her decision. I’m happy.”

“You are?” Sean blinks, surprised.

“Yes! I'm happy, so don't tell me I fucked up, because I did. I know I did, but… but I talked to Ronnie, and we have a whole plan and I need money for my plan. And just. Look at it.”

Sean glances back down, taking the paper back, smoothing it out. Shiny on one side, it's a printed black and white image, a smeary blur of monochrome shades. Unmistakable in its center, more or less, is a gently rounded blob of white, topped with another and with other little blobs coming off its sides. Labeled along the top is Baby Botham, 14 weeks 3 days. 

“Botham?” Sean asks, head cocked to one side.

“That’s… that’s Ronnie’s last name. She, uh. She didn’t tell them… Because we’re not married.” Paul squares himself up again. “Yet. We’re not married yet.”

He tries not to think about Ronnie crying on his shoulder about how her parents and her sister had screamed at her when she told them, that no one was talking to her and they might throw her out, like this. His throat will close up if he does, in hurt for her, and in anger. 

His own parents he’d just told on the phone today, heard the long silence on the other end. Whispers that didn’t quite carry through the line. Then his mother had said, brisk and no-nonsense as always, So what does Ronnie want to do? We’ll help however we can. Will she need somewhere to stay?

“You’re not married yet,” Cilly repeats, not with derision, just with a kind of flat uncertainty. “You’re seventeen, Paulie. Little young to be talking marriage, don’t you think?”

“Well, we’re talking it, anyway,” Paul says firmly. “And don’t tell me it’s stupid. We already made our minds up.”

“Well, far be it for me to question your judgement,” Sean deadpans. “Since you’re clearly making excellent decisions already-”

“I got married at sixteen,” Conor points out. “Wife and I been married forty-two years this December, too. Sometimes it works out.”

“Different world, different times,” Cilly counters, and Conor has to nod in agreement to that. “Lots of those didn’t work out either, now did they? Besides, kids got options now we didn’t have back then.”

“Ronnie doesn’t want those other options,” Paul says, forcing his voice to be loud enough to carry, surprising all three men, who give him a new kind of look. Maybe even seeing him as nearly a man and not a kid, just for the moment. “She doesn’t. I never told her to do or not do anything, we talked about it, and she knows what she wants to do, and I agree with her. Ronnie and I want to get married, and we’ll need somewhere we can live when-... when the baby comes. So I need to start making money. And I want-... I need some fast, this weekend.”

Cilly’s expression goes cold. “Don’t tell me your folks are making you find a place that fast. I’ll take Billy to the woodshed myself if he’d be such a bastard to his own kid when things get tough-”

“He’s not,” Paul says quickly. “They’re not. Mom and Dad aren’t-... but they get it, they’re helping us. It’s not for an apartment, not yet. It’s so I can buy her some stuff.”

"This is a serious thing," Sean says, and he rubs his thumb over what Paul is pretty sure is his baby's head. The blobs are all sort of odd to look at, but… he's pretty sure that one's the head. It’s where he would put the head, if he were designing a person, anyway. "But I can see you’re quite the serious young man, now. What sort of stuff are you lookin’ to buy, Paulie?" 

Paul swallows, nervously rubbing his palms along the seems on the outside of his pants. “I… I don’t know. What do you buy someone who’s pregnant? I thought, like, baby clothes? Or a crib?”

“No, no, no.” Sean shakes his head. “You can’t just get her baby stuff, not this early. You are not starting with a crib, Paulie. You got nowhere to even put one yet.”

“Then… what do I buy?” Paul looks from man to man. “I’ve never known a pregnant person before, not anyone I cared about.”

“You were around for my wife’s last pregnancy,” Sean says, mildly offended.

Paul shrugs. 

The three older men look at each other, and then sigh nearly as one. Someone pushes out the fourth chair from the fold-up table and Paul sits, each of the other men sitting in turn. Sean picks up his phone and dials. “Hey, Don. Let everybody know we’re off-limits for the next couple hours, ‘til lunch. Yeah, Billy Higgs’s boy stopped by. He’s sniffing around for some lookout work this weekend. Find him some decent jobs for me, will you?”

Paul starts to smile, and it’s genuine this time. Sean hands him back the little picture of the blob that will become a baby, his and Ronnie’s baby, and he tries not to crumble it fully in his hands, worried his sweat will smear the ink. She’ll get another one in a few weeks, said her doctor told her it’ll look more like a person, then. Less like a weird frog. Or like a really, really bad painting.

“Thanks, I’ll owe you.” Sean hangs up the phone and grins, leaning on his elbows on the wobbly little table. The sun shines warmly through the open warehouse doors on Paul’s back. “All right. Between the three of us, we’ve got, what, ten kids?”

“Yeah, but five of those are all Cilly’s,” Conor points out. “And mine stopped bein’ kids decades ago.”

“Yeah, but babies don’t change, and they don’t need much. You need a pen and paper to write things down, Paulie?”

“Write… write what down?” 

“What you’re gonna spend your money on, for your girlfriend. You don’t just show up with baby clothes, kid, you gotta go all out. Let’s talk date, let’s talk gifts for this Ronnie, let’s talk it all out.”

“What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” Cilly says. “They all get that book, right? Isn’t that the one?”

Sean snorts, derisive. “Don’t get her that, not this early. That damn book had my wife in fucking tears telling her everything that could go wrong. We need to think of a happier book than that.”

“Well, call your wife and ask her what she’d want, then.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You should!”

“She’s liable to start planning a damn baby shower if I do. You know how Christa is about little ones.”

Cilly grins. “Think she’ll make those deviled eggs I like for the shower?”

“Cilly, for God’s sake, we found out about this five minutes ago.”

“Right, but... deviled eggs.”

Paul takes a deep breath, and sits back in his chair. “I’ll remember, whatever you say. I promise. I don’t need to write it down. Just tell me what I should get her, what I should do.”

“Right. Well, then.” Sean spreads his hands. “Let’s talk gifts.”

-

Tagging: @burtlederp , @finder-of-rings , @endless-whump , @whumpfigure , @astrobly @newandfiguringitout , @doveotions , @pretty-face-breaker , @gonna-feel-that-tomorrow @boxboysandotherwhump  , @oops-its-whump  @cubeswhump ,  @whump-tr0pes  @downriver914 @vickytokio @whumpiary @orchidscript @moose-teeth @nonsensical-whump

[thehours2002]

the thing is that marianne elliott doesn’t even seem to like the original version of company. she remembers the show being misogynistic. it was. but the kind of misogyny elliott thinks was there, wasn’t. the female characters weren’t singing or talking at length about their domestic duties and child rearing; they had some of the most thematically resonant songs in the whole show, like “another hundred people,” “(not) getting married today,” and “the ladies who lunch.” the latter two actually comment on marriage as a repressive institution. parsing out the misogyny in the show is a matter of identifying which elements comment/criticize/expose the oppressiveness of marriage for women and which elements reveal sondheim and furth’s own underlying contempt for women. for example, i would call the characterization of april (who i still love as written) demonstrative of the authors’ misogyny but call the scene in which david demeans jenny, literally calling her “dumb,” a comment on the abuse and disrespect women endure from their husbands. it’s always tricky to suss out: i easily read “the ladies who lunch” as a critique of wealthy women’s materialism laden with misogyny OR a devastating portrait of women whose intelligence and talents are squandered because their husbands demand that they not work. elliott sees NONE of that nuance. her “feminist” adaptation is only concerned with women’s pressure to marry and have children, which is an admirable focus, but really just scratches the surface compared to the interrogation of marriage as a fundamentally misogynistic institution in “getting married today” or the david/jenny scenes. true, in elliott’s version, women hold the power but, even in 2021 the institution of marriage is stacked against us and benefits men vastly more than it does women.

[fuckyeahstephensondheim]

Rick Pender knows his Sondheim from A to Z

If the word “encyclopedia” conjures for you a 26-volume compendium of information ranging from history to science and beyond, you may find the notion of a Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia perplexing. But if you have ever looked at a bookshelf full of book after book about (and occasionally by) the premiere musical theatre composer-lyricist of our era and wished all that information could be synthesized and indexed in one place, maybe the idea of a Sondheim encyclopedia will start to make a little more sense to you. It did to Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, an independent publisher that’s made encyclopedias such as this one of their calling cards, offering tomes on everyone from Marie Curie to Akira Kurasowa. Several years ago, they approached Rick Pender, longtime managing editor of the gone but never forgotten Sondheim Review and now, after years of research, writing, and pandemic-related delays, the The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia is finally hitting shelves. I sat down with Rick (via Zoom) to chat about this unique, massive project.

FYSS: I want to really focus on the new book, but we should start with your history with Sondheim and The Sondheim Review. How did you become so enmeshed in this work?

RP: As a teenager, the first LP that I bought was the soundtrack from West Side Story, and I didn't have any clue about who much of anybody was, particularly not Stephen Sondheim. But I loved the lyrics for the songs, especially “Something’s Coming” and “Gee, Officer Krupke.” These are just fabulous lyrics.

Then, of course, in the ‘70s it was hard as time went by not to have some awareness of Sondheim. I saw a wonderful production of Night Music in northeast Ohio, and I again just thought these lyrics are incredible, and I love the music from that particular show. Fast forward a little further in the late ‘80s, I was laid up with some surgery and I knew I was going to be bedridden for a week or two anyway, so I went to the public library and grabbed up a handful of CDs, and in that batch was A Collector's Sondheim, the three-disc set of stuff up through about 1985, and I must have listened to that a hundred times, I swear, because it had material on it that I didn't know anything about like Evening Primrose or Stavisky. So that really opened my eyes.

Later, my son had moved to Chicago. He's a scenic carpenter and a union stagehand. He worked at the Goodman Theatre, and I went to see a production when they were still performing in a theater space at the Art Institute of Chicago, and they had a gift shop there. And lo and behold in the rack I saw a copy of a magazine called The Sondheim Review! I thought, oh my gosh, I've got to subscribe to this! This would have been about 1996, probably, so I subscribed and enjoyed it immediately. A quarterly magazine about just about Stephen Sondheim struck me as kind of amazing.

In 1997-98 the Cincinnati Playhouse did a production of Sweeney Todd in which Pamela Myers, all grown up, played Mrs. Lovett, and so I wrote to the editor of the magazine and said, “Would you like me to review this?” That started me down a path for a couple of years of making fairly regular contributions to the magazine. Then in 2004 that editor retired, and I was asked to become the managing editor, which I did from 2004 to 2016. It went off the rails for some business reasons, but it lasted for 22 years which I think is pretty remarkable.

I tried to sustain it in an alternative form with a website called Everything Sondheim. We put stuff up online for about 18 months, and we published three print issues that look very much like The Sondheim Review, but we were not able to sustain it beyond that.

FYSS: How did the Encyclopedia project originate?

RP: The publisher asked me to write an encyclopedia about Stephen Sondheim! I envisioned that I would be sort of the general editor who coordinated a bunch of writers to put this together, but they said no, we're thinking of you as being the sole author. They had done a couple of other encyclopedias particularly of film directors, and those were all done by one person, so they sent me a contract asking me to generate 300,000 words for this book, and after I regained consciousness, I said all right, I'll give it a try.

It took me about two years – most of 2018 and ‘19 – to generate that content. I sent it off in the fall of ‘19, and then, well, the world stopped because of the pandemic. It was supposed to come out April a year ago, and they had just furloughed a bunch of their editors and everything stalled. But now it's coming out mid-April 2021.

FYSS: What was the research and writing process like?

RP: This project came about in part because the publisher initially approached another writer, Mark Horowitz, who's at the Library of Congress and who had done a Sondheim book of Sondheim on Music. Mark and I had become quite close because he wrote a number of wonderful features about different Sondheim songs for The Sondheim Review. When I heard that that he had put my name out there, I went back to him after I had agreed to do this and said, Mark, could we use some of that material that you wrote for the magazine about those songs? And he said, sure do with them whatever you wish. And I was glad he said that, because they were really long pieces, and I've reduced each of them to about 1500-2000 words, which I thought was probably about the maximum length that people would really want to read in a reference volume.

But other than that, I generated everything else myself. I relied upon plenty of material within the 22 years of back issues of The Sondheim Review. Another great resource was Sondheim's own lyric studies, the two-volume set which provides so much information about the production of shows and that sort of thing.

Of the 131 entries I wrote for this, 18 of them are lengthy pieces about each of the original productions, so again Sondheim's books were certainly useful for that, and other books like Ted Chapin's book about Follies.

I also spent some time in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress, and Mark loaned me a quite a bit of material that he had collected – not archival material but scrapbooks of clippings that he put into ring binders of stuff about Sondheim's shows.

I came back to Cincinnati with about four or five cartons of materials, and I could really dig through that stuff as I was working on these. And then I have, as I'm sure you and lots of other Sondheim fans have, a bookcase with a shelf or two of Sondheim books, and those were all things that I relied upon, too.

I actually generated a list with lots and lots of topics, probably over 200, and I knew that was going to be more than I could do. Eventually, some things were consolidated, like an actor who perhaps performed in just one Sondheim show wasn't going to get a biographical entry, but I would talk about them in the particular show that they were involved in. So, I was able to collapse some of those kinds of things. But as I said, I did end up with 131 entries in the publication, and it turned out to be 636 pages, so that's a big fat reference book.

FYSS: Who is the intended audience for a work like this? RP: The book is really intended to be a reference volume more than a coffee-table book. It does have photography in it, but it's black and white and more meant to be illustrative than to wallow in the glories of Sondheim. There is an extensive bibliography in it, and all the material is really thoroughly sourced so people can find ways to dig into more.

FYSS: Sometimes memories diverge or change over time. Did you come across any contradictions in your research, and how did you resolve them?

RP: I can't say that I can recall anything like that. I relied very heavily on Sondheim's recollections in Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat because he's got a memory like a steel trap. Once in a while I would email him with a question and get very quick response on things. I really used him as my touchstone for making sure of that kind of thing.

I also found that Secrest’s biography was very thoroughly researched, and I could rely on that. But I can't say that I found a lot of discrepancy, and some of those kinds of things were a little too much inside baseball for me to be including in the encyclopedia.

FYSS: For figures with long and broad histories, how did you decide what to include? George Abbott, for example, is the first entry in the book and he worked for nine decades! How important was writing about an individual as they relate to Sondheim vs. who they were more generally?

RP: To use George Abbott as an example, I would say that the first things that I did was to go back to the lyric studies and to the Secrest biography and just look up references to Abbott. I mean, it was George Abbott who said that he wanted more hummable songs from Sondheim, so you know that was certainly an anecdote that was worth including because, of course you know, it becomes a little bit of the lyric in Merrily We Roll Along. 

So you know, I would look for those kinds of things, but I also wanted to put Sondheim in context because Abbott was well into his career when he finally directed Forum which, since it was Sondheim's first show as a composer and a lyricist, is significant. That was very much the focus of that entry, but I wanted to lay a foundation in talking about Abbott, about all the things that he had done before that. I mean, he was sort of the Hal Prince of his era in in terms of his engagement in so many different kinds of things – writing plays, directing musicals, doctoring shows, all of that.

FYSS: Did any entries stick out to you as being the hardest to write?

I think the most complicated one to write about probably was Bounce/Road Show because it's got a complicated history, and Sondheim has so much to say about it. And because it's not a show that people know so much about, I wanted to treat it appropriately, but not as expansively as all of that background material might have suggested. So I kind of had to weave my way through that one. It also was a little tough to write about, because how do you write a synopsis of a show that has had several incarnations quite different from one another, and musical material that has changed from one to the other? With shows like that, I particularly tried to resort to the licensed versions of the shows. 

FYSS: I haven't had a chance to read the book cover-to-cover yet, but I did read the Follies and the Into the Woods entries to try to get a sense of how you covered individual shows, and both of those are shows that had significant revisions at different times. And I thought you made it very clear what they were and also where to go for a reader who wants to learn more.

RP: Let me say one other thing this is not directly on this topic, but it sort of relates, and that is that in writing an encyclopedia, I didn't want to overlay a lot of my very individual opinions about things, but with each of the show entries I tried to review the critical comments that were made about the show in its original form, perhaps with significant revivals and that sort of thing, and then to source those remarks from critics at those various points in time. And of course, my own objectivity (or lack thereof) had something to do with what I was selecting, but I thought that was a good way to represent the range of opinion without having to make it all my own opinion.

FYSS: Did you feel any responsibility with regards to canonization when you made choices about what to include or exclude? What made the First National Tour of Into the Woods more significant than the Fiasco production, for example? Why do Side by Side by Sondheim & Sondheim on Sondheim get individual entries, but Putting It Together is relegated to the omnibus entry on revues?

RP: I guess that now you are lifting the curtain on some of my own subjectivity with that question. I tried to identify things that were particularly significant. I mean with the revues for instance, several of those shows – you know, particularly Side by Side by Sondheim, the very early ones – they were the ones I think that elevated him in people’s awareness. So, I think that to me was part of what drove that. And then shows that that were early touring productions struck me as being things that maybe needed a little bit more coverage. I think the Fiasco production was a really interesting one, but with the more recent productions of shows I just felt like there's no end to it if I begin to include a lot of that sort of thing.

FYSS: I mean it's so subjective. I'm not the kind of person who clutches my pearls and screams oh my goodness, how could you not talk about this or that. But I was surprised to see in your Follies entry that the Paper Mill Playhouse album was not listed among the recordings, for example. I imagine that once this book hits shelves you're going to be bombarded with people asking about their pet favorites.

RP: Oh, I'm sure, and maybe that will be a reason to do a second edition, which I’m totally ready to do.

The Sondheim Encyclopedia hits bookstore shelves April 15. It’s available wherever you buy books, but Rick has provided a special discount code for readers of Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim to receive 30% off when you order directly from the publisher. To order, visit www.rowman.com, call 800-462-6420, and use code RLFANDF30.

Celebrate the launch of The Sondheim Encyclopedia with a free, live online event featuring Rick Pender in conversation with Broadway Nation’s David Armstrong Friday, April 16 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Eastern. More information and register here.

[andhumanslovedstories]

Recent country songs that have made me literally gay gasp as a gay woman, in order of how much they make me want to write an essay on gender and queerness

HONORARY MENTION BUT JUST BECAUSE I THINK THIS IS TECHNICALLY AMERICANA NOT COUNTRY (but genre is fake) AND THIS SONG ISN’T RECENT (2014 and I’ve been listening to it faithfully since then) BUT I ONLY RECENTLY LEARNED IT’S A COVER AND THAT’S MADE ME RECONTEXTUALIZE IT: “Murder in the City” by Brandi Carlile, a cover of The Avett Brothers where she changed the words “make sure my sister knows I loved her/make sure my mother knows the same” to “make sure my wife knows that I love her/make sure my daughter knows the same” which fucking. fucking gets me. Especially since the first time that I heard this song, I assumed it was from a man’s point of view because of that line, and then I learned that Brandi Carlile is a lesbian and I was caught up in my foolish heteronormitivity, and then I learned it was a cover and thought oh okay I guess the song is originally from a man’s pov and it’s cool she covered, and then I learned she changed those lines to make a song that already feels deeply personal to her to explicitly include her love for a woman and the family they’ve made together. And that’s just. It’s all just a lot. 

3) “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” by Miranda Lambert featuring Maren Morris, Elle King, Ashley McBryde, Tenille Townes and Caylee Hammack, because the first time it came up on my spotify, I saw the title and was like “hey dope I like this song” and then I heard the first line was still “I must have been through about a million girls” and I realized none of the words or pronouns were getting changed and I was getting the song I’ve always wanted and deserved: a high production value, high energy, big girl group tribute to being a lesbian fuckboy who Fooled Around And, oops can you believe it, Fell in Love. 

2) “If She Ever Leaves Me” by The Highwomen, sung by Brandi Carlile who is, as mentioned, lesbian, but since I’m apparently still chugging my comp het juice, I was still trying to figure out if this song--a classic “hey buddy keep walking, she’s my girl and she’s not interested” song with an interesting element of the singer being aware the relationship might not last anyway--was gonna be explicitly queer. And then there’s the line, “That's too much cologne, she likes perfume,” and I was like OH HOHOHOHOHOHOHO!!! 

This is immediately followed by the lines “I’ve loved her in secret/I’ve loved her out loud” which is also deliciously queer in this context, with this singer and that juxtaposition, but the line that really fucking got me is my favorite of the song: “If she ever leaves, it's gonna be for a woman with more time.” This is two women in a complicated relationship. This isn’t just a “keep walking, cowboy” song, it’s a song that uses that framework to suggest a whole ass “Finishing the Hat”** relationship, and that’s so interesting to me. Like a song that isn’t just explicitly about two women in love but one that conveys very quickly a rich history between the two of them. And in a genre where the line “Kiss lots of boys, kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into” was revolutionary representation.

(Fun fact, “Follow Your Arrow” was partially written by Brandy Clarke, another country lesbian! Another fun fact, so is basically every other good country song. Brandy Clark, please write a big lesbian country anthem, I know it will immediately kill me on impact.) 

To quote one youtube comment, “”lesbians how we feeling??” and to answer by quoting some others, “As a closeted baby gay in the 90s, who was into country, this song would have changed my life”, “I just teared up.  So many happy tears, as a gay woman raised on country music,  this is something that's definitely been needed.  Thank you Brandi. Thank you highwomen”, “This song means more than I can say in a youtube comment”, and “Lesbians needed this song :)”

It’s me. I’m lesbians. 

**ANOTHER HONORARY MENTION EXCEPT IT ISN’T RECENT AND IT ISN’T COUNTRY SO I GUESS THIS IS JUST A MENTION, BUT I AM INTERESTED IN THIS SONG--“Finishing the Hat” by Kelli O’Hara. A very good Sondheim joint, that’s about making art, the costs of its obsessive and exclusive nature and the incomparable pleasure of putting something into the world that wasn’t there before. It’s such a traditionally male narrative that I’m thrilled to find a wonderful female cover of it. I’m not even fussed about her changing the gender from the lover who won’t wait for the artist (except that the shift from “woman” to “one man” sounds so clunky) because there’s value turning this song into a lament of the men who won’t love artistic women. But I do also wish she’d also recorded a version that kept the original gender so it would be gay. OKAY BROADWAY TANGENT OVER, BACK TO COUNTRY. 

1) “Highwomen” by The Highwomen, ft. Yola and Sheryl Crow. I can’t even express the full body chills the first time I heard this. Like repeated, multiple chills renewed at every verse of the song. This really closely parallels my experience with “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” up there, because when I started it I was like “oh dope I know what this cover will be” and then the lyrics started and I was like “OH MY GOD I DIDN’T.” In the case of “Fooled Around” it’s because I was amazed that they kept the original words. In the case of “Highwomen” I fucking transcended because they changed them. 

So I grew up on Johnny Cash, obsessed with a couple of his albums but largely with a CD I had of his greatest hits. (Ask me how many times I listened to the shoeshine boy song. Hundreds. Johnny Cash told me to get rhythm and I got it.) And my FAVORITE was “Highwayman” from the country supergroup he was in, The Highwaymen. The concept of the song is that each of the four men sing a verse about a man from the past and how he died. It’s very good. The line “They buried me in that grey tomb that knows no sound” used to scare the shit out of me. I didn’t expect to have a song that targets so specifically my fear of being buried alive in wet concrete. 

(If you haven’t heard the song, by the way, listen to this version to properly appreciate it as a piece of music. If you have, watch the fucking music video holy shit this is a work of art oh my GOD.) 

So I was predisposed to love this cover before I even heard it. But then I heard it. And they rewrote the song to be about historical women. And it’s like. There’s layers here okay. 

Neither the Highwaymen nor the Highwomen are signing about famous people. This isn’t a Great Man tour of history, it’s about dam builders and sailors and preachers and mothers and Freedom Riders and also Johnny Cash who flies a starship across the universe, as you do. 

In the 1986 version, it’s a song about the continuity of life--the repeated idea is “I am still alive, I’m still here, I come back again and again in different forms.” The highwayman is all the men in the song. He reincarnates. The song is past, present, future. The title is singular, masculine. The same soul, expressed through multiple voices, multiple lives. 

In the 2019 version, the title is plural, feminine. Highwomen. This song is about women. Each verse asserts the same motif as the 1986 version--“I may not have survived but I am still alive”--but there is no implication of reincarnation. Each woman is her own woman. This version has a final verse that the previous versions lacks. The singers harmonize. It’s not a song where one voice replaces  another, the story of this One Man progressing through time. It ends in a chorus of women saying “We are still alive.” 

We are The Highwomen Singing stories still untold We carry the sons you can only hold We are the daughters of the silent generations You sent our hearts to die alone in foreign nations They may return to us as tiny drops of rain But we will still remain

And we'll come back again and again and again And again and again We'll come back again and again and again And again and again 

Another fun fact! The first time I heard them sing “We are the daughters of the silent generations” I died! But luckily I came back again and again and again.  

This is a song about the continuity of history. It asserts that women’s historical lives matter and that they continue to matter, long after they died. This is a song about legacy as well, the legacy of nameless women who worked to protect the ones they loved and make the world better. They don’t die by chance. They are all hunted down by political violence, by racism, by misogyny, for stepping outside their prescribed roles. But, as Yola (who btw fucking CRUSHES THE VOCALS ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????? HOLY SHIT MA’AM) sings as a murdered Freedom Rider, she’d take that ride again. And at the end of the song, she joins the chorus but does not disappear into it. Her voice rises up out of crowd. And the crowd calls itself “we”. These women are united but not subsumed into being One Woman. This is about Women. 

And then, outside the song itself, there’s the history of this song about history. It’s originally by Jimmy Webb and was covered by Glenn Campbell. This cover inspired the name of the supergroup that covered it, the group with Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and my man Johnny Cash. And it’s like holy shit! What an amazing group to collaborate! Hot damn! 

Then, it’s 2019 and here’s The Highwomen with Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires. The name is obviously riffing on The Highwaymen. Shires set out to form the group in direct response to the lack of female country artists on the radio and at festivals. And they name themselves after a country supergroup, and they put out this song, a song connected to massive names in country music, and they center all of this on women and womanhood and the right of women to be counted in history and to make history and to talk about the ways we have mistreated and marginalized women, in a group that started because one woman was like hey! we’re mistreating and marginalizing women! 

I just think this is neat! I think there’s a lot here we could unpack! But this post is 100 times longer than I was planning and work starts in a bit so uh I’m gonna go get dressed and listen to The Highwomen on repeat for the next hour, “Heaven is a Honky Tonk” is another fucking bop that improves on the original, it would be dope if they’d collab with Rhiannon Giddens, okay byyyyyyyye 

[d-criss-news]

When it was announced that The Rosie O'Donnell Show would be back for one night only with a guest list of about 15 million Broadway talents, many of us wondered, would it be a return to the glory days of her multiple Emmy-winning daytime talk show or more like her ill-fated attempt to resuscitate the primetime variety format on NBC in 2008. It turned out to borrow from both those predecessors while evolving into something completely different — a low-tech lovefest that felt like eavesdropping on a group chat among friends looking out for one another in a time of need.

It was spontaneous, messy and blighted by some of the worst audio glitches imaginable. Yet it was often affectingly intimate, and even over an endurance-testing three-and-a-half commercial-free hours, also strangely addictive. The lack of slickness seemed to carry through to the relaxed manner of the guests, and their refreshing unpretentiousness.

Conceived by actor-producer (and occasional tech-support helpmate) Erich Bergen and live-streamed on Broadway.com and the website's YouTube channel, the show was a benefit for The Actors Fund, the charitable organization founded in 1882 that supports performers and behind-the-scenes theater workers. It raised more than half-a-million dollars, O'Donnell announced at the end of the marathon, sitting in a Hamilton hoodie and offering a champagne toast in a glass emblazoned with the face of Barbra Streisand.

She conducted the entire show from behind a laptop in her New Jersey garage, its floor spattered with the paint spillage of countless craft projects. "I'm a little bit of a Broadway nerd, I admit it," said O'Donnell, establishing her dual role as host and superfan.

Part of the show's unique pleasure was seeing favorite Broadway performers chilling in their own homes, almost all of them dressed down, with little visible attention to makeup or hair, and zero concern about unflattering angles. It was a great equalizer, proving that even artists who can hold packed theaters in the palm of their hands with a song are housebound and trying to make the best of a bad situation just like the rest of us — staying close to their families, killing time, learning to cook, wondering how long this unnerving isolation will last. Or how much longer we can put off that shower.

It was kind of comforting to see Idina Menzel sitting by her microwave and confessing, "I guess I'm going a little bonkers," while lamenting a failed lasagna attempt and sharing the challenges of homeschooling her son when she's no math genius. Likewise, hearing Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker talk about watching Columbo reruns or catching up on The Crown, while SJP begged for no spoilers on the final episode of The Sopranos, which she may now get to at last. Seeing Annette Bening on her Los Angeles balcony wearing a "Make America Kind Again" baseball cap was as much a tonic as watching Neil Patrick Harris do a card trick with his adorable twins. And who doesn't want to meet Gloria and Emilio Estefan's cute rescue dogs or hear about Lin-Manuel Miranda's kids' reaction to their first exposure to Singin' in the Rain?

Then there were the musical interludes.

Where else could you catch Patti LuPone, in magnificent voice, singing the urgently upbeat 1930s standard "A Hundred Years From Today," unaccompanied while sitting by the jukebox in her basement? Or Kelli O'Hara nestled into an armchair honoring Stephen Sondheim's 90th birthday by wrapping her crystalline soprano around "Take Me to the World," a hymn to unity from Evening Primrose? Or husband and wife Audra McDonald and Will Swenson duetting on the Charlie Chaplin evergreen, "Smile," from their Westchester living room? Or Darren Criss pouring his heart into another Sondheim classic about the desire for connection, "Being Alive," from Company, accompanying himself in a lovely pop arrangement on acoustic guitar from the sofa of his Los Angeles home? And while sound problems plagued Barry Manilow's selection of hits, ending with "I Made It Through the Rain," I was tickled to see his Judy Garland Kleenex dispenser.

Many of the song choices were thoughtfully apropos of the current crisis, offering comforting reassurance of the eventual return of resilience and togetherness while people in major cities all over the country self-isolate as the infection rate of the coronavirus pandemic continues to climb. Maybe Tituss Burgess at his home keyboard singing "The Glory of Love" is exactly the kind of uplift we all need right now.

Even in the seemingly random numbers, the entire enterprise was characterized by a spirit of generosity and sharing.

Kristin Chenoweth celebrated a Starbucks romance in "Taylor the Latte Boy." Matthew Morrison goofed it up on ukulele to a mashup of "The Bare Necessities" and "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from his Disney Dreamin' album. Alan Menken whipped through a medley of his songs from The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Little Shop of Horrors, among others, at the piano. Ben Platt, also at the keyboard, did Bob Dylan's "Make You Feel My Love." And Adrienne Warren, the sensational star of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, growled out "Simply the Best" from her bathtub. That was on the third attempt during a particularly troublesome audio patch, by which time her bubbles were history.

Prompted by O'Donnell, more than one guest reminded viewers that The Actors Fund is not just about Broadway artists pulling star salaries but also stagehands, makeup artists, wigmakers and ushers who work in what is very much a gig economy. The organization provides emergency financial assistance, social services, affordable housing, healthcare and insurance counseling and addiction support.

"Everything's a one-off," said Tony-winning actor Brian Stokes Mitchell, who serves as chairman of The Actors Fund. "That's how we get by, and many people are living on the edge right now."

"We're all just one, two, maybe three paychecks away from bankruptcy," added Billy Porter, whose mother is in an Actors Fund nursing home. "In this community, our whole job description is insecurity," said Judith Light.

Porter, along with Lea Salonga and longtime activist Light recalled how Broadway was on the frontlines of another life-threatening struggle during the early days of the AIDS crisis. All of them urged viewers to stay strong and take the time to reflect on the value of solidarity.

While O'Donnell has never been shy about her opposition to Donald Trump and everything he stands for, the show was remarkably light on politics, with just the occasional dig slipping through. She opened with a little celebratory "Yay!" while admitting she had missed the president's daily coronavirus press update, and then explained that she and her guests were not there to talk Trump. When Harvey Fierstein, O'Donnell's 2005 stage husband in Fiddler on the Roof, reminded her of all the election work still to be done, she said, "Let's all just know, we deserve a leader who tells the truth." And the delays in making coronavirus testing more widely available prompted a comment that the government should have gotten busy on that back in January when the writing was already on the wall.

Mostly, however, the hastily revamped Rosie O'Donnell Show was about bringing people together at this time of anxiety and isolation, as the host reconnected with artists whom she has championed since her reign as the Queen of Nice. "Everyone in the community loves you," she told Chita Rivera in a particularly effusive greeting. "You are our queen mother!"

Many of the performers would have been decompressing after rehearsals or Sunday matinees if the Broadway shutdown hadn't happened — Criss in American Buffalo, Broderick and Parker in Plaza Suite, Warren in Tina, Lauren Patten and Elizabeth Stanley in Jagged Little Pill. Sunday would have been LuPone's opening night in the gender-flipped revival of Company. Gavin Creel, who abruptly ended his London run in Waitress to fly home and is in isolation in a cabin in upstate New York, revealed the fear that he might have contracted the virus, given that several others in the cast have fallen ill, with one of them testing positive.

The show bridged the gap separating us from artists whose work we normally experience on the other side of the footlights. Most of us will never again get to see Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber exchange greetings in song on the birthday the two composers happen to share. From those celebrated veterans to rising-star newbies, the common denominator here was everybody facing the crisis just like us, reaching out a hand of friendship, albeit from a mandatory safe distance.

[nanowrimo]

Road Trip to NaNo: Character Inspiration Is All Around You

November is coming. To get ready, we’re taking a road trip to visit Wrimos from around the world, and hear about how their regions can inspire your writing. Today, New York City Municipal Liaison Kayleigh Webb talks about how the people around us can serve as inspiration:

New York City is so incredibly special because it encompasses so much. New York is sprawling, forming five different boroughs are home to the 8.6 million New Yorkers who walk the sidewalks and ride the subways every day. Each person with their own backstory, own lives, own likes, dislikes, and everything in between. Ghosts of the past peek between gleaming skyscrapers while forest green scaffolding is a reminder that the future is just a few blueprints away. Libraries and museums give endless access to the stories of the past, and every day stories are told on the stages of Broadway theatres. 

Truman Capote, Alexander Hamilton, Edith Warton, Herman Melville, and Colson Whitehead are just a few of the many prolific writers that New York has fostered and each year, more writers are finding their craft through NaNoWriMo.

It’s the city that never sleeps, a city that never stops, and a city that taught me to write like I was running out of time. Prior to joining the New York City region of NaNoWriMo, I participated in NaNoWriMo in Mississippi, where I never successfully completed the coveted 50,000 words in the month of November. That changed the moment I sat down at my first write-in in New York. The creative spirit of the New York City region takes root deep in your bones and never lets you go.

In short: it’s a fantastic place to live if you are a writer.

Why? Because in New York City, inspiration is everywhere.

Often, I find my characters come to before the plot bunny really bites and leads me down the spiraling rabbit hole that is my plantser novel writing process. Those characters are the seeds that make the garden grow. They walk past me on the street, sit across from me on the subway. Characters are all around you, you just have to look!  Living in New York is truly a character study. 

To quote Sondheim’s musical Company:

It's a city of strangers Some come to work, some to play A city of strangers Some come to stare, some to stay And every day….. another hundred people just got off of the train. 

But then again, every day of your life is a character study! You just have to open your eyes.

Now, I’m not asking you to stare at the next person you see and try to memorize them as they are so you can transpose them on the page EXACTLY as you saw them. First and foremost, people watch respectfully. Instead, think of the way the person walks, how they speak, the subtlety of their body language, the patches on the bright green backpack of a suited businessman whose Doctor Who key chain distracts you from the novel you’re reading during a subway delay. 

Most recently, the pieces of a project I had been stuck on for months fell into place the moment a young man strode onto the subway and leaned against the subway pole. With one glance of disinterest around the train, he shifted his sunglasses over his eyes and the metaphorical light bulb above my head dinged. He didn’t care that he was blocking the railing for the rest of the train. He knew who he was and in that moment, he owned that space. Finally, I knew how my villain carried himself and the attitude in which he viewed the world. Never before was I glad I carried a notebook at all times.

So, I challenge you to go to a public place where you are most comfortable – be it a café, your daily bus route, or even the checkout line of Target. Who catches your eye? Why? What do you hear around you? Perhaps their hair curls in a way that sparks an idea for your hero or an overheard laugh instantly places you in the throne room of a fantasy novel, where an antagonist sits plotting your main character’s downfall. Build a backstory in your head for each person that captured your attention. Who are they and what do they want? How can you describe the eyes of the child peeking at you over the back of their bus seat? Take the strangers you see and smoosh them together, weaving together traits and mannerisms until you’re left with a flawed, magnificent character that breathes life into your work.

Make them real. Your characters are all around you – you just have to look.

Kayleigh Webb returns to New York City as NaNoWriMo ML for the third time this year. She writes across a variety of genres but tends to focus on Southern Gothic contemporary fantasy projects. Online, you can find her on Twitter @thekayleighwebb and read her work here. When not writing, she works in genre publicity at a Big 5 publishing house, drowns herself in musical theatre history, and spends entirely too much time playing the Sims 4. She lives in Brooklyn with her own personal cheerleader/lighting designer and a very opinionated tuxedo cat. 

Top image licensed under Creative Commons from International Partnerships at Kent on Flickr.

[wasdname]

Long post about Don’t Monkey With Broadway/An Evening With Patti LuPone on Friday, July 12, 2019. 

First of all, for people who have never been at Davies Symphony Hall, it's essentially a 360 house, with the stage in the center. Patti was pretty good at making sure she faced the terrace (the people behind her). I’m sitting at side terrace in the very front row (see pics above for reference), so I have a view of the audience’s faces. Patti was at center stage most of the time and I could only see the side of her face and back of her head, unless she actually turned around. Which she did a lot, actually, bless her soul. If you look at the pic above, I was sitting RIGHT in front of the water glass on the piano, so every time she drank from the glass she was directly facing me. Swoon.  The first song after opening with Don't Monkey With Broadway, she knocks her mic off the mic stand while reaching for it to take it off. It plonks onto the stage with a loud thump and EVERYONE (including the pianist) looks shocked and audible gasps are heard. She picks it back up and everyone including Patti laughs it off. During Big Spender. Props to the pianist, Joseph Thalken, who had a bell on top of the piano to ding on cue, which he would casually reach over to do. He also jumped up from his seat once, dinged the bell, hovered there a bit, and sat down just as quickly which got lots of laughs. Also lots of giggles from the expressions and movements Patti was making. I was sitting at terrace so unfortunately I couldn't see her face for most of it, and boy, am I jealous of people who can afford orchestra seating, but I sure did stare at those swaying HIPS. 

She brings out a silver prop gun during If and shoots it (audience gasps) and there's a very LOUD sfx BANG and scares the bejeesus out of everyone as we all jump a bit in surprise. Lots of giggles after. She brought out those two albums that her mom bought her at “the East Northport A&P supermarket checkout” and talked a bit about playing really strong women on Broadway and how that was never how she saw herself. She pauses and gives a look and the audience laughs. She riffs with that and says something like how she was always a shy and soft-spoken (lmao) kid, more laughs from the audience. 

She sang Don't Cry For Me Argentina for the end of the first act, before the intermission. My god, she sounds as good as she always does. She did the iconic raised arms pose before the song started, at everyone (including terrace, she turned around and did it just for the people behind her), but not during the song at the part everyone expects her to do it in. I could only see the back of her head/side of her face but I could TELL she was doing those same facial expressions that she always does. And of course, the iconic palms out for each and every "don't keep your distance". At the end, lights black out and intermission starts. Beginning of act 2

The chorus (SF Gay Men's Chorus, yaaas) rolls out to do Trouble, right under the side terrace I was sitting in. Patti comes out, in a different outfit (it was like a black see-through-silky dress...thing, and she wore black pants underneath and black heels) and faces the side terrace (finally!) the whole time while they were on stage together. And they do it FLAWLESSLY, lots of giggles with the dramatic acting by the chorus. "Words like... swell?" the chorus GASPS, some people in chorus shout TROUBLE at the end of every other line as she goes through the rest of that verse. Lots of applause and bowing. Patti is smiling a lot and you can tell she’s having a blast. Blow Gabriel Blow. YES, someone in the chorus hit THAT iconic high note (you know the one) while waving his arms in the air, holding onto that note for dear life. The chorus all face him while he's holding that note to make sure he stands out, everyone applauds as he does it and you can tell Patti is impressed, more smiles and laughter from her. Audience loves it, lots of applause.

Give My Regards to Broadway. This song always gets audience participation. Everyone clapped in rhythm and sang along.

She starts doing Sondheim. Sweeney Todd: Not While I'm Around, Company: Another Hundred People, Being Alive and... Before the next song starts she steps off backstage and comes back with a martini glass full of what looks like water. We ALL know she's about to sing The Ladies Who Lunch. And yes, she throws the martini glass full of water INTO the audience, center stage, first two rows. I could see the looks on the audience's faces, and it was priceless.  For her last song, Some Other Time, the chorus is brought out again, behind Patti, center stage. Patti sets her mic down on the piano, and even without mics, she and the chorus are still quite audible. It was magical.

[honeylikewords]

*rips through the fabric of time, space, and electronic screens, smooshing K's cheeks in my hands* *in deep, spoopy voice* D O I T. FEED ME THIS POTENTIAL TONY-NOMINATED PERFORMANCE. WHAT IS THE STORY BEHIND THESE SONG TITLES? WHAT HAPPENS? STAGE DIRECTIONS, COSTUMES, SONDHEIM OR WEBBER, EVERYTHING ELSE I LOVED ABOUT THEATER BEFORE MY COLLEGE SUCKED THE JOY OUT OF IT. *leans in and goes quiet* F E E D M E E E E E!!!... Please? 😃😇

replying in a tiny soft voice: iM GONNA DO IT

SONG PLOTS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

1. “Respect the Research”- performed by Eddie McCarthy. Costume: Yellow Hawaiian shirt and jeans, boots, etc. His character introduction song, essentially! It sets the scene, opening as him in his classroom berating the students to, as the title says, Respect The Research! His enthusiasm is displayed through his dancing, which is light on his feet but punctuated with incredibly loud, powerful STOMPS or him jumping with all his might on the stage, sending it rattling!

2. “Jewish and Tattooish”- performed by Eddie McCarthy. Costume: Yellow Hawaiian shirt and jeans, boots, etc. This song introduces the crux of Eddie’s problem: he’s an outcast. He gets a lot of odd looks as he walks down the hall, and he is lamenting all the things that make him such an outlier. He lists his tattoos and Judaism, his height, his appearance, his enthusiasm, and his curious passions and interests. He ducks into the library, and then-

3. “The Composer At Work” - performed by Eddie McCarthy. Costume: Yellow  Hawaiian shirt and jeans, boots, etc. This song is Eddie spying his lovely library lady for the first time and coming up with hundreds of poetic, romantic sentiments that run through his head, sending him spiralling. He is partially the “composer”, as he is composing these thoughts, but she is also a “composer”, as she is the muse and is shown to be working on a project of her own at the desk, composing art and bearing a resemblance to many paintings of composers labouring over their work, but another “composer” is fate, bringing these two together.

4. “Hush! This Is A Library” - performed by Eddie’s love interest, the librarian. Costume: a simple skirt and blouse, professional but unique in their color schemes. Where Eddie is yellow, she is blue. This song is her scolding Eddie after he accidentally yelled out the last word of his song (”HER!”), and she raises a finger to her lips and hushes him. But when she lays her eyes on him, her heart begins to race and she is trying to quiet it, hushing her own feelings and trying to keep them suppressed.

5. “Silent Love Letter”- performed by Eddie. Costume: Red shirt, blue jeans, boots. This song is set many weeks after their initial meeting, and Eddie is walking through the stacks, watching his librarian and writing out what he wants to say to her in his head. He thinks of all the things he loves about her, and tries to string his thoughts together into something that makes sense, but his words come up short- so he scraps the letter and thinks he can never tell her.

6. “A Song Between The Stacks”- performed by Eddie’s love interest. Costume: a pink dress and black cardigan, symbolizing her sensitive, loving heart being covered by fear. This song is her wandering through the shelves after closing and singing to herself about her growing love for Eddie, but her overwhelming anxiety that they can never be together. Eddie, however, is there, and overhears.

7. “Big, Loud, and Incredibly Dense” -performed by Eddie. Costume: Blue shirt and jeans, boots. This song is Eddie repeating everything he’s heard her say to herself, muttering to himself and trying to understand if what he thinks he heard is really what was said. Does she love him? He’s caught because makes too much noise and alerts her that he was listening, and she runs off, upset that she was spied on, and he berates himself for being too big, too loud, and incredibly dense.

8. “Wondering What He Saw”-performed by Eddie’s love interest. The same dress as before. She is panicked and hiding in a closet, asking herself what he knows and what he saw, and what he’ll do now that he knows how she feels.

9. “Thinking Out Loud (Because My Thoughts Are Too Big)”- performed by Eddie. Blue shirt, jeans, boots. He has found the closet and is telling his love bits and pieces of what he feels, but is still unable to make sense of everything and tell her, soundly, what he means. It’s highly stream of consciousness and he’s stumbling over himself. He accidentally says that she “upsets him” and makes him “worried”, which she interprets as he does not like her.

10. “In The Best Interest Of Our Livelihoods”- performed by Eddie’s love interest. She comes out of the closet and tells Eddie that, for the sake of their jobs, they should remain apart. They clearly don’t mesh and only cause one another distress, and she begins to cry as Eddie leaves.

11. “Hostess For The Heart”- performed by Eddie. Costume: grey pajama bottoms, a white t-shirt. Eddie is at home on his couch, sadly eating junk food because he’s sure he’s lost the only girl he’s ever been in love with.

12. “Louder Than Our Voices”- performed by both. They are each at home and talking to themselves, lamenting the loss of their love, and thinking that if only there was something louder than their voices to truly convey what they were feeling, since words fall so short of what they need.

13. “Grandfathered In”- performed by Eddie. Costume: Black button up, jeans, boots. Eddie has learned that his grandfather, a generally bitter, lonesome man has passed away, and is looking through family photographs, thinking of all the men in his life who were unkind and died without love. That is, until he sees a photograph of his great grandfather, the original Eddie, and sees the happy couple that his great grandfather and great grandmother made. He makes a decision.

14. “Recreating Shakespeare”- performed by both. Costume: Eddie is in full Shakespearian garb and has left a dress for his lovely lady in her office in the library, including instructions for to meet her “mystery lover”. She indulges, hoping it is Eddie, and follows his trail of clues as he leads her through their little world, recreating famous scenes from Shakespeare’s works.

15. “Could It Be? Is It He?”- performed by Eddie’s love. Costume: Shakespearian dress. She sings, knowing that all the clues grow more intimate, it has to be someone who knows her so well that they could write these notes for her. So, could it be?

16. “Apologies For What I Said/Didn’t Say”- performed by both. Costume: Shakespearian costuming! They sing to each other as they unite at the meeting spot, each explaining their words and choices, trying their best to say what they really mean, apologizing both for the ill-chosen words and the ill-chosen silences.

17. “Learn Something New Every Day”- performed by Eddie. Costume: same as prior! Eddie is talking about how he doesn’t want to live a life like the men that came before him, and he wants to keep learning about the woman he loves. He wants her to teach him, and it’s always been his life policy to keep learning, so he’d like to know if they can create-

18. “A Story All Our Own”- performed by both. Costume: same! They realize that they don’t have to abide by any of the rules that came before them, and they can be their own people; not their families’ descendants, nor Shakespeare’s lovers, or anyone else. Just each themselves, because that is who they are in love with. They live happily ever after.

END!

[maren-as-an-adult]

I Severely Underestimated the Lack of Time and Energy This Job Would Allow Me

So my plan of posting a weekly-ish update about this job severely backfired on me, because HOLY SHIT DO THEY KEEP US BUSY! This is legitimately a full-time job, we should all get a raise, but because the Man hates the Arts we probably won’t ever at all and counselors are people who do the most but get the least, goddammit. SO! The week started off where I was a scared beanpole of a girl super intimidated by all of the nearly 300 children that would be staying with us for the next 3 weeks. I had no idea how I would run my classes, I had no idea what I’d be doing for my show, I had no idea if I would make friends, and I had no idea if I’d be able to handle the six girls I’d be in charge of on my floor. 

Three weeks later, I was so emotionally compromised when they left and I realized I wouldn’t see them for another year... unless I don’t come back next year in which case I’ll probably never see them again. WHICH IS NOT WHAT I WANT TO HAVE HAPPEN!

Basically, here’s the breakdown:

CLASSES

I taught three dance classes: beginner jazz, intermediate ballet, and advanced modern. I only had four in my modern class, and I grew to love each of them so much. They were so receptive and willing to perform their best, and they all said they really admired me. Modern also was set to perform in the class showcase, and they were able to beautifully perform the choreography I gave them.... although I didn’t actually get to see their performance, the class showcase was on my day off, and on that day I went into the city for a date with The Boyfriend. That was a fun day, but back to camp for now. 

THE SHOW

The show I worked on was Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. And WOW was our director intense. We were flying through the show which was to be expected because we only had two and a half weeks to have it blocked, cued, choreographed, and memorized and even though I’m good at picking up and learning choreography, I was struggling myself to keep up. 

This was especially nerve wracking for me, as the cast would frequently come up to me and ask me for clarification on what we just learned. Because it’s not considered professional to say, “Sorry, dude, I know about as much as you do right now, so I guess you’re fucked,” I struggled to help them as best I could. 

I’d feel so useless, incompetent, and foolish when I couldn’t help them, and there were days I was definitely overwhelmed. I was also super lost on several of the group dances, because I’d been gone for a weekend up in Albany for my grandfather’s funeral which was a fucking blast there was a rainbow and everything. 

There was this one girl in my cast who was, in a bit of a word, super high-strung about everything. She wanted to be perfect in the show for all the wrong reasons (I won’t get into it much, but basically she felt she needed to be perfect to prove to other people outside of this particular production that she deserved better treatment from them) and was constantly oscillating between doubting herself (because even though she’s clearly talented, that knowledge isn’t enough when another cast member gets applause after her numbers in rehearsal and she doesn’t) and taking it upon herself to correct others and give them notes. She wasn’t a nightmare to work with, but I’m glad she’s not in the production I’m working on for Session 2 (she was one of the few stay-over kids we had who stay for two sessions instead of just one)

There were some great and memorable times during rehearsals, though. One of our leading men during dress rehearsal got a costume ring stuck on his finger and had to be taken to urgent care to get it cut off. Before that, though, I took him over to our nurses to see if we could get it off there. When lotion, an old ring cutter, an ice pack, and dental floss did not work, that’s when we put his fate into the hands of the professionals. 

There was also the time a rumor may have started that the director and I were sleeping together, which is hilarious because he and I both have boyfriends. 

THE GIRLS

So last session I was assigned a room of six girls to look after: wake them up, make sure they’re on the floor by curfew, make sure they’re in their rooms at 10:30, take away their phones for the night, and make sure their lights are out by 11pm. If they’re having problems or want to talk to someone, they should come to me. They were all between the ages of 14 and 16, which in my experience can make for some fairly catty attitudes. 

I did not realize how sad I would be when most of them left (one of my girls is a stay-over, yay!)

They all gave me huge hugs before they left, and asked if I would come back again next summer. I told them that unless Stagedoor decided not to re-hire me, there was no way I wasn’t coming back. 

They would open up to me, confide in me, and told me how much they loved me. 

I’m 99.99% certain it was all genuine and not just flattery so I’d be lenient with them. 

But I do miss them, and I hope I get to see them again. 

PRODUCTION WEEKEND

During this week, my birthday happened and I turned 24. My roommates decorated our door, I got a cake at lunch, was sung to twice, and received over a hundred “Happy Birthday” messages in various electronic form: Facebook, text, voicemail, Snapchat, etc. But the top three moments of the day were:

- A voicemail from The Boyfriend, officially being the first person to wish me a Happy Birthday

- A card from one of the director-choreographers, and head of the dance department (who has worked at Stagedoor for 25 years and everyone loves)

- A card from my family with a very generous gift cart to purchase show tickets (which I now have thanks to The Boyfriend!!!!)

But apart from that there was nothing particularly special about the day. My girls kept wishing me a Happy Birthday each time they saw me, though, so that was nice. 

One good thing about production week is you get real good at pin curling and iron curling hair. I had so many flashbacks to my high school theatre days when the crowds formed around a handful of curling irons all plugged into one communal power strip and a box of approximately 8,000 hairpins was constantly floating around. But at my high school, it was just one show with about 40 kids getting ready. Imagine almost 200 girls needing their hair pin-curled for wigs by counselors (because apparently none of them knew how to do it?) on a super strict schedule that didn’t give them much time, coupled with the fact that everyone needed to get makeup done and costumes on an hour before the shows opened. 

And on top of all this, there was some weird plague going around. Campers and counselors alike were dropping like flies and succumbing to this illness, and if it wasn’t that illness it was strep throat. The hectic and stressful environment coupled with the fact that parents were coming to visit had staff near the breaking point, and the only thing we wanted was 24 hours of quiet solitude. 

That was a little more than a pipe dream, though. 

I myself almost caught this mysterious flu-like death virus going around. Our music director for Follies caught it, and was struggling to stay alert and conscious during our dress rehearsal, our stage manager caught it and was promptly sent to bed to try and sleep it off. That night I remember a rather large headache and a weird pre-nausea feeling in my stomach, along with a general full-body ache, and I just remember thinking, “Please God don’t let me have this.” I made sure to go right to bed that night after our end-of-the-day meeting, and woke up feeling fine. I’d already gone through some pretty shitty allergy sickness at the start of the session, and I didn’t want to start and end session 1 sick. 

Thankfully, though, our music director and stage manager were back in action the next day for opening show, and the shows were flawless. I’ve never been so proud of a group before, because they did one of the most challenging things I could have imagined. 

But the day had to come where they packed up their stuff and drove home with their families. It was sad to see them go, especially after bonding so strongly with some of them. And there was no time to feel sad, really. As soon as a room was empty, counselors and cleaning staff would immediately start cleaning the rooms and prepping them for the next batch of kids to come in. 

And now they’re here. I have two rooms this session, and on night one of session two my first room (which has my stay-over girl in it) managed to break a bulb on a string of lights and get glass over the floor. My group leader had forewarned me that they could be rowdy and quite a handful, but I was hoping they’d give it a few days before breaking something. So I knew I had to do something to prevent excessive rowdiness ASAP. 

That night, after cleaning up the shards of glass/plastic, I gave them a quick speech about how busy it was for counselors: not only did we look after a room full of girls (and in my and other counselors’ cases, sometimes multiple rooms), but we also had classes to prep for and teach, and shows to either manage or choreograph. I asked them to help make the counselors’ jobs a little bit easier by being smart, conscientious, and mature. That seemed to get through to them, because thus far I haven’t had any trouble from them. 

And it’s now been a few days into session 2. I’m teaching intermediate tap, intermediate modern, and musical theatre. The class structures could not be more different for me this time. Musical theatre thus far doesn’t have a set class structure, what I’ve kind of cobbled together as a lesson plan has been: work on one piece for the showcase, and throw potential audition combinations at them to train them to pick up choreography quickly. Tap is basically a warm-up of basic moves, and then the rest of the class is spend working on moves they want to learn. Modern still holds some semblance of structure, though, but it’s my largest class and the students take up all the floor space, so it’s harder to really see everyone and make sure they’re getting the combinations I give them. 

I was super excited when I heard about the shows for this session, but the two that I really wanted to work on were choreographer shows, and didn’t require an assistant choreographer (A.C.’s only work on shows with director-choreographers). They were Evil Dead - The High School Version and Guys and Dolls. But I’m still excited about the show I’m working on: Me and My Girl. It’s kind of like My Fair Lady and Half A Sixpence. My director-choreographer is this really great lady who is super organized with everything, so with the way she has things planned and mapped out, we should have the show ready for full runs in less than two weeks. 

Today was my first day off for this session, and it was pretty amazing. I slept in, treated myself to some nice makeup, went out for pizza with my friend Anna, and got some counselor work done. Next week I get to see two of my favorite people in the world and a Broadway show (I’m seeing Kinky Boots starring Brendon Urie with The Boyfriend). I still need to figure how I’m getting to the bus station but that’s a problem for tomorrow or the next day. 

So, weekly updates won’t be a thing, but I can try to do session recaps. That’s what I’m aiming for at this point. 

And now, on to session 2!

[quinnmorgendorffer]

I've just recently in the past few years gotten more into musical theater, so I have a lot to learn. I'm not a singer or anything, but I like to watch and listen. Also, I have to randomly ask something. Why the heck did " Glee" have Brian Stokes Mitchell on the show and not let him sing more? What a waste. Ha ha. What are some really underrated musicals?

That’s awesome! Nah man, you don’t have to be a singer to get into/like musical theater! We actually need more people to appreciate musical theater who don’t participate, honestly. Same with opera, but that’s another story I know no one here wants to get into lol.

Who knows, man? I mean, they had Victor Garber on and didn’t have him sing and fucking Cheyenne Jackson!!!! Even The Real O’Neals had Cheyenne sing!!!! And he was on one ep of that unlike being in several episodes like he was for glee.

Okay, so as I said, I’m a bit of an MT hipster. So I like a lot of weird shit lol. A not very detailed list is below, with some notes by yours truly lol. Sorry that this got so long omfg

Bat Boy - based on the Daily News articles, this chronichles the story of a bat boy found in a cave in West Virginia. He’s taken to the local vet, and while everyone in town just wants the doctor to kill him, the vet’s wife wants to take care of the teen, who she names Edgar, and teach him how to behave. The doctor kind of goes crazy and their daughter, Shelly, falls for Edgar. A lot of the parts in the show outside of the family are double casted, and it’s honestly hilarious and also makes me cry by the end, poking a lot of fun at “Christian Charity” (that’s the name of one of the songs that also gets a reprise) and the like. It’s extra loved by me for featuring the impeccable Kerry Butler (the original Penny in Hairspray, female lead in Xanadu, Catch Me If You Can...the ageless girl wonder)Reefer Madness - the Off-Broadway production opened the weekend of 9/11, which definitely effected its possible success. It’s, of course, based off the ridiculous propaganda film of the same name, though it takes it a bit farther and pokes fun at all of it and even more of the racist/sexist attitudes of the 1930s. While all/most of the others I’m talking about here only have CDs and maybe some bootlegs, this one has a movie version!!!! That actually is almost 100% like the stage version (at least based on what I saw). The movie features Kristen Bell as Mary Lane, the part she originated, and also features Alan Cumming and the forever under-appreciated Ana Gasteyer and Amy Spanger. Side Show - you can debate which version is better, but whether you prefer the original cast or the 2014 revival that changed some of the story to make it more accurate, it’s absolutely amazing. A musical based (loosely) off the true story of the conjoined Hilton twins who made a career of their oddity by working in freak shows, vaudeville, and even a few movies, though they were all critically panned. Features some of the best duets for female voices (most famously “Who Will Love Me As I Am?” and “I Will Never Leave You”). The original has Alice Ripley as one of the twins (Violet, and while I still think she screams a lot, she does a great job), and Norm Lewis as Jake. If you ever want to cry, just listen to his big song “You Should Be Loved” or the above duets. Or just read about the Hilton’s lives because it’s so depressing and the musical doesn’t even touch on that. I’m forever sad this never gets awards or the long runs it deserves. It should also be noted that Alice and her fellow twin, Emily Skinner (Daisy Hilton), were nominated together for the Tony.[title of show] - okay, this show is just...fucking........hilarious. “It’s a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical...” Just a lot of silly fun and also some great quotes, like “I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.” It also points out a lot of flaws in Broadway, like the lack of original musicals and how there are waaaaaaaay too many musicals based off movies lol. It’s a four person cast, all of whom are named after the people who originated the roles, and it manages to be just so funny and still inspirational and such a joy to listen to.Zanna, Don’t! - okay. so I get why most “oppressed group written as oppressors” stories are awful, like that whole “save our pearls” book or w/e that happened a few years back. But Zanna, Don’t was written by a gay man who just wanted to write some musicals with fun, catchy love songs for gay couples. So, in this world, being gay is the norm and straight people are the hated group. Zanna is an actual fairy (in high school) who matches up everyone in his town and never actually remembers to pair himself up with anyone. So when a straight A student and the quarterback of the football team fall in love...well, it finds a way to be cute, funny, and poignant all in one. Features Queer Eye “culture vulture” Jai Rodriguez in the title role and the show should get extra points for the line “what kind of world would this be if the football star wasn’t the lead in the musical??”In the Heights - not necessarily underrated so much as it’s just forgotten in Hamilton’s success. This tells the day in the life of people in Washington Heights. It also features a completely diverse cast and, imo, has some catchy songs that outdo some of Hamilton. If you don’t bawl while singing along to “Breathe” while stressing about failing at college/your dreams, what do you even do with your spare time? That used to be my most common activity.The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown - Idk if I can truly say it’s underrated since it really hasn’t been on Broadway so it’s never had a chance to get known...plus I think it’s popular among actual theater performers, but not enough of musical fans know about this. A lot of theater kids probably know “Freedom” and “Run Away With Me”, as the duet is a great choice for two women and shows a ton of depth/vocal prowess, while the solo can show a very tender male voice, but the show is more than those songs or “The Proposal” or “The Girl Who Drove Away”. The story starts with Sam sitting in her car. She’s supposed to be driving to college, but she’s fantasizing about driving away. She conjures up her best friend, Kelly, in her mind, and Kelly convinces her to relive her senior year and figure out why she wants to leave. You eventually find out Kelly died that year, and along the way you learn about Sam’s college applications, her boyfriend, and how lost she felt all year, all while still trying to learn how to drive. It’s so moving, and, honestly, “Freedom” is still a jam and probably does deserve to be one of the most famous songs from the show. The show might also inspire you to run away so...watch out for that. The bootleg I have is what inspire my love for Melissa, quite literally, since I had stopped watching g/lee at the time. The Boy from Oz - one of the better done jukebox musicals, since it focuses on the writer of those songs, and also is the best role Hugh Jackman will ever have. I’m sure a lot of people on my dash are familiar with Chris’ version of “Not the Boy Next Door” on g/lee. If you like it, you should check out Hugh performing that at the Tony’s. Anyways, it tells the life story of Peter Allen, whose songwriting credits include the above song, “I Honestly Love You”, and “Don’t Cry Out Loud”. He met Judy Garland and, of course, then met and married her daughter, Liza Minelli. I will never praise Stephanie J. Block’s Liza enough, she is perf. And, again, Hugh is flawless, and he originated the part both in Australia (Peter Allen’s home country) and then on Broadway. Getting to see the original cast in this was one of the highlights of my life.

That’s it for now. I’d also suggest checking out some classics. I didn’t put it on the list since it’s not underrated, but the original cast of Sweeney Todd is the best thing you could ever listen to - Victor Garber in his prime and Angela Landsbury is the forever best interpretation of Mrs. Lovett, #notsorry Patti. The movie version directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp is truly a disgrace compared to the actual version which has a legal taped version available for your viewing pleasure! You can see why it’s performed in opera houses nowadays!!! Though the video sadly doesn’t  have the original Anthony (Victor Garber) and the Johanna is bad...not that I’ve heard a Johanna I truly like. Rodgers and Hammerstein should at least be somewhat known, though a lot of their stories are like...gross. But Sondheim is pretty damn solid -- and if you didn’t know, he wrote the lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story. A lot of people seem to not know that, but like he was making some big strides long before Company was a hit. Which also deserves a listen

[newyorktheater]

Fans can add another reason to be disappointed with Game of Thrones. NBC executives are now claiming they killed Hair Live, which they had planned to broadcast yesterday, when HBO announced GOT’s finale would be aired on the same day. Rather then reschedule Hair, they used this as an excuse to drop it. “The bigger, broader, four quadrant, family-friendly musicals are the ones that work,” NBC Entertainment chairman George Cheeks told Ad Week. “Four quadrant” is TV exec-speak for the four major audience niches: both male and female, and over- and under-25.

  The Week in New York Theater Awards

2019 Drama League Awards:Bryan Cranston, Hadestown, The Ferryman…

Hadestown Amber Gray Patrick Page Reeve Carney on Broadway 2019

2019 Chita Rivera Awards: Hadestown, Alice by Heart, Ephraim Sykes….

The Lilly Awards The 10th annual Lilly Awards, which honor the work of women in the American theater, gave awards to: Jayne Houdyshell (presented by Laurie Metcalf), LaTanya Richardson, Dawn Landes for her work on the new musical Row, Masi Asare, Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, Eliana Pipes for her play Dreamhouse, Julia Cho and Oliver Butler. The evening ended with Shaina Taub’s tribute to Liz Swados, and plays by women artists given out as party favors. Marsha Norman announced that the Lillys will start to publish theater writing from multiple points of view to reduce the “tyranny” of the current limited critical voices

The Roger Rees Awards for Excellence in Student Performance: Best Actress – Ekele Ukegbu, Elmont Memorial High School (Nassau Country), for the role of Aida in Aida. Best Actor – Jeremy Fuentes, Archbishop Stepinac High School (Westchester County) for the role of Calogera in A Bronx Tale.

Up Next: The Obies (tonight!), Drama Desk Awards, the Tonys (2019 New York Theater Awards Calendar and Guide)

The Week in New York Theater Reviews

The Pink Unicorn

The story that Tony winner Alice Ripley tells in this one-woman show – of an unsophisticated mother named Trisha Lee in the small Texas town of Sparktown who becomes woke after her child Jolene comes out to her as genderqueer  – is inspired by playwright Elise Forier Edie’s own experience with her child’s similar announcement at the age of 12.  Edie wrote “The Pink Unicorn” in 2011, and has performed it herself to some acclaim since 2013 around the country.

But Trisha Lee differs significantly from Edie herself….

Happy Talk

From the moment Susan Sarandon makes her entrance in Jesse Eisenberg’s latest play, it is clear her character Lorraine is extravagantly self-absorbed to the point of delusion….It would be easy to find humor in Lorraine’s vanity and even in her contempt, and to assume that the play will be a comedy…But Happy Talkis an ironic title for a play that winds up far closer to horror than comedy. Whatever pleasures come from the fine acting by a starry cast in this New Group production directed by Scott Elliott,  Happy Talkis ultimately a sour and off-putting play

Enter Laughing

Comedian Carl Reiner called his comic novel Enter Laughing, because that is the first stage direction that his 17-year-old main character is given, at his first ever-audition, and he makes a hilarious hash of it.

Reiner wrote his semi-autobiographical novel at the peak of his popularity in the 1950s, recalling his frustrating and sidesplitting effort to break into show business as a teenager from the Bronx in the 1930s.

Reiner is now 97 – even his son Rob Reiner is now a name for nostalgists — so it shouldn’t be too surprising that there is an old-fashioned feel to the musical comedy adapted from Reiner’s novel

Original Sound Review: When Is It Musical Inspiration, and When Theft?

Did George Harrison steal from The Chiffons?…he “My Sweet Lord” vs. “He’s So Fine” case is just the most famous of a whole slew of accusations of musical plagiarism… that can serve as background to “Original Sound,” an original play by Adam Seidel..In its own low-key entertaining way, “Original Sound” forces you to think not just about the music business, but about the nature of the creative process.

Ismenia Mendes as Lady Macbeth and Isabelle Fuhrman as Macbeth

Mac Beth: 7 Schoolgirls Put On Shakespeare’s Tragedy

At the end of “Mac Beth,” Macduff severs Macbeth’s head and then she takes a selfie of it, posing with two of her fellow murderous teenage girls, all dressed in parochial school uniforms.

This is one of the cleverest moments in Erica Schmidt’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy,  produced by Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel, in which seven actresses portray schoolgirls who are putting on “Macbeth” in the middle of an empty lot.

Then She Fell: Rachel I. Berman (as Alice)

Jason Tam as Epic

Red Hills, 2018 Sifiso Mabena and the moon

Cafe Play

The Best Immersive Theater Companies in New York

  The Week in New York Theater News

Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown will perform together with Katrina Lenk in an evening of songs and stories with two pianos and an orchestra at Town Hall June 24, to mark Brown’s 50th SubCulture performance 

Lincoln Center’s revival of My Fair Lady will close at the Vivian Beaumont Theater July 7, having played a total of 548 performances (39 previews and 509 performances It will launch a national tour in December.

Its national tour was postponed last year. Now, as promised, @BATtheMusicalNY, inspired by Meat Loaf’s hit album, is coming to NYC after all — to @NYCityCenter Aug 1 – Sept 8 pic.twitter.com/U648z1spk2

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 15, 2019

David Byrne’s @americanutopia coming to Bway’s @hudsonbway Oct 4,2019 – Jan 19, 2020. Opens Oct 20. The theatrical concert features songs from @DBtodomundo‘s 2018 American Utopia album + songs from #TalkingHeads & his solo career. Pre-Bway run in Boston’s @EmColonial Sept 11-28 pic.twitter.com/d6nXP4qt5B

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 17, 2019

Fleet Week Follies, Waterwell, the theater company that presented “Blueprint Specials” on board the battleship, is offering a day of music, food and family activities on May 26th, with hosts Andrew Rannells and Celia Keenan-Bolger inspired by the legacy of the Stage Door Canteen, at National Sawdust in Brooklyn.

  Broadway in the Boros

Noon to 1 p.m., free!

  Chicago production of Hamilton will close Jan. 5, 2020, having played 1,365 performances to some 2.8 million people & grossing hundreds of millions of $. Why is it closing? Strategy, as @ChrisJonesTrib explains. (e.g. don’t want to sell discount tix)https://t.co/dHxnppTU1Y

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 16, 2019

Glenda Jackson

  Why To Kill A Mockingbird didn’t get a Tony nomination for best play maybe.

Solving the 6 Biggest Mysteries of This Broadway Season

An abbreviated version of the answers Michael Paulson got..

Is the sidewalk scene in “Network” performed live? Yes

Where does Aunt Maggie of The Ferryman go when she’s far away? I think about death a lot

How tall is that guy in “Hadestown”? Timothy Hughes is 6’7″

What’s it like to dance in a wheelchair? “It’s a little like being on ice,” says Ali Stroker, in the cast of Oklahoma!, “because the movement is more fluid than when people are walking and running.”

How does the male star of “Tootsie” sing like a woman? Lots of practice.

Is the debate in “What the Constitution Means to Me” scripted or improvised? A little bit of both.

Game of Thrones vs Hair Live. David Byrne On Broadway, Bat Out of Hell Off. More Awards! #Stageworthy News of the Week Fans can add another reason to be disappointed with Game of Thrones. NBC executives are now claiming they killed Hair Live, which they had planned to broadcast yesterday, when HBO announced GOT's finale would be aired on the same day.

[nadinejustlives]

Sondheim in Black

If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, pop by the Galloway Theatre and catch Sondheim in Black, featuring Namisa Mdlalose and Arlin Bantam. I just did Rent with both of them and decided it would be great to catch up and find out more about their next project.



1. Sondheim in Black, that’s a pretty interesting name, what is the meaning behind it and does it hold any personal significance to your life?

Arlin: It holds personal significance because the title comes directly from us being black. The show comes from the idea of what it is like when Black people sing the show tunes and the Sondheim Catalogs. It’s basically us challenging the typical whitewashing which takes place in musical theatre. We as artists have personally experienced the issues that are brought up in this show, so we just want to bring it to the light. 

Namisa: It was basically Arlin’s idea. I thought of doing a musical revue after seeing a revue that a few graduates from UCT did- and it made me think, “here’s something that I can do that is seemingly inexpensive, as well as well as showcasing my work and talent at the same time.” Then Rent happened and I was reunited with Arlin, we knew we’d have a six week break and I said, “hey, let’s do this!” This is also why I chose to study Theatre Making instead of acting at UCT, as a black artist. I Hadn’t seen many pieces of work created by black artists, so I thought, why not create these avenues myself. There is lots of black work out there, but they either go unnoticed or undocumented or it’s a very specific kind of black work - that i can’t always relate to, or write about or say that it’s from my perspective.

2. You are both fairly new to the industry, having graduated from your respective universities, what has the experience been like so far creating your own show and spreading the word about it?

Arlin: The experience has been good. I was surprised at how people were open to doing the show and how we didn’t experience any negative energy while talking about the show. I mean the people we were talking to were white people, they were open to us representing this side of the story. Handling all the admin was a bit tedious, but overall it has been a good experience. Namisa: I think, the best part was the process, which was quick and easy. We just made decisions because we didn’t have much time to put this together. We made the poster and we were just ready to do it. It is informal and it is about our lives and where we are at. We are not trying to be something we are not. There’s no serious pressure from producers to make money, we are just trying to share our work and talent. Spreading the word was quite easy but it’s still a bit scary. It’s like hosting a party and you’re worried that anybody is going to come.

3. What can we expect to see in this revue and which songs do you think the audience will enjoy the most?

Arlin This revue is just a selection of our favourite numbers from Sondheim. I think songs like; “A little Priest” from “Sweeney Todd” and “Ladies who Lunch” from “Company” are gonna be songs that people recognise. And also we have very theatrical numbers, like “Rose’s Turn” from “Gypsy”. There’s a lot to be enjoyed and things that will be recognised and songs that have been undeniable crowd pleasers since they’ve been written. Namisa: You will see Arlin and Namisa on stage. There’s no characters. There’s no dress up. There’s just us being who we are at our core on stage. I think the audience will enjoy or duet, I’m so excited and I know Arlin will be there to support me through it on stage.

4. In your opinion, how did Sondheim revolutionise theatre?

Arlin I think Sondheim revolutionised theatre in quite a significant way as he made theatre more…intellectual. Before Sondheim, everything was very 42nd Street type show tunes and very classical. Sondheim introduced difficult musical concepts and raised the intellectual level of what was happening on stage. He brought the Avant Garde Music feel into the musical theatre scene, he took musical theatre in a new and interesting direction which had never happened before. 5. What is your favourite Sondheim song and musical?

Arlin My favourite musical Hands down is Company. It’s just such a great musical, the subtly of it’s narrative, the perfection of it’s score- it just makes me very very happy. My favourite Sondheim song would have to be “Another Hundred People” from Company. There’s just something about it thats unlike any other show tune I’ve ever heard! It’s such a unique song and thats what makes it completely worth listening to. Namisa: Being Alive from Company. Actually. JUST THE WHOLE OF COMPANY. (Starts Fan Girling about Company) 6. You mentioned in the blurb that Sondheim is usually performed by one particular race, why do you think that is? And in what ways do you think we can diversify Sondheim and the people performing his music?

Arlin: Sondheim traditionally is performed by white people and I think that is because he is an American writer writing in a country that is made up of majority white people. He wrote what he knew and he can’t be faulted for that. The thought behind this show is how we can diversify this in South Africa, how do we in a South African context shy away from that tradition because we have to, because we have a majority black population. How do we localise the text, how do we look at formulating this through this medium instead of imitating a context that doesn’t represent our particular context. 7. If you could say one thing to Sondheim, what would it be?

Arlin: Thank you for saving Musical Theatre and allowing the world to see that Musical theatre could be clever and witty. It could be amazingly stimulating in a real world, literary sense instead of just being jazz hands and tap dancing. 8. Talk to us about how you guys put the show together and how you worked together to create this revue- since you do not have a director as an outside eye?

Arlin It’s been very interesting because we didn’t have a director. We had already had the idea of doing a revue together and Namisa and Jaco completely came in and understood my idea behind it. From day two it became a three party project, we have all been very equal. We didn’t need a director because we knew where we were going with it from day one. The show is different because it’s a free space, casual atmosphere and a low anxiety space. We can be ourselves in the space instead of needing a director to carve out a character for us. It is about the music and our personal politics, As long as we can get up and perform the songs and completely be ourselves then and get our message across, then that’s what needs to be done and I think that’s what we have achieved. 9. Can we expect more Namisa and Arlin collaborations in the future?

Arlin: You can definitely expect more collaborations. We’ve already thought of moving the project onto other composers. Maybe even get a bigger cast where needed. (He lists possible ideas) We are also thinking of touring theatres and taking it to a festival sometime next year to see how it does. 10. What advice do you have for people who are in this industry and want to put on their own shows, but are too afraid? Arlin I think fear should never be at play when you are sure of an idea, because if you know you have an artistic idea which hasn’t been done before and that there is a social stimulus for it, then you just have to do it. The problem isn’t going to go away unless you tackle it. Yeah, don’t let fear get in the way. Be sure that you know where you’re coming from, because then you’ll  know where you’re going to and you’ll never say yes when you mean no.

Catch Sondheim in Black from April 6th -8th at the Galloway Theatre at 7:30PM 

[newyorktheater]

Sweeney Todd

Len Cariou, who originated roles in Sweeny Todd and A Little Night Music

Company

Pamela Myers and Teri Ralston, both in the original company of “Company.” Ralston also originated a role in “A Little Night Music”

Anyone Can Whistle

Follies

Harvey Evans, who originated roles in Anyone Can Whistle and Follies

Kurt Peterson, who originate role in Follies

Len Cariou, one of the five performers who recently reminisced about having originated roles in musicals by Stephen Sondheim, recalls getting the script for “Sweeney Todd” and thinking “You’ve got to be kidding!” But at the end of the first preview, although it was plagued by technical glitches, Sondheim came backstage and exclaimed about the audience: “The understood it! They f— understood it,” and performer and composer hugged.

Cariou and the others — Harvey Evans, Pamela Myers, Kurt Peterson and Teri Ralston, who variously originated roles in “Anyone Can Whistle,” “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” and “Sweeney Todd,” (and performed in the original “West Side Story” and “Gypsy”)  — gathered over the weekend to talk for 90 minutes about their experiences with the composer who changed their lives. The video below is an 18-minute excerpt, answering the question: What advice did Sondheim give you?

“I don’t remember his giving us too many notes,”says Harvey Evans, who performed in the original Broadway productions of West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle and Follies. “I wish he had given me more personal help.” But he did give them stories.

Pamela Myers auditioned for the original production of “Company,” having just moved to New York from Ohio. A little while later, Sondheim came up to her: “I wrote a song for you.” “I guess I got the part,” Myers recalls thinking. The song was “Another Hundred People” The note she got from Sondheim and director Hal Prince: “The song is about joy. Most people would not think that, but it’s about how much somebody loves living in New York. That’s all they had to tell me.” “He’s the only genius I ever met in my life.”

Kurt Peterson, who had starred as Tony in the 1968 Broadway revival of West Side Story, and created the role of Young Ben in Sondheim’s Follies, became a producer in 1973, putting together a concert entitled “Sondheim – A Musical Tribute.” It had been a taxing endeavor, Peterson recalls, so much so that at the end, Sondheim said to him: “Now that the last few months have aged you so, you’ll never have to play a juvenile again.”

Teri Ralston, said that she wasn’t impressed when in 1970 Sondheim cast her in 1970 as Jenny in the original production of Company. “I didn’t know who he was. That’s how I naïve I was.” On the last day of the run, Sondheim told her that her performance had been ‘perfect.’ “I will carry that with me forever.” Three years later she originated the role of Mrs. Nordstrom in “A Little Night Music.” “I didn’t know what I was learning then,” she says. “I know that now.”

The five appeared in a panel discussion moderated by Rick Penner as part of the American Theatre Critics Association conference, at Don’t Tell Mama’s, November 5, 2017.

Sondheim Originators on His Advice to Them Len Cariou, one of the five performers who recently reminisced about having originated roles in musicals by Stephen Sondheim, recalls getting the script for “Sweeney Todd” and thinking “You’ve got to be kidding!” But at the end of the first preview, although it was plagued by technical glitches, Sondheim came backstage and exclaimed about the audience: “The understood it!