parterre box serves up an amuse-bouche of Natalie Dessay as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd in Strasbourg!
This week, Chris’s Cache offers a performance of Follies from 2007 featuring Lucine Amara as a rarely richly sung Heidi alongside Donna Murphy and Victoria Clark.
During the 1970s, Stephen Sondheim composed Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd–five richly varied masterpieces of musical theater in a nearly miraculous burst of creativity.
On June 16, San Francisco Opera concluded their excellent Centennial Season with a heartfelt 100th Anniversary Concert, featuring a starry cast, three conductors (including current and former Music Directors) and the SF Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
Sweeney Todd is by any measure a triumphant show, the kind that makes an audience understand why Broadway is American theater’s gold standard
A quick survey of the Met website shows wide swaths of available seats for the upcoming performances of La traviata and L’elisir d’amore. Only new works like The Hours and Fire Shut Up in My Bones have been achieving sold-out houses.
The Kennedy Center’s Opera House was a white-hot crucible of theatre kid energy on Friday evening for a luxurious 50 Years of Broadway at the Kennedy Center gala.
I see in Kimberly Akimbo an audacious idea, once unthinkable territory for a musical, which is realized through a highly imaginative and often unpredictable use of song and especially open-ended ensemble writing.
The mixture of romance and realism in Sondheim songs, the revelation that while love could be grand and passionate it could also be mundane or inconvenient or mistimed or just plain embarrassing, was such a relief.
Steve adored puzzles, solving them and creating them, so it makes you wonder that this one continued to fester—was that so few of his songs attained the rank of “standard.”
When I think of Stephen Sondheim, so many of my memories are not simply about shows of his I loved and learned from—they are experiences that literally shaped my life.
Stephen Sondheim turns 90 on Sunday, prompting Trove Thursday to present his most “operatic” work, Sweeney Todd, in a rare 2002 performance with Christine Baranski and Brian Stokes Mitchell as the murderous duo.
The Day Before Spring , while not exactly experimental, shows a young and adventurous team thinking both traditionally and out-of-the-box.
In crafting his musicals, Sondheim’s focus, regardless of genre, tends towards the processive.
The singularity of Stephen Sondheim contributes to the conception of him as a camp figure.
Celebrating Lenny’s 100th this year has made Candide ubiquitous at opera houses worldwide.
I’ve always believed that Follies, like life, should be relentless and inescapable.
Today’s offering is an electric performance of Verdi’s early potboiler Attila conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli.
Forty-five years ago today, Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant, frustrating Follies played its first Broadway preview at the Winter Garden Theatre.
After her marvelous Pat Nixon at the Théâtre du Châtelet two years ago, June Anderson returned there last Wednesday with pianist Jeff Cohen for a recital of French melodies and Broadway songs.
The stunning New Broadway Cast Recording
of Sondheim’s Follies is currently on sale on Amazon for an astonishing $4.99.
Legendary “Queen of Exotica” Yma Sumac has died at the age of 86. Among many credits in a career spanning more than half a century was a screen appearance as (obviously) a Peruvian priestess in the 1954 film Secret of the Incas.
Good times and bum times — She saw them all, but my dear,She’s no longer here.The actress everyone is eulogizing as the “definitive Lily Munster” had another, in La Cieca’s opinion far more important credit. In 1971 Yvonne de Carlo created the role of Carlotta Campion in Follies, and introduced the showbiz anthem “I’m Still…
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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