Stephen Sondheim

A Casebook

Joanne Gordon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135702175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Stephen Sondheim is an artist with many contradictory facets: he is an avant-garde composer and lyricist working in the populist art form, an apparently dry and acerbic critic who captures all the ambivalent pain of passion, an intellectual whose work contains some of the funniest bawdy lines on the Broadway stage. He has chosen to confront an audience that is usually looking for escapist literature with the very issues it has fled to the theatre to avoid. This collection of original essays takes particular pains to present Sondheim's diversity in a chronological plan that illustrates how each new work grew out of the previous one. Some of the topics covered are the evolution of Sondheim's female characters, who take us far beyond the usual sweet ingenues; the Roman farce antecedents of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the resemblances between Sondheim's chorus and the chorus in ancient Greek drama; Sondheim and the concept musical; and Sondheim's maturing philosophy. All students of the modern theatre and the modern musical will want to read this book.

Index

A

A Chorus Line 81, 190, 191

Abbott, George 43

Albee, Edward 5, 70

Allegro 6, 27, 158–167

American Dream 72, 75, 76, 79, 83, 188, 191, 193, 194, 198–200, 202, 246

Antigone 224, 225

Anything Goes 226

archetype 7, 23, 215, 216, 218

Arena Stage 167

areté 223–225, 229

Aronson, Boris 72

Atkinson, Brooks 159

Ayers, Lemuel 2

B

Babbitt, Milton 2

Bacharach, Burt 48

Banfield, Stephen 80, 183

Barnes, Clive 43, 162

Beauty and the Beast 205, 209

Bennett, Michael 72, 73, 78, 80, 94, 203

Bergman, Ingmar 90

Bernstein, Leonard 2, 160, 248

Billington, Michael 71

Birch, Patricia 94

Blanchard, Dorothy 162

Bond, Christopher 129

Brecht, Bertolt 184, 188

Brigadoon 53, 225, 226

Brustein, Robert 36

C

Cabaret 188–194, 198

Carmen Jones 158

Carousel 14, 19, 30, 158, 203

Chaplin, Charles 220

Chicago 188, 189, 191

chorus, Greek 7, 129...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Broadway Babies Images of Women in the Musicals of Stephen Sondheim
• Comedy Tonight! A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
• Company—25 Years Later
• Nixon’s America and Follies Reappraising a Musical Theater Classic
• The Last of Sheila Sondheim as Master Games-Player
• On Performing Sondheim A Little Night Music Revisited
• “More Beautiful Than True” or “Never Mind a Small Disaster”: The Art of Illusion in Pacific Overtures
• Psychology, Evil, and Sweeney Todd or, “Don’t I Know You, Mister?”
• Sondheim: The Idealist
• “Let the Pupil Show the Master” Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein II
• Portraits of the Artist Sunday in the Park with George as “Postmodern” Drama
• Assassins and the Concept Musical
• Passion Not Just Another Simple Love Story
• Revisiting Greece The Sondheim Chorus
• Contributors
• Index