Blog

A century ago this month, people who read Liberty magazine were talking about Ring Lardner’s newest short story. “Haircut” involves a barber who talked and talked while serving a customer sitting in his chair. The 13-page story starts off blithely enough but soon devolves into a dark tale of severe sexual situations and murder. The […]

Fair warning: this column will appear to be something between a mild shill and a hard sell. But, really, I know you’ll have a better time at OPERATION MINCEMEAT if you hear the cast album in advance. The plain truth is that many of the songs that David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Zoe Roberts wrote […]

“Has anyone noticed how many R&H works have kids in them?” Ethan Mordden asked that question in his 1992 book Rodgers & Hammerstein. “The answer,” he then told us, “is nine out of eleven.” True. Only OKLAHOMA! and ME AND JULIET don’t feature children. You might argue that ALLEGRO doesn’t, either, but it does start […]

For the past weeks, I’ve been hypothesizing that Stephen Sondheim consciously or unconsciously reworked the musicals that his mentor Oscar Hammerstein wrote with Richard Rodgers. Some changes were due to changing mores. More, however, had to do with Sondheim’s differing worldview. Note how both wrote about marriage. Granted, their own personal experiences must have influenced […]

I asked the question last week, and I’ll ask it again. Have you ever noticed that Stephen Sondheim wound up writing new and edgier versions of the musicals that his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote with Richard Rodgers? Last week, I compared what the two did with a famous fairy tale: Hammerstein’s CINDERELLA and Sondheim’s […]