Guest Blog: No second acts in American lives? Take that, Scott Fitzgerald!
By David Foil Call it a tipping point. Call it a watershed. Call it, by all means, a “magic moment.” However you characterize it, Barbara Cook’s concert at Carnegie Hall on January 29, 1975, was a kind of joyous pivotal event in our love affair with classic American songs. Columbia Masterworks’ live recording of the […]
Sondheim the Balladeer
The vast majority of Broadway ballads springs from boy-meets-girl, boy-loves-girl romance. But you know that Stephen Sondheim; he’s always looking for ways to expand musical theater horizons. So while the new anthology, Send in the Clowns: The Ballads of Stephen Sondheim – now available for digital downloads — does offer odes to love, it shows […]
Comedy Tonight!
In “Comedy Tonight,” one of Broadway’s best opening numbers (for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962), Stephen Sondheim wrote “Weighty affairs will just have to wait” – a nice example of his deft wordplay. But this week, we’re talking about an eighty affair that just cannot wait. We must […]
Why You Should Hear a Waltz
I’ve often seen it happen, soon after Stephen Sondheim has taken the stage and is interviewed by a moderator. Eventually the moderator opens the floor to questions, and inevitably, someone asks, “Mr. Sondheim, of all your shows, what’s your favorite?” Just as inevitably, Sondheim answers, “I don’t have a favorite, but I have a least […]
What Cast Albums Give That Soundtracks Don’t, Part II
You may recall that last week I listed 25 of the best songs that cast albums offer that soundtracks do not – because, more often than not, the film versions dropped these musical gems. Although there are well more than a hundred that fit that category, I whittled my personal favorites list down to 50 […]
