Sondheim at Herbst Theater

Posted on Mar 11, 2008 | 1 comment
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This past Sunday was a date I’d been anticipating for months. As part of the City Arts and Lectures series here in San Francisco, Stephen Sondheim sat down with Frank Rich for a thoroughly spontaneous and entertaining hour-and-a-half discussion. Now, I’ve read and heard so many interviews and similar Sondheim talks over the years, so there was very...

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Sondheim's Favorite: "Someone in a Tree"

Posted on Jan 4, 2008 | 0 comments
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It is well known among Sondheim kooks such as myself that Stephen Sondheim’s favorite among his own songs is “Someone in a Tree” from the 1976 musical Pacific Overtures. I love this song too, but it’s never been clear to me exactly why it stands out in particular for Sondheim. Briefly, the song attempts to deal with a particular event...

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Sweeney Fatigue

Posted on Dec 31, 2007 | 5 comments
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Why am I so uninterested in the new Sweeney Todd movie? It’s as much a surprise to me as it is to anyone who knows me. I remember being excited about it about 15 years ago when there began to be noise about a Tim Burton adaptation, but in recent years I’ve lost interest. The original stage version of Sweeney Todd is a masterpiece, and I’ve...

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Bay Area Announcement #1: D'Arc, Woman on Fire

Posted on Oct 11, 2007 | 0 comments
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It will be worth your while to see writer/performer Amanda Moody’s latest music theater piece D’Arc, Woman on Fire, music by Jay Cloidt, at Footloose & Shotwell Studios. D’Arc offers a surreal inquiry into the costs of dreams, lived and unlived. Weaving the threads of the Dark Ages with our own dark times, D’Arc depicts a present-day...

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Revisiting the Trunk: "You Must Learn"

Posted on Oct 5, 2007 | 0 comments
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Throughout the year I’ve been occasionally posting recordings of songs from my earlier musical The Ghost of Wu. Today’s installment is the song “You Must Learn”, in which an ambitious mother lectures her naïve daughter, a concubine, in the ways of the Emperor’s court. This song is probably the most Sondheim-derivative thing...

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