1st Edition

Stephen Sondheim A Casebook

Edited By Joanne Gordon Copyright 1998

    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.

    General Editor's Note, Kimball King * Introduction, Joanne Gordon * Chronology * Broadway Babies: Images of Women in the Musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Laura Hanson * Comedy Tonight!: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way tot the Forum, Lois Kivesto * Company 25 Years Later, John Olson * Nixon's America and Follies: Reappraising a Musical Theater Classic, James Fisher * The Last of Sheila: Sondheim as Master Games-Player, Douglas Braverman * On Performing Sondheim ( A Little Night Music Revisited), David Craig * More Beautiful than True or Never Mind the Small Disaster: The Art of Illusion in Pacific Overtures, Leonard Fleischer * Psychology, Evil and Sweeney Todd or, Don't I Know You, Mister?, Judith Schlesinger * Sondheim: The Idealist, Mari Cronin * Let the Pupil Show the Master Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein II, Andrew Milner * Portrait of the Artist: Sunday in the Park with George and Revolutionary Musical Drama, Edward T. Bonahue, Jr. * Assassins and the Concept Musical, Scott Miller * Passion: Not Just Another Simple Love Story, Gary Konas * Revisiting Greece: the Sondheim Chorus, Barbara Means Fraser * Contributors * Index

    Biography

    Joanne Gordon