Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim
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Hershey Felder, who’s made a career of one-man shows in which he plays a composers, acting & playing the piano as Gershwin, Chopin, etc., tackles Bernstein in his current show, Maestro Leonard Bernstein, which is in Boston this coming week.
The Saturday night performance has been bought out by the New Center for Arts and Culture for a Jewish community night, but they still have tickets available. If you’re a student, send me a message and I can share a discount code with you. (I’d post it, but I wrote it down at my office and I’m not there right now… And no, you don’t have to be Jewish to come on Jewish community night.)
Huntington Theatre (Boston) Managing Director Michael Maso performs “Broadway Baby” from Follies during the his acceptance speech of the Wimberly Award at the company’s 2012 Spotlight Spectacular.
Michael Maso received the 2012 Wimberly Award, the Huntington’s highest honor. Michael has served as the Huntington’s Managing Director since 1982, producing more than 170 plays in partnership with three artistic directors, growing the Huntington’s budget from $750,000 to $13.2 million, and leading the Huntington’s ten-year drive to build the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. His considerable efforts have played a significant role in positioning the Huntington as one of the country’s leading regional theatres.
Any other Boston peeps going to see West Side Story at the Coolidge Corner Theater on Monday the 14th?
This is a recording of Dean Jones singing “Happily Ever After” during the out of town tryouts for Company in Boston in 1970. I’ve always liked this song, despite its grim outlook, and have been frustrated that there’s never been a full-length recording of it with an orchestra. (The only full-length recording of it I know of is Craig Lucas’s rendition, backed by a piano, on the original cast album of “Marry Me A Little.”)
Jones’s performance is impeccable, which isn’t surprising, given that his own marriage was falling apart at the time and this song probably matched his mindset more accurately than any of the other closing numbers that cycled through Company during its development.
Perhaps even more exciting is hearing, for the first time, Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations for the song. Those Bacharach-influenced horns! The Vocal Minority! It’s all pretty much brilliant. I wish we had a high-fidelity recording of these charts. Maybe someday we’ll get one.
And a big thank you to Jonathon for letting me experience this!
This article, from this coming Sunday’s Boston Globe, includes me telling stories of making friends on the Sondheim Listserv. (That’s my picture at the top of the page too.)
The link above is to the Variety review of that production, which was directed by Larry Carpenter and starred Davis Gaines and Karen Mason. The big conceit of it was to give Bobby a profession — he was a photographer. Was this inspired by Mark in Rent? Maybe, although I don’t remember making that connection at the time. But it served the same purpose as a commentary on how he watched his life rather than lived it. It worked.
