New Broadway steeped in tradition

 

by Michael Kotze

 

Stephen Sondheim has had an amazing career. Though justifiably regarded as one of New Broadway’s great innovators, his work is deeply rooted in the traditions of Old Broadway. When Light Opera Works presents the revue Side By Side By Sondheim, you’ll get a rare opportunity to hear songs from such groundbreaking shows as Company, Follies and Pacific Overtures side by side with Sondheim’s earlier collaborations with American musical theater giants Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Richard Rodgers.

 

In the last 40 years or so of Sondheim’s career, in which he set his own words to his own music in a series of highly praised and hugely influential shows, it is almost easy to forget he spent part of his early career providing lyrics to some of Broadway’s most eminent and established composers. Easy to forget, that is, were it not for the fact that two of the shows in question stand among the very greatest ever produced on Broadway: Bernstein’s West Side Story and Styne’s Gypsy.

 

Receiving the torch

 

But Sondheim’s Broadway roots go even deeper. As a teenager, he lived in the same neighborhood as Broadway legend Oscar Hammerstein II. Having written a musical comedy performed to great acclaim at his high school, young Sondheim took the script to Hammerstein for his opinion. The old pro didn’t mince words; the show was terrible. But if the young man wanted to know why it was terrible, Hammerstein would take the time to tell him. Sondheim later recalled, “In that afternoon I learned more about songwriting and the musical theater than most people learn in a lifetime.”

 

So began a remarkable mentorship, in which the author of Show Boat, Oklahoma! and The King and I generously shared the benefit of his experience with a kid who went on to write A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. It’s astounding to think the man who wrote Rose Marie passed the torch to the creator of Assassins.

 

One can hear Sondheim’s reverence for Broadway’s Golden Age in his songs for Follies, his glorious eulogy to lost love, lost youth and the forgotten byways of American show business. A few of the best are featured in Side By Side, including “I’m Still Here,“ a four-minute epic in which a veteran actress recounts her harrowing ups and downs, and “Losing My Mind,” a torch song to rival the best of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin.

 

You‘ll hear these songs and more in this tribute to the wunderkind who went on to become Broadway’s grand old man.

 

 Jennifer Davis-Johnson, George Wolff and Mary Robin Roth star in Side by Side by Sondheim.

 

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