#Tunesmith harold crossword movie
Sondheim says he had an immediate emotional response to the movie when he saw it in 1983 and seized on its possibilities as a musical. The commanding officer there has taken responsibility for his cousin Fosca (Donna Murphy), an ugly, mysteriously ill creature who sets her sights on Giorgio-with tragic consequences. In it, the soldier Giorgio (Jere Shea) is having an affair with Clara (Marin Mazzie), a lovely married woman, when he is suddenly transferred to a remote and barren post. Sondheim and Lapine, like Scola, based the musical directly on an 1869 Italian novel, “Fosca,” by Iginio Tarchetti. “Passion” is inspired by Ettore Scola’s 1981 Italian film “Passione d’Amore” (“Passion of Love”). It might make an audience more comfortable but it wouldn’t be the story we had in mind.” “Fosca is a wild character but it would be a mistake to water her down. “There will always be people in the audience who resist this story because it’s bizarre, it’s very close to the bone,” says Sondheim, sitting in the downstairs lobby of the Plymouth Theater between performances, looking calm and confident amid a hectic schedule of revisions. But this time out, the show’s detractors maintain that Sondheim and Lapine have simply outreached themselves. Sondheim is 63, and his febrile creativity shows no signs of burnout. Martin Gottfried, in his new book, “Sondheim,” goes so far as to call him “the conscience of all Broadway musicals.” His fans are so devoted that each new Sondheim show becomes a kind of artistic flashpoint, if not a religious experience, for some theatergoers. But Sondheim has been honored with six Tony Awards and numerous tributes, including last year’s Kennedy Center Honor. Together they came up with the non-linear “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods,” a Freudian immersion into fairy tale, and now “Passion.”įew of his shows have made buckets of money-his first as both composer and lyricist, 1962’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” remains his most lucrative. In 1970, he and director Harold Prince began a collaboration with the groundbreaking “Company” and went on to create such memorable shows as “A Little Night Music,” “Follies” and “Pacific Overtures.” When the pair broke up in 1980 after the failure of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Sondheim continued the experiments with Lapine. Though he began by writing lyrics in a more traditional mode for such musicals as “West Side Story” and “Gypsy” in the ‘50s, Sondheim served notice early on that he was willing to push the envelope.
#Tunesmith harold crossword serial
This is a composer, after all, who has given musical voice to some of the most unexpected characters in musical theater, including a serial murderer (“Sweeney Todd”), a pointillist painter (“Sunday in the Park With George”) and killers of Presidents (“Assassins”). The wildly divergent views shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed troubled preview periods of other Sondheim musicals, including “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George"-both of which became hits-and “Merrily We Roll Along,” his last musical with director Harold Prince, which flopped. “I loved it,” confessed another theatergoer, visibly awed. “He ought to be ashamed of himself,” muttered one man as he trundled up the aisle in the middle of a performance. Major revisions in the show began, and the producers postponed the opening for 11 days to May 9 to give the creators a chance to clarify a character and to bolster the strange story.
Word spread quickly on the street and in the press that the $4.5-million musical was in trouble, plagued with occasional walkouts and derisive laughter during serious moments. Since “Passion” began performances early last month, the response has been vociferous.
“We can relate to her.”īut the question during this preview period is: Can the Broadway audience relate to this woman? “Stephen and I understand this woman,” says James Lapine, the librettist and director of the musical in which Fosca, a sickly recluse, becomes obsessed with Giorgio, a handsome 19th-Century Italian army captain. Yet she is arguably the most daring and personally felt character of any of Sondheim’s shows-and one of the most troublesome. “Passion,” the new Stephen Sondheim musical, features a character who is probably the most repulsive, obsessive and uningratiating woman ever to grace the Broadway musical stage.
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