Sondheim on Sondheim

Musical (2010)

With Leigh Barrett, Mal Bhattacharya, Maritza Bostic, Christopher Chew, Aimee Doherty, Davron S. Monroe, Sam Sinahk, Patric Varner

There are some things that you just don’t want to end, and this is one of them. As I sat there during the course of this two hour and forty minute musical and film tribute to Stephen Sondheim, I realized I could have gone on for hours more.

Everything about this production is beautifully done. The singing, the dancing, the movement, the staging overall is first-rate.

The setup of the show is quite simple: song after song from the Sondheim repertory is fitted in between snips of film with pieces of interviews with Sondheim from various points in his life are projected on various screens around the set. The songs have something to do with what he’s just talked about.

It all starts and ends with a song from Company, a show about an unmarried guy named Bobby who is nudged by his friends to hook up with someone. As Sondheim himself notes in one of the interviews, everybody assumes that Bobby is really Sondheim; Sondheim denies it. In fact, he declares quite clearly that he didn’t pick the subject-matter or write the book for that show, or for most of the other shows for which he wrote the music and the lyrics.

Deftly interlaced throughout are either integral songs from any number of the shows, exquisitely performed by the amazing company that’s been mounted for the production, or medleys of them aggregated artfully.

Sondheim’s interview clips are wonderfully engaging; whoever selected them did a great job. Overall the video created and designed by Peter Flaherty is excellent. One might think that a show relying on interview after interview with the same person would get monotonous, but it is not one bit so. Part of that is due to the adeptness of the selections, and the rest is a function of Sondheim’s engaging intelligence and genuineness.

It is heartbreaking to hear Sondheim, for example, talk about his mother. At one point well on into the show, after alluding to the difficulties he had with her, Sondheim recalls the moment whenhis mother wrote him a letter declaring “the only regret [she] ever had was giving him birth.” Sondheim says it with a kind of directness that is neither callous nor defensive nor fake. He reports it honestly and reflects on it as an important formative factor in his life. How sad and how difficult; and yet how inspiring it is that this greatly inventive and expressive artist can be so frank, open and vulnerable.

Sondheim’s account of his relationship with Oscar Hammerstein II, who became a surrogate father for him, is also touching and inspiring. Apparently, after Sondheim, as a young boy, and his mother moved to Doylestown, PA, they found themselves a few miles down the road from the Hammersteins. Sondheim’s mother made some kind of connection with Hammerstein and his family. Ten year old Sondheim became friendly with Oscar Hammerstein’s son, James, and wound up becoming close to the family and deeply inspired by Oscar Hammerstein’s example. As a result, very early on, Sondheim decided he wanted to do what Hammerstein did – become a creator of musical theater. As Sondheim says in one of the clips, had Hammerstein been a geologist, Sondheim might well have become one himself, so inspired was he by him.

After wetting his feet in musical theater as a professional at the age of twenty-three, Sondheim was offered the role of lyricist in a new show in development by Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein. Sondheim hesitated at the offer because he desperately wanted to write his own music as well as lyrics, but Hammerstein encouraged him to accept because the team was so good that felt Sondheim would learn a lot from the experience. As it turned out that show became West Side Story and made theater history. Sondheim’s distinctive lyrics became immortalized in that great early success.

The stories go on and on, capturing many different dimensions of Sondheim’s life and career; they are endlessly fascinating.

The cast of this show is out of this world. Everyone in the ensemble shines, and individually and together they produce a result that is scintillating and captivating.

Some of the performers are well-known to Boston musical theater audiences; Leigh Barrett, Christopher Chew, and Aimee Doherty have done exceptional work on Boston stages for many years and they do it here with great verve and style.

Among other things, Leigh Barrett gives a beautiful account of the great Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music (1973). It comes near the end of the show, well after a spoofy film tribute showing everyone under the sun singing a piece of it: Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Patti LaBelle, Barbra Streisand, among numerous others. It’s a funny montage, and then charmingly echoed with incredible sweetness and poignancy in Barrett’s rendition delivered later in the show.

Aimee Doherty has a electrically wry presence and innate vivacity that frequently sparks the stage, and here she provides that in spades.

Christopher Chew, as well, comes to this production with distinctive panache, charm and buoyancy.

The voices of these three established Boston musical theater stars are vivid and wonderful.

But equally talented, charming and full of potent voice are the other members of the cast who are perhaps somewhat less familiar on the Boston scene.

Mala Bhattacharya is a marvel to watch and to listen to. She moves with wonderful grace, and her voice is warm and supple.

Davron S. Monroe has a beautiful tenor that carries through wonderfully on its own but mixes excellently in ensemble.

And Moritz Bostic, Sam Sinahk and Patrick Varner are all as well excellent complements in this first-rate company.

Music direction by Jonathan Goldberg is wonderfully adept throughout.

Choreography by Ilyse Robbins is beautifully conceived and executed, with subtle but entertaining movements making all the difference. The actors pull them off with a command, assurance that makes everything flow.

The simple but effective set by David Towlun features suggestions of several 3D marquees drawn in arrays of lights; it’s basic but it really works as an entertaining background and as a frame for the screens on which the film clips are shown.

Most of all, the cast carries off excellently onstage what Sondheim exhibits on screen – a relaxed assurance that communicates an accomplished sense of artistry but also a good deal of fun. It’s a winning combination.

The Lyric has really hit a home run here. Don’t miss it.

– BADMan