Latest in Stephen Sondheim

In honor of Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday next March, London’s Queen’s Theatre will be renamed Sondheim Theatre after the influential American composer and lyricist. This will make Sondheim the only living artist to have a theatre named for him both in the West End and on Broadway. Theater owner Cameron Mackintosh…

IFC’s Documentary Now! has cut a vinyl record of the music from an upcoming episode,Original Cast Album: Co-op. Six new Sondheim-ian songs were written for the send up of Original Cast Album: Company, the 1970 D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the grueling overnight cast recording of Stephen Sondheim’s hit…

IFC’s Documentary Now! will take on Sondheim, Stritch and the ladies who lunch in a 2019 episode parodying D.A. Pennebaker’s classic making-of Company documentary. The episode, called “Original Cast Album: Co-Op”, will chronicle the recording of a cast album for the fictional musical Co-Op. Taran Killam, John…

Producers of the long-running Off-Broadway production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street said the intimate, immersive rendering of the Stephen Sondheim masterpiece will close on August 26. Sweeney Todd‘s original Broadway incarnation in 1979 remains one of the peak moments in musical theater history…

I probably don’t have to tell you that the husband and wife duo of John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey are the gold standard of cabaret performers, classing up even joints not in need of classing, like the swanky Café Carlyle. More than talent, of which they share an unseemly amount, and their sheer musical…

Thoughtful, self-possessed and charismatically morose, Oscar Isaac inhabits Shakespeare’s melancholy prince as naturally as the sweater he wraps himself in. This youthful Hamlet is most compelling during soliloquies as familiar to us as speech itself, delivered in the hushed cadence of prayers seeking grace, and…

I’m sure I’m not alone in remembering my junior high school history class about Admiral Perry and the “opening” of Japan. We know that Perry and his ships arrived with a double mandate: Get the Imperial navy to stop killing the crews on China-bound vessels shipwrecked in neighboring seas, and, more important, invoke…

It was the best of pies, it was the worst of pies. Benjamin Barker, AKA Sweeney Todd, has set up his terrifying tonsorium in Greenwich Village, and in contrast to John’s of Bleecker Street around the block, where you can’t get a slice but only a pie, at Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, you can get both…

And then there were 41. Broadway’s roster of houses, where stars are born or confirmed, and where theater folks come in hopes of finding Tony glory, expanded by one Thursday night with the re-opening of the Hudson Theatre, recently taken over by the Ambassador Theatre Group, updated and restored to autumnal golden…

Who knew? Jake Gyllenhaal can be brooding (Brokeback Mountain), intense (Nightcrawler, Zodiac) and weird (Enemy). But who knew he could out-Mandy Patinkin Mandy Patinkin? Yet that’s exactly what he does in the outstanding concert version of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday In Th…

Indie distributor Abramorama just launched Ron Howard’s Beatles doc The Beatles: Eight Days A Week — The Touring Years. Heading into the New York Film Fest season, the company has acquired distribution rights to Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, the Scott Rudin and Eli Bush exec produced documentary…

Emerging from the ashes of bankruptcy and mismanagement, the revived New York City Opera will present a season beginning in September at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater and other venues, General Director Michael Capasso announced today. Among the offerings are two with strong roots on Broadway: The New York…