The 92Y s Lyrics & Lyricistsseries shined its impressive lights on the six musical collaborations betweenStephen Sondheim and Harold Prince that began hopefully with the stinginglyinsightful Company(1970) and ended with the disappointing disaster of MerrilyWe … Perhaps we don’t need to be placated like that anymore. The nonprofits served Sondheim well, giving him the freedom to create Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, Passion, and Bounce (still unseen on Broadway) in the late ’80s and ’90s. Tickets: $15. Merrily We Roll Along is a musical with a book by George Furth and lyrics and music by Stephen Sondheim. His musicals won’t have, they couldn’t have, the electric tension that put true believers on the edges of their seats from 1970 to 1981, as theatrical innovation and show-biz tradition collided, canoodled, and, in the astonishing best of the Sondheim-Prince productions, declared that the Broadway musical could do it all. A few phrases from "Sweeney Todd," fixed in my head, send up a shiver of guilty thrills whenever I summon them. Fifty years ago this fall, when the young lyricist for West Side Story made his Broadway debut, only one New York critic even bothered to mention his name. The Bay Area has been especially fertile ground for Sondheim over the years. For more than a decade, Hammerstein had been instructing Sondheim in the craft of writing show tunes, firmly discouraging early attempts to emulate the bucolic imagery of Oklahoma! “I could not do it again because I could not in conscience raise the money.” Running the show was so costly ($80,000 a week) that, even though Follies played for more than a year, it lost its entire $800,000 initial investment. Even the operatically inclined "Sweeney Todd" has patches of heart-stopping beauty, in "Johanna" and "Pretty Women," amid the dissonant carnage. and Carousel. Eugene Lee’s elaborate sets and Prince’s epic staging gave the original production a scale that wasn’t at all what Sondheim had had in mind but probably contributed to the production’s popular success: you certainly felt you were getting a lot for your money, watching 28 actors running around all that scenery. The masterpiece of Sondheim’s work with Prince, Sweeney Todd, lay eight years ahead. Pragmatically speaking, Frank Rich had a point. Perhaps, if they’d had a chance to sweat it out in Boston or New Haven, they would have found a way to make this concept work; Sondheim described the New York previews as “exhilarating . Skip to main content Hello, Sign in. It started out like a song, We started quiet and slow with no surprise, Then one morning I woke to realize We have a good thing going. Celebrations, videotaped performances, seminars, exhibitions and special concerts -- such as the New York Philharmonic's lauded semistaged "Sweeney Todd" earlier this month -- keep Sondheim consistently in the mind's eye and ear and onstage in one form or another. Sondheim and Arthur Laurents had tried to do the same thing five decades earlier with “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy, feeling that this psycho­drama-in-song would be trivialized by applause. West Side Story did indeed provide something of a blueprint for Sondheim’s subsequent career, but not precisely the one he suggested to Secrest. It is indicative of the surprises that will enthrall you as you listen to Steve Ross, a master of the art of cabaret, interpret the songs of Stephen Sondheim, a master of the … In a recent interview marking his 70th birthday, Stephen Sondheim hit some melancholy notes about himself and the musical theater that's been his life. good thing going: a definitive version of a sondheim classic comes to boston Written by CHRISTOPHER EHLERS Posted September 14, 2017 Filed Under: A+E , Performing Arts Eden Espinosa, Jennifer Ellis, Mark Umbers, and Damian Humbley in Merrily We Roll Along | Photo by T. Charles Erickson Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Breathless at a revival of "Pacific Overtures," I heard "Someone in a Tree" for the first time and wanted to hear it again and again, right away, even as I wanted the story of Japan's future to press on. In 2006, Doyle repositioned Company’s “Marry Me a Little”—an important song cut in 1970 because it manifestly couldn’t close the show—to the end of act one, where it perfectly captured Bobby’s mistaken concept of marriage: “We won’t have to give up a thing, / We’ll stay who we are.” Without it, “Being Alive,” Bobby’s final song, didn’t make much sense, and it is evident in Dean Jones’s singing on the original cast soundtrack. Teen reported missing from Oakland found dead in rural NorCal, What to know about new virus detected in India that's in Bay Area. -- "The Art of Making Art: A Celebration of Stephen Sondheim": An exhibit chronicling the composer-lyricist's career continues through June 30 at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, Fourth Floor, Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. He would go on with other collaborators to plumb such deeply felt subjects as the joy of creation in Sunday in the Park with George and the overwhelming force of love in Passion. Both are spare and seemingly repetitive up close, and ravishing overall. Instead of soothing, caressing or march- stepping an audience to attention, Sondheim's music pries open the musical theater container and invites a different, more intimate kind of engagement. Stream ad-free or purchase CD's and MP3s now on Amazon.com. Enough people cared about what Sondheim and Prince were trying to do in 1976 to keep the original production of Pacific Overtures afloat for 193 performances at the vast (albeit seldom full) Winter Garden Theatre. Making a modern musical out of George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1934 play was a tricky proposition. in 1943, Broadway music still sounded much the same as pop music and was still sold to the same broad audience. But by the time the failure of Merrily We Roll Along ended the Sondheim/Prince partnership in 1981, Broadway’s ballooning costs, higher ticket prices, and shrinking audiences required a new approach to developing a musical. But before anyone tries to close out the richest chapter in the past half-century of musical theater, consider the evidence. “I am happy I did Follies,” Prince wrote in Contradictions. Its chronology was reversed, beginning with a successful playwright (a composer in the musical) at the peak of his fame and moving backward in time to show how he has betrayed his ideals and his friends. None of this would matter if it didn't come together in gorgeous ways. He would continue to balance artistic imperatives against fiscal reality through four more shows with Sondheim. Sondheim’s shows since then have continued to explore that territory; and as long as musical theater exists, his entire repertory will continue to be fruitfully restaged and reexamined. [Intro] F C Bb F [Verse 1] F C It started out like a song F A We started quiet and slow A7 With no surprise F E7sus4 Dm9 And then one morning I woke D7 To realize Gm7 C We had a good thing going [Verse 2] F C It's not that nothing went wrong: F A Some angry moments, of course A7 But just a few F E7sus4 Dm9 And only moments, no more D7 Because we knew Gm7 C We had this good thing going … It is conceived and directed by James Lapine. It's not that nothing went wrong, some angry moment of course, but just a few, And only moments no more because we knew we had a good thing going. According to the Theorytab database, it is the 6th most popular key among Major keys and the 9th most popular among all keys. Download Stephen Sondheim Good Thing Going sheet music. Sondheim was a theater composer, not a songwriter, but the schism that had appeared between those job descriptions was part of a larger trend that was unhealthy for the American musical. With its roots in the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein, its offshoots popping up everywhere from opera halls to subscription houses, Sweeney stood at a crossroads for the American musical. Follies was a bold departure for every member of the creative team, none of whom had any notion that they were “in essence presenting their own funeral,” as Rich asserted in his closing sentence. This woman, 82, dresses to the nines each Sunday for virtual church. Sondheim, as both his ardent fans and detractors would agree, goes places no other composer or lyricist does. The movie musical was entering artistic senescence just as the Broadway musical was being revitalized by a new generation. That said, it's perfectly clear that Sondheim makes a different kind of … Contemplating children years ago, my wife-to-be and I emerged speechless and tearstained from "Into the Woods" and headed straight for the trees in Central Park. Lyrics & Lyricists , 92Y. Rock ’n’ roll—which had recently emerged at the time Sondheim did West Side Story in 1957—coexisted with show tunes and traditional pop material into the 1960s, but it had long since become the dominant style in American music. New York audiences had to console themselves with this season's off-Broadway run of an early Sondheim show, "Saturday Night," that its creator critiqued as the artistic equivalent of his "baby pictures" -- "not bad stuff for a 23-year-old.". Fifty years ago this fall, when the young lyricist for West Side Story made his Broadway debut, only one New York critic even bothered to mention his name. “We are each an individual part of the picture,” he remarks, his voice full of emotion. It's not that nothing went wrong, Some angry moment of course, but just a few, A tattered kewpie doll who just wanted to make a living and make her man happy, she triumphantly incarnated Sondheim’s matter-of-fact acceptance of life’s cruelty—and made the audience love it. A great Sondheim audition piece. “Good Thing Going” has been covered by numerous artists including Frank Sinatra, who’s not exactly known for his Sondheim covers. Doyle’s interpretation captured the loneliness and terror that beat at Company’s heart. I know it’s dishonest, but please, fellows, put a big ending on that number if you want the rest of the play to play.”. They hoped West Side Story would do the same. With the disappearance of regular movie sales and the slow death of the national tour, the Broadway musical was thrown back on its own shaky resources: an in-town audience that got smaller with every bump in ticket prices and tourists increasingly intimidated by New York’s rising crime rate and the municipal government’s financial meltdown in 1975. Change means loss as well as gain. Abbott had little interest in the Hammerstein brand of musical drama, the sort that Prince would come to direct. In the original production, the murders were distanced from us in the cavernous Uris Theatre, where Sweeney slit throats atop a platform and the bodies slid through a trap door. Tickets: $11-$22. When it officially opened on November 16, 1981, critics agreed that the book was a shambles and the casting a mistake; Merrily We Roll Along closed after 16 performances. When you’re an innovator in the high-stakes world of Broadway musicals, waiting around for the press and public to catch up with you can be an annoying and expensive proposition. Sondheim would like to see "Merrily" and "Assassins" revived. Artistically, nothing could have been further from the truth. Sondheim on Sondheim the Musical - Good Thing Going Lyrics. The York production made it easier to see the show’s delicacy and lyricism, though it was in a tiny theater and had only 20 performances. But that’s when I knew my career was in trouble.”. In 1957, however, they viewed themselves as “the natural inheritors of the theater we were entering,” Prince recalls in Contradictions. Doyle was more faithful to Sondheim’s idea that the show would be scariest if it were intimate. In the heyday of “mindless musicals,” as Prince scornfully characterized them, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter wrote pop songs that were played on the radio and sold on record. “Another Hundred People” from Company lovingly eulogized this city where people “find each other in the crowded streets and the guarded parks, / By the rusty fountains and the dusty trees with the battered barks, / And they walk together past the postered walls with the crude remarks.” It wasn’t a place a lot of people wanted to visit to take in a show. Sondheim’s friend Harold Prince, who produced West Side Story, took the unusual step of bringing it back to Broadway after the national tour, persuading Bernstein to conduct the reopening night and the critics to re-review it. West Side Story and Gypsy were made into movies, but what studio executive in his right mind would buy the film rights to Company, Follies, or Sweeney Todd? He wins them by bringing head and heart, words and music, plot and a deep sense of wonder together in great works of art. A small but instructive exhibition of posters, photographs, memorabilia and manuscripts, "The Art of Making Art: A Celebration of Stephen Sondheim," continues through June at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum. The musical received good but not great reviews and no major awards; it had a respectable but not record-shattering run. The songs insist on a close hearing of the lyrics, and the lyrics reward the attention. With an enduring rainbow of shows that runs from the artist's exultant lyrics for "West Side Story" to the glowering ferocity of "Sweeney Todd" -- with "Company," "Follies," "Sunday in the Park With George," "Into the Woods," "Passion" and other shows supplying every conceivable color in between -- Sondheim arcs grandly and undimmed over the theatrical landscape. High-Quality and Interactive, transposable in any key, play along. The curtain goes up and six ballet-dancing juvenile delinquents in color-coordinated sneakers go, ‘Da da-da da da,’ with their fingers snapping. They assumed that the Broadway musical could accommodate their aspirations. Not that that charge troubles Sondheim. It tends, in other words, not to be easily hummed on the way home. And while it's going along, you take for granted some love will wear away, We took for granted a lot, and still I say, it could have kept on growing, Instead of just kept on, we had a good thing going, going, gone. Licensed to Virtual Sheet Music® by Hal Leonard® publishing company. Sondheim on Sondheim Concert Live at the Hollywood Bowl - July 23, 2017. Yet Prince retained his respect for “The Abbott Touch” as he defined it in Contradictions: “Dancing characters dance, doors are slammed only when characters out of emotion would slam them, and there is no such thing as a funny reading of a line.”. Although Prince wanted to direct, he began his career as producer of The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and Fiorello!, all directed by George Abbott, the man who professionalized the ramshackle musical comedy genre by insisting that scripts make sense and lead naturally to the songs and dances. "Gypsy" conquered me in a high school production. Good Thing Going. The theater he once adored has become a theme park -- "revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. For all the recognition accorded his brilliance—a Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, still more Tonys for Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, and Passion—conventional wisdom for three decades had it that Sondheim’s work wouldn’t attract a broad popular audience because his lyrics were too intellectual, his music too difficult, his characters too unpleasant, his worldview too cynical. Certainly Doyle’s Sweeney Todd assumed that we were grown-up enough to discern our kinship with its tortured protagonists unassisted by the operatic trappings that had made the original production so exciting but had slightly blunted its edge. “You don’t believe any of that,” Hammerstein told Sondheim. His works constitute a show business force of nature, unmatched and unapproached in their ardor, stylistic variety, intelligence, complexity, thematic depth, wit and stirring expansiveness. Everything cost less. Try Prime Cart. The dramatic action was in the songs—mini-plays that variously established a character’s history, delineated an emotional dilemma, sardonically commented on the events at hand, or sometimes tentatively pointed a way forward. Call (510) 881-6777. The current and upcoming Sondheim playbill stretches from the Marin Mountain Play's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" to a Kelley-directed "Gypsy" in Mountain View. (Typing up the lyrics for “I’m Still Here,” written during the Boston previews of Follies, Ted Chapin realized that Sondheim had closely observed Yvonne De Carlo, taken what he’d learned about her personality and past, and used it to craft a song that deepened both her character and the play’s underlying motif.) But no one, not even the excellent Patti Lupone in Doyle’s revival, has topped Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Lovett. Sondheim knows how to write a song, but often times he writes things that fit into a show like a piece of a puzzle. Good Thing Going is written in the key of F Major. Lyrics to 'Good Thing Going' by Frank Sinatra. In the eight years since Follies’ vast array of costumes, scenery, and equipment had been trucked north to Boston in 1971, that Broadway tradition had become prohibitively expensive. Further, they implied they had felt that way about it the first time around. Here's why it doesn't. But they hadn’t.” This scenario would become all too familiar to Sondheim and Prince toward the end) of their historic six-show collaboration, when they took sardonic amusement in critics who unfavorably compared the current offering with previous works that had received decidedly mixed reviews. April 4th marked the 53rd anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. When Hammerstein saw the show in Philadelphia, he told them: “The audience is so anxious to applaud [Ethel Merman] that they are not listening to the scene that follows. Directed by Arch Nicholson. Furth and Sondheim retained the basic structure and overall theme of the play but updated it to encompass the period from 1957 to 1976. With John Hargreaves, Veronica Lang, Chris Haywood, Miles Buchanan. "Sunday's" score is a kind of auditory simulacrum of Seurat's canvases, the source and inspiration of the show. We have a good thing going. Good Thing Going: The Songs of Stephen Sondheim by Steve Ross on Apple Music. Instead of vague rumors floating down from the hinterlands about Merrily We Roll Along being in trouble, New Yorkers could open the Daily News and learn in Liz Smith’s column that 140 people had walked out at intermission the night before, describing it as “terrible” and “tacky.” And while out-of-town audiences prided themselves on their ability to spot a promising show still in rough shape, Broadway was less forgiving. Not exactly ingratiating subject matter—it had been one of Kaufman and Hart’s rare failures—but after Sweeney, Sondheim and Prince might be forgiven if they thought they could make just about anything work. Of course Sondheim, who adores puzzles, can pun and play wittily like no one else with language. Assassins, which so repulsed sensibilities in 1991 (with its depiction of presidential killers driven by an all-American lust for fame) that it became the first Sondheim show not to play on Broadway, got its due in 2004, when Joe Mantello’s fun-house staging underscored its even greater pertinence in the age of Jerry Springer and reality TV. “How they can heal, how they can still bring us together, but only if they are spoken with conviction and from the heart.”, Sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa I can’t blame him. The American Conservatory Theater scored its first big success of the post-Bill Ball era with its 1986 "Sunday in the Park With George." How could mere prose compete with the sheer gusto of verses like “The hobbies you pursue together / Savings you accrue together / Looks you misconstrue together,” or the pitiless existential economy of “everybody dies”? “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” a riotous break from the bleakness in 1979, was so low-key as to be almost inaudible. -- "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum": The Mountain Play Association production plays next Sunday through June 18 at the Sidney B. Cushing Memorial Amphitheater, Mount Tamalpais, Marin County. Includes an High-Quality PDF file to download instantly. While standing in the aisle one evening, Sondheim said, he saw a man rise from his seat not two minutes into the show, coat in hand, and head for the exit. The film versions were seldom as good as the stage productions, but they kept theater connected to mainstream America. Beauty is finally personal and ineffable, and no one can persuade another to share a response. With Lupone eschewing Lansbury’s Cockney verve, Mrs. Lovett was nearly as grim a figure as Sweeney. My God!’ . Tickets: $20-$38. “I had the whole picture. The Marin Theatre Company revived "Company" a couple of seasons back. It is based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. He was wise to move on when the commercial theater could no longer nurture his work. Call (650) 948-4444. Follies, by contrast, probably will never again have its themes so perfectly embodied as they were in the opulent production that Prince, Bennett, Aronson, and costume designer Florence Klotz gave it in 1971. It was a saner environment. That said, it's perfectly clear that Sondheim makes a different kind of music than Rodgers and Hammerstein or Andrew Lloyd Webber, and for different reasons. Wonderful if youre looking for something to sing for any number of shows, but Sondheim … Revivals have made it clear how well his work endures and how it thrives in radically different treatments. Asian American 'randomly' stabbed to death while walking her dogs. Ever since the late 1950s, Sondheim and others on Broadway who considered themselves the heirs of Rodgers and Hammerstein had worked to extend the legacy of South Pacific and The King and I. "Passion" left me spent in Mountain View. . Uber ordered to pay $1 million to Bay Area woman denied rides, Disneyland's newest food craze is truly bizarre, Before-and-after photos of Calif. reservoirs show looming drought, 'I paid $15,000': Disney guest arrested for refusing temp check, What to know about new virus detected in India that's in SF Bay Area. As the work of his lesser contemporaries diminishes over time, Sondheim's work can only gain in stature. The red liquid that Patti Lupone and Michael Cerveris (as Sweeney) poured from bucket to bucket downstage center made palpable their characters’ bloody deeds. TheatreWorks' Robert Kelley is a devotee, and he's led Peninsula audiences through the catalog, up to and including "Passion." You know it when you compare the original productions of Company and Sweeney Todd with their sterling 21st-century revivals. His fervent, intense score for "Passion" has no discernible song breaks because Sondheim "didn't want the audience to remember they were in a theater" during their immersion in obsessive love. A DIFFERENT KIND OF MUSIC. Sunday in the Park with George was first presented in a series of workshop performances at Playwrights Horizons in 1983. A song should sincerely express the writer’s own feelings and experiences, he explained; “listeners were not fooled [by] false sentimentality.” Sondheim would honor that credo with a vengeance in the years to come. And yet, when the York Theatre Company in Manhattan staged a Pacific Overtures revival in 1984, The MacNeil/Lehrer Report captured the composer on camera in a warmer mode, observing a rehearsal of “Someone in a Tree.” This lovely song, which layered the memories of two characters (played as young and old men by four actors) into a single, shifting narrative about memory and history, had always been a favorite of Sondheim’s, who usually pointed to its “developed” composition as the reason for his pride. Without the big Broadway orchestration and Michael Bennett’s fabulous tap routine, “What Would We Do Without You?” lost its exuberance and became sadder—truer to Sondheim’s intent, maybe, but eliminating one of the few moments in which Bobby’s married friends were actually a pleasure to be with (always a problem with the script). As one of a six-show rotating repertory in the Kennedy Center’s 2002 Sondheim Celebration, Merrily was considered a success and ran for 16 performances, the same number it received as a flop on Broadway. Your Amazon Music account is currently associated with a different marketplace. The spring issue of the Sondheim Review, a journal "dedicated to the work of the musical theater's foremost composer and lyricist," covers productions of "Company" in Dallas, "Merrily We Roll Along" in Los Angeles, "Anyone Can Whistle" in Boston, "Sweeney Todd" in Mannheim, Germany, and "A Little Night Music" in Miskolc, Hungary. “Night Music was about having a hit,” Prince wrote later, and it was a hit—so in 1976 they veered to another path with Pacific Overtures, “the most bizarre and unusual musical ever to be seen in a commercial setting,” Sondheim said. It’s probably Sondheim’s most revived work, and it’s found favor in the world of classical music as well as on Broadway; New York City Opera maintains it in repertory, and concert productions have successfully mixed Broadway and opera voices, backed by such orchestras as the San Francisco Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Her selfies have become legendary. It was, for example, the first Sondheim show not to have out-of-town tryouts. "A Little Night Music" is filled with beguiling waltzes and boasts "Send in the Clowns" as its signature. by Joel Benjamin. Even as songs began to be more carefully integrated with plot in the wake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Today, critics and audiences seem to be more attuned to Sondheim’s essential qualities as an artist. A musical about marriage? “This time around [April 1960],” Prince writes in his memoir, Contradictions, “the book was special, Sondheim was credited, and the show had its place in history.

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