Stephen sondheim

Merrily We Roll Along starts in 1976, at a party held by big-shot Hollywood producer Franklin Shepard, who is surrounded by stars (not least his second wife, a veteran Broadway siren, and his young lover, the nubile leading actress of his latest hit movie). It ends in 1957, with stars of a different kind: constellations in an inky sky that provoke awe and inspiration for a younger, more naive Frank, as he sits on a rooftop with friends Mary and Charlie, dreaming about their future. The juxtaposition — of celestial bodies with shiny, obnoxious celebrity — helps to frame this musical about the loss of innocence.

On Sunday April 16, the curtain went down on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera for the last of 13,981 performances on Broadway, a titanic thirty-five-year run grossing north of $1.3 billion. The end of an era? Not quite — dating back to the 1979 opening of Evita, Lloyd Webber musicals have run continuously on the Great White Way for forty-four years. That streak is now hitched to the fortunes of Bad Cinderella, which opened just weeks before Phantom closed. The show gets a lift from a lush score and some winning numbers, as well as sumptuous set design. The whole premise, however, turns out to be a pumpkin, and it may spell midnight for the composer’s magical run within the year.

Lots of folks go to swingers’ parties; fewer go by accident. I achieved this distinction, once — and in my defense, I will plead only that my ignorance of the situation was so extreme, my credulity so extensive, that it took my asking one couple, in complete earnest, the most hilarious and incidentally incisive questions a person in my situation could ask — “How did you two meet?” and “How do you know the host?” — in order to set the record straight. To the first, the one said that the other’s husband had introduced them. The answer to the second was the old chestnut about “college roommates,” et voilà! At parties nowadays, I just ask people what they do for work.