Sweeney Todd

Sunday

Robert S. Erickson

Bringing back Stephen Sondheim and enduring a new Andrew Lloyd Webber

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.

Lloyd webber

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Alan Rickman and the misery of being famous

Perhaps the defining moment of the posthumous collection of diary excerpts from the late actor and director Alan Rickman comes around two thirds of the way in. Rickman has recently played the villainous role of Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, an undertaking he describes with what readers will have come to recognize as his signature combination of angst and actorly obsession ("I can only sense the crumbs, dandruff, dirt under the nails.") At last, the film is finished, and is premiering in London. Rickman’s general mien of detachment ("there is a deep introspection during these days…a feeling of being marginalized by shallow minds") is temporarily interrupted by an impertinent journalist, who asks him at the premiere, "If you were a pie, which flavor would you be?

Monday

Alexander Larman

Remembering the brilliant Stephen Sondheim

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s death at the age of ninety-one does more than simply rob the world of musical theater of its most distinguished practitioner. With the exception of Tom Stoppard, there was probably no greater figure in contemporary world drama. To mourn his passing, even at his extraordinary old age, is only to pay dutiful homage to one of the most extraordinarily diverse (in its usual meaning) and accomplished canons of work that any figure in English-language drama has ever produced. He was born in New York City in 1930 and remained the most Manhattanite of talents all his life.