My mother-in-law can denigrate Stephen Sondheim all she wants and complain endlessly about the lack of memorable tunes in musical theatre, but Stephen Sondheim is a genius!
I've rented "Sunday in the Park with George" from blockbusteronline. If you're not familiar with the musical, it's based on the painting "Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte", the famous pointillist painting by Georges Seurat that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
I have loved this painting since I first learned about it in my art history class at Manatee Junior College. The thought of taking the very tip of the paintbrush and creating a painting by dot-dot-dotting the canvas. Whenever I see a pointillist painting, I just want to stand a foot away from it and study the individual dots. Brilliant!
And then listening to what Sondheim does with what's going through the mind of Seurat. That's brilliant also. "Red, red, red, red, red, red-orange, red, red-orange..." All I could think of was what curses the actor must have been uttering as he tried to get his tongue around these lyrics.
"George" was written in 1984. "Company" was written in 1970. I've been having a love affair with the soundtrack of "Company", and the tongue-twisting techniques Sondheim utilizes in "Getting Married Today" are echoed in "Color and Light", the number that includes the red-red phrase above.
I composed the senior class song for Forest Lake Academy in 1967. I composed eight measures of a song in my dreams a couple of weeks ago. But composition as a vocation?! Unthought of, impossible.
I am in awe of the genius of Stephen Sondheim.
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