Gerald Kaufman

New Sondheim: enjoy it while stocks last

Gerald Kaufman is enthralled by the first Sondheim premiere in 14 years. A minor work Road Show may be, but it is still worth much more than anyone else’s musicals

issue 06 December 2008

A Sondheim premiere in New York! Besotted fans of one of the four greatest-ever Broadway composer-lyricists (the others being Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, all, regrettably, dead) were resigned never to seeing another. I feared that we were going to have to make do, perpetually, with repeated, indeed incessant, revivals of Sweeney Todd, and those anthologies, such as Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together, which started out as such fun but became funerary lamentations for the lack of something novel, exciting and, most of all, unknown.

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