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Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Wilmington on DVDs: Sondheim! The Birthday Concert

 

PICK OF THE WEEK

SONDHEIM! THE BIRTHDAY CONCERT (Three and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Lonny Price, 2010 (Image Entertainment)

Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday was the occasion for something really special in Manhattan, an all-star concert in his honor at Lincoln Center, an event that which has now become the excellent DVD, “Sondheim! The Birthday Concert.” The concert DVD offers 24 Sondheim songs (and medleys) sung to the max, by a dream cast of stars who’ve been in these Broadway shows and who helped make them famous. Sondheim was in the audience, beaming. As well he should have.

Most of the songs come from shows for which he wrote both words and music (“Company,” “Follies, “Sweeney Todd,” “Sunday in the Park with George,” and others). But there two from his great collaboration with Leonard Bernstein, “West Side Story.” Acting as master if ceremonies, with real wit and mastery, was David Hyde Pierce. The conductor was longtime Sondheim collaborator Paul Gemignani; his band was the New York Philharmonic. The highlights — well, they really included virtually every number in the show. But I’ll single out a few: Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin singing and emoting the intense “Finishing the Hat” and “Move On” from “Sunday in the Park with George.” A company of star divas and singers, including Peters, Patti Lupone, Audra McDonald, Marin Mazzie, Donna Murphy and Elaine Stritch, joining each other for a performance, with solos, of “Ladies Who Lunch,” from “Company.” The climactic mass ensemble number on “Sunday,“ from “George.“

And my personal favorite, which I watched many times: a sizzling rendition of the classic show-stopper “America” by the revival cast of “West Side Story,” with Karen Olivo (new to me, and fantastic) as a genuinely fiery Anita. Olivo also seemed to me a real potential movie star, but then so is everybody on stage here, including Pierce. So why doesn’t somebody start turning these shows into movies and casting these wonderful performers in them? Mystery to me.

Two mild objections. I understand the reason producer-director Lonny Price left the names of the singers off the concert program. He wanted to surprise the audience, who would have recognized most everybody. But the TV show and DVD’s potential audience includes many people who haven’t been to New York, and maybe never will get there. I’m sure they’d like to know, in every case, who was who, and who sang what. Also: It does seem to me, sorry, a little pretentious to leave off off the program the one Sondheim song almost everyone outside of New York City knows and wants to hear: “Send in the Clowns.” But then, isn’t a little pretentiousness part of what we love best about New Yorkers?

Extra: Booklet with essay, and some cast listing, by Lonny Price.

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So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

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~ David Simon