Word: weidman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...distracting." With Assassins coming together, he is buckling down to finish three final songs for The Frogs ("I'm a slow writer, and I only have a month to do them, so it's tight"). Then he may turn back to his troubled Bounce, which he and Weidman based on the lives of Wilson and Addison Mizner, brothers who got caught up in everything from the Alaska gold rush to the Florida land boom. The show has gone through two directors, three titles and several approaches--and still seemed to miss the mark in a Washington tryout last year...
...some critics, what Sondheim and book writer John Weidman put onstage in 1991 was disaster enough. A carnival barker, under neon signs blaring HIT THE PREZ! WIN A PRIZE!, opens the show by luring in a parade of customers like John Wilkes Booth, John Hinckley and Charles Guiteau, the "disappointed office seeker" who shot President James A. Garfield. Hinckley and Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme--wannabe assassins of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, respectively--sing a duet about unrequited love, in their cases for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson. One musical number ends in an electrocution, another in a hanging. Samuel Byck...
...1970s when he was judging scripts at a workshop for new musicals and came upon one called Assassins. It was a different, Manchurian Candidate--like story about a war veteran hired to assassinate a President, but Sondheim remembered it years later when he was discussing ideas with Weidman, his collaborator on Pacific Overtures. Their first thought was to create a musical about assassinations through history, starting with Julius Caesar. They eventually narrowed it to assassins of U.S. Presidents--each of whom gets a moment in the spotlight, voicing grievances both real and imagined, poignant and farcical. Sondheim sees the show...
Sondheim and Weidman have made only minor changes for the new production (directed by Joe Mantello) beyond including a new song, Something Just Broke, written for the 1992 London version. It's a nice addition to a score that is (oddly, given the subject) one of Sondheim's most tuneful and accessible, with its stylistic echoes of American folk ballads, gospel hymns, Sousa-style marches and turn-of-the-century waltzes. Sondheim has little patience for the long-voiced criticism that many of his scores abandon melody for astringent experimentation. "I do what is required for each show," he says...
Hottest person you know: Laura E. Weidman...