I know that calling this album definitive will be deemed as sacrilege by many musical theatre lovers, with the legacy of the original cast recording looming over it, but this version is set apart by the fidelity of the recording and the completeness of the artists’ original vision.īetween this new production and the upcoming Josh Groban-led revival of Sweeney Todd, I’m so thankful that producers are finally appreciating the importance of Jonathan Tunick’s full orchestrations to Sondheim’s scores. In the case of this new cast recording, that new independence paid off in spades. They will listen to other trusted voices, they will rely on the advice that was offered during the departed’s life, and they will go forward trusting that their own sense of intuition won’t let them down. And they did what the Baker’s Son will likely one day do. Like the Baker’s Son, the performers were left in a scary world without the most important of guiding voices. What happens when the king is no longer with us?
The stage production might be headed by the director and producer, but in the recording studio, Sondheim was king. Sondheim was very involved with every preservation of his music, coaching and offering advice to actors during the recording process.
It is also the first recording he didn’t get to hear.Īlthough we had the gender-bent production of Company last year (Sondheim saw a preview, but didn’t live to the opening), the relationship a composer has to a cast recording is a very different animal. This is not only a fantastic, definitive recording of one of Sondheim’s finest works. The weight of this album had finally revealed itself. It was during this stanza when I started crying. Specifically, it’s the ghost of the Baker’s Wife singing a reprise of “No One Is Alone” to the Baker: But the relationship between nearly all of us and Sondheim was only parasocial.Īll of this emotional baggage didn’t really come into play until the end of the experience of listening to the cast recording for the latest Broadway revival of the show. We watched the interviews, or read Finishing The Hat and Look, I Made A Hat, or maybe even were one of the lucky few to participate in a little bit of snail mail correspondence.
Next month marks a year since the passing of Sondheim, and while many continue to mourn his passing every day, we do so with the caveat that almost none of us ever actually met this musical theatre juggernaut. It’s a predicament many of us in the musical theatre community are all too familiar with. Being an infant, it’s unlikely he’ll retain any memories of the Baker’s Wife, relying only on the stories and memories of others who knew her. He is left half an orphan by the conclusion, his mother killed by a giant and buried in it’s footprint, with a neurotic and insecure father left as his only blood relative. In Into The Woods, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s revisionist fairy tale masterpiece, the Baker’s son will one day have to answer that question. do you mourn somebody you’ve never really met? Alex Kulak is a playwright, composer, and screenwriter currently based in Chicago.
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