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Measure Your Life in Love

 Michael Riedel's "Singular Sensation" is here, and it's great, and I'm ready to answer your questions:

*What role does Stephen Sondheim have? Sondheim attends a Broadway performance of the revival of "Show Boat," in which Elaine Stritch sings to a baby. If you've heard the recording, you know that Stritch is weirdly ferocious. (She is Elaine Stritch.) At the end of the lullaby, Sondheim murmured: "I didn't know if Stritch would sing to that baby or eat it."

Also, a diva-ish Jonathan Larson, deep in the weeds before "Rent"''s opening, goes to Sondheim to complain about various collaborators. Sondheim rolls his eyes. "You chose those collaborators," he says. "Now collaborate with them. Or you can be like Wagner and go off on your own, and find some King of Bavaria to fund your work."

*Where is Bernadette Peters? She is rather quiet in this book, though she is mentioned as a possible star of the Guys and Dolls revival. (This is the revival famous for its Nathan Lane/Faith Prince moments.) At one point, someone wanted Bernadette with Mandy Patinkin in the show.

Bernadette also helps the country re-encounter Broadway in the NYC wreckage post-9/11. But, really, this was a strangely passive era for Bernadette.

*Back to Sondheim, please? Around 9/11, a Broadway Internet message board popped up. It was called "All That Chat," a reference to "All That Jazz." This was just meant to be a space for theater nerds to be nerdy together. (Says the creator: "I imagined a virtual arena where weirdos could get together and talk about Sondheim songs that were cut during various out-of-town tryouts in the seventies." Indeed, this actually is a part of what you can find on the message board, on any given day.)

But "All That Chat" had a strange side effect. People would go to new shows out of town and post vicious reviews. Word would get out. So, a show could be "dead" even before its Broadway debut. The first time this happened--via ATC--was in response to "Seussical." All That Chat killed "Seussical," and not even Rosie O'Donnell could flip the narrative.

Clearly, I loved this book.


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