Sondheim's Last Musical

Sometimes, New York seems to design its own self-parody--and a fine example is the case of Sondheim's last musical.

Sondheim allegedly authorized a production of this show right before dying, but I wonder if certain wires were crossed. In the current season of "The Crown," Dodi calls his father, Mou Mou, to deliver news about Diana. He uses a deliberately ambiguous sentence--"An agreement has been reached!"--because he knows his father will misinterpret the news. "This will get people off my back for a while...." I see Sondheim doing something similar: "Joe Mantello, an agreement has been reached!" And Sondheim died, and Mantello was free to make of the nebulous sentence whatever he might have wished.

(I have no evidence for this theory.)

The site of the Sondheim production is a brutal wind tunnel near the Hudson River; you scale six flights of stairs to reach the stage, and the program features one-eighth of an interview between Frank Rich and David Ives. (To access the rest of the piece, you need to locate your phone, then perform a scan, pull out your reading glasses, and scroll, scroll, scroll with your frostbitten finger.) The first hour has tiny snippets of Sondheim melodies, but they disappear, and you're left to wade through an additional unfunny and stagnant and rudderless seventy minutes. At the end, everyone in the crowd jumps to his or her feet--which seems, to me, like something from a Kafka novel. Prisoners in a gulag are jumping up, breathless, to applaud for Stalin.

Only in New York.

I'd skip this one.

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