Stephen Sondheim’s Wonderful Years

By Liam Hoare for The Jewish Daily Forward

“Alice Longworth Roosevelt said, ‘First you’re young, then you’re middle-aged, then you’re wonderful,’” Stephen Sondheim remarked at the conclusion of his 80th birthday celebrations at Avery Fisher Hall in 2010.

Now very much in his wonderful years, Broadway’s greatest living composer-lyricist is experiencing a phase in his career where revivals, musical reviews and fêtes honoring his achievements have filled the void left by the absence of new material. His last original musical, “Road Show” — which had been in development since the mid-1990s — played Off-Broadway at The Public Theater in 2008. One must look back to “Passion” in 1994 to find Sondheim’s last musical début on Broadway.

But since “Road Show,” Broadway has experienced revivals of “Gypsy,” “West Side Story,” “A Little Night Music,” and “Follies,” as well as a New York City Center production of “Merrily We Roll Along.” “Sondheim on Sondheim” — a revue which included an original song, “God,” written by Sondheim — played Studio 54 in 2010. Last year, New York City Center put on “A Bed and a Chair: A New York Love Affair,” which wrapped jazz arrangements of Sondheim’s back catalogue by Wynton Marsalis around an original plot.

Now, 54 Below — the Broadway cabaret and restaurant on West 54th Street — is staging “Three Wishes for Sondheimas,” turning Stephen Sondheim’s birthday — he will turn 84 on March 22 — into something of a religious festival for musical theatre aficionados. Described as “one part concert, one part hilarious worship service,” the evening will tell “the Birth of Steve as you’ve never seen it before,” featuring a salad of Broadway actors and dancers, puppeteers, and the Sondheimas Tabernacle Choir.

“With better songs than ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ and more laughs than ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ you’ll want to tell your grandchildren that you were there the day Sondheimas was first celebrated.”

Sondheim’s wonderful years, and in particular the reverence and festivity, are slightly odd considering that celebrations, and in particular birthdays, play an inauspicious role in his work. Such occasions rarely invoke the joy and merriment one typically associates with anniversaries — after all, happiness does not make for compelling theatre — and are instead imbued with melancholy and act as moments for reflection and introspection.

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Interview: Lisa Loeb

For Moment Magazine

Lisa Loeb achieved fame in an unusual way. After her song Stay was used in the rolling credits of Reality Bites, the Generation X period movie starring Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder, Loeb became the first unsigned artist to have a single reach number one on the charts. In recent years the song and Loeb herself have become a cultural touchstone for nineties nostalgia and have been featured on numerous TV shows from The Colbert Report to New Girl. The 90’s were great, but the Grammy-nominated Loeb, still rocking her signature cats-eye glasses, is anything but stuck in the past: Producing eight studio albums, publishing two children’s books, starring in a reality dating show and a cooking show and even starting her own line of eyewear, the mother of two tells Moment about how her religion impacts her music, her Camp Lisa foundation and her 100 pairs of eyeglasses.

Has Judaism influenced your music?

Absolutely. The whole tradition of Torah study is to look at things from a lot of different angles. The attention to words and attention to how they sound and the melodies that are ingrained in all of us from religious ceremonies have had a huge impact on how I create music.

Who are some Jewish musicians who have influenced you and your music?

The band KISS was a big influence. They were very theatrical. Great songwriters like Carole King, Barry Manilow, countless other Jewish songwriters. And of course the many, many Jewish musical theater writers.

Why do you think Stay has remained so popular?

It’s funny how it has become this iconic song for a specific time. When a song is popular and people connect to it, they don’t ever stop connecting, it brings back memories while still being timeless. Everyone has had that experience. There are songs that were super popular when I was little and it just brings me back to hear them. And that’s what Stay is for so many people.

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Musical Magpies

NORMAN LEBRECHT for StandPoint

It is pitch dark, dead of night, in Safed and my feet are crunching gravel in a graveyard. Not any cemetery. Perhaps the holiest in the Holy Land. At the end of this unlit path lie side by side the twin propulsive forces in Judaism, the great masters of mysticism and legalism, the Holy Lion and the House of Joseph.

A candle flickers at the foot of the adjacent tombs. My companion, Eyal Shiloach, takes out his violin. Eyal used to play in the London Symphony Orchestra until he was drawn to the light of faith. He starts a tune that he tells me was sung by Levites in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Both he and I know, exchanging glances, that this cannot be true: tonality, colour and pulse place the melody in eastern Europe, early 19th century. But tradition holds that it is Temple music and there is no arguing with tradition. We stand riven between the mysticism of the Holy Lion (Isaac Luria) and the meticulous rationalism of the House of Joseph (whose surname was Caro).

I am in Israel, gathering testimony for a BBC Radio 3 series titled Music and the Jews. Not Jewish music, note. There is insufficient reason, in my view, to delineate a genre whose main streams — klezmer bands, Chasidic songs, cantorial melismas, Ladino ballads — are no more Jewish than pickled herring. Each is a local catch, harvested and embellished by Jews in the lands of their dispersion. Music and the Jews pursues a different story. It explores how music shaped the history and identity of the Jews, and how Jews influenced the course of music in all its forms.

I am not the first on this trail. In 1905, a cantor called Abraham Zvi Idelsohn arrived in Jerusalem from South Africa and found the streets paved — or squatted — by old men from all corners of the earth, each with his native cantillation for singing the Torah. Idelsohn set to work, like Béla Bartók in the Balkans, recording fragile voices on a wire machine. Analysing the results, he concluded that Yemenites had the oldest traditions and that their tropes bore such affinity to early Gregorian chant that it was likely Christians were singing music of the Temple. All hell broke loose at this hypothesis. (Idelsohn went on to compose an Israeli dance, Hava Nagila, the most popular of its kind. The melody is Romanian.

At the National Sound Archive in Jerusalem I spun some of Idelsohn's cylinders, as well as much weirder items by the obsessive Robert Lachmann who, when Hitler's Reich stopped supplying wax for his project, recorded old men's chants on discarded hospital X-rays. I have handled a celluloid disc with the shadow of human ribs on it.

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NYC's Beloved Yiddishe Music Maven

by Jenny Levison for Jewniverse

You never know what treasures lurk within NYC buildings. For many years, just blocks from Manhattan's Union Square, a woman named curated the Yiddish music collection at the vaunted YIVO archives.

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The Red Warbler Pete Seeger, 1919-2014.

BY RONALD RADOSH for The Weekly Standard

During the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939-41), Seeger sang antiwar songs that, in effect, called for the support of Hitler. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, he withdrew the songs he had just recorded and suddenly supported the “antifascist alliance” between the United States and the Soviets. During the Cold War, he supported unilateral American disarmament and backed one Soviet propaganda campaign after the other. “Put My Name Down, Brother, Where Do I Sign?” he sang, calling for signatures on the Stockholm Peace Petition developed by KGB fronts in Europe.

During the Vietnam war, Seeger not only helped lead the antiwar movement, he also sang in praise of the brutal Ho Chi Minh. Lyndon B. Johnson was called “a big fool” in one of his most famous songs, while he sang of Ho Chi Minh: He educated all the people, / He demonstrated to the world, / If a man will stand for his own land, / He’s got the strength of ten.

In 1999, Seeger traveled to Cuba to receive an award from the Castro regime. The fading Cuban tyrants honored him with their highest cultural award, given for “humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism,” which was in and of itself a travesty. Accepting an award from Fidel Castro should make it clear that Seeger’s would-be humanism and protest was aimed at one side only: his own country, which he clearly thought was led by the world’s sole oppressors.

One cannot hope to be thought of as a defender of human rights and also accept an award from the Cuban police state. That, too, must be taken into consideration when evaluating what Pete Seeger really learned from his own Stalinist past.

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