Groffsauce, led by interviewer Michael Schulman on a backward journey from last month (the Met gala, the Tony-nom announcements) to twenty years ago (moving to NYC at 19), keeps getting misty-eyed:


The New Yorker:   Jonathan Groff Rolls Merrily Back


Yesterday's matinée was lovely — I could still nitpick both the show and the production; but time, and a bit more polishing since NYTW, have more or less won me over.   Radcliffe's understudy was fine (his "Franklin Shephard, Inc.," the most obvious hurdle to clear, was flawless), though his chemistry with Groff and Mendez seemed muted.  Many of my quibbles from NYTW have been addressed, and the design and staging seemed tighter overall.  Gilmour's scenic tricks, while still not entirely invisible, are satisfactorily less apparent-in-advance than I've ever seen them.

Revisiting a pet obsession: the stars for the finale are gorgeous, including -- just as I'd suggested here last year -- a generous smattering embedded in the walls of the set, which successfully render Frank's house temporarily "transparent/invisible".  Rather than appearing for the entire rooftop  scene as I'd hypothesized, these additional stars (along with a bunch more out in the auditorium, strikingly suspended above and around the proscenium, but invisible until illuminated) appear only for the last few seconds of the show, just before the final blackout (which means that the "rooftop" still kinda feels like it's indoors, though its lighting does feel thankfully more romantic at the Hudson than it did at NYTW).  Still, the vastly-improved starscape, and especially the portion of it that's embedded in the walls, does suggest that either someone on the creative team read my post here — vanishingly unlikely — or that it really was kind of a no-brainer.  Either way, kudos to the creatives:  it looks gorgeous, and, along with the slightly rejiggered orchestration, it really makes the show's final moments hauntingly beautiful (in a way that pointedly, and disappointingly, wasn't the case at NYTW).

All in all, a lovely afternoon (with beautiful spring weather to match); the cast was on point, and the now-definitive version of the book once again feels right, especially in terms of sheer comprehensibility — evidenced by increasingly-frequent audience gasps or riveted ooohs and mmmms over the course of the second act, as various consequential plot points were traced back to their origins.

A light, early dinner afterward at Café Un Deux Trois, right next door to the theatre, rounded out the day nicely.

I saw this today and thought it was worthy of sharing:

Those photos are fantastic, Tom!  The one of you and Aileen makes me super happy, and the other two make me super hungry.

Posted on the Facebook "All Things Sondheim" group:

Playbill:  How PBS Captures Broadway Shows for Great Performances

Quote from: Diep Tran, Playbill.com, 28 May 2024"Many of the Sondheim musicals have been on public television.  And they were because Mr. Sondheim wanted them.  He would defer his cost to make the shows happen, to make his money hopefully, in the back end," explains [GP Executive Producer David] Horn.  The "back end" would be in DVD sales, on-demand sales, or the rights to resell the program to different broadcast or streaming services, along with whatever added audience the broadcast brings to the show for future productions.

For decades, cast albums almost singlehandedly performed what would seem to be a similar function, in terms of bringing in residuals and enhancing a show's potential life after its Broadway production had closed.  But in terms of video, the historical timing seems perfect, and SJS looks very shrewd indeed, to have chosen the "back end" even at the cost of forfeiting whatever upfront royalty he might otherwise have been paid to capture these shows.  Broadcasting them from the mid-1980s to mid-90s, with reruns for a decade thereafter followed by home video and eventually streaming,  brought them (and him) to the attention of, I would guess, a whole lot more people than would likely have seen a live performance or bought the cast albums on their own.  I suspect that his 21st-century renaissance — represented onstage almost entirely by revivals and concerts, a steady cascade of both for the past twenty years — and his modest but equally steady spread into popular culture (think South Park, Desperate Housewives, Glass Onion), not to mention his subsequent canonization, all owe quite a bit to those videos' having brought the full shows to audiences many of whom, if they'd heard of Sondheim at all, had previously been subsisting on cast albums — and Tony clips, impossibly meager crumbs in retrospect, viewed on the night and/or taped on VHS to be worn to shreds with repeated viewings.

Later came the internet, with its unique ability to forge all those far-flung fans into a community of sorts.  But I'd bet that more of us had more to talk about on, say, the Internet 1.0 version of Finishing The Chat, because of PBS and home video than would ever have been the case if those videos had never existed.  And then, of course, YouTube and social media came along and made video arguably essential to any sort of virality SJS could achieve, however limited or gradual.  While clips or full "slime tutorials" of the various revivals and innumerable regional and educational productions certainly played their part in keeping Sondhead culture current, those original captures (Sweeney, Sunday, Into The Woods and Passion: the pinnacle of his success with Prince, and the entirety of his work with Lapine) could probably lay as much claim as the cast albums to having anchored his reputation among those who never saw their respective productions onstage, and who might just as likely have been steered to buy their OCRs by having seeing the captures on TV (or DVD or YouTube) as vice versa.

Add the filmed concerts, beginning with Follies in 1985, and the revivals captured by Digital Theatre and Fathom/NT Live and all the rest, and you have a collection of theatre-on-video — circulating and recirculating for a decade now in the niche paradise of streaming-on-demand — that is completely unexampled among Broadway dramatists.  And all this is to say nothing of the the various movie-movie adaptations, the documentaries, or the now unmanageable sprawl of audio recordings, encompassing not only cast albums (although those keep proliferating too, with each new revival spawning its own recording) but also innumerable cabaret vocalists and jazz instrumentalists and so forth.

Hindsight is 20/20, but one is tempted to surmise that the preservation and dissemination of these "great performances", on video especially, was as much an intentional cause as a well-deserved effect of their composer's late-career ascension, in which comparisons with Shakespeare have become not only unabashedly serious but routine, rapidly verging on cliché.

NYT:  Audra McDonald to Star in Gypsy Revival on Broadway This Fall
            The six-time Tony-winning actress will play musical theater's most famous stage mother in a production directed by George C. Wolfe.

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Previews November 21, opening December 19.   At the Majestic, former home of the Phantom.

Notwithstanding the undeniable Audra of it all, I'm just as excited to see Wolfe's take on Gypsy as I am for McDonald's Rose.  Per the article:

Quote from: Michael Paulson, New York Times, 29 May 2024He said that his ideas for the production were still evolving.  "The thing that keeps on resonating with me is the idea of not enough: not enough space, not enough love, not enough money," Wolfe said.  "That's what's pulling me in."

I'm not sure what that ultimately looks like onstage — no designers have been announced — but there seems to me a discernible GCW aesthetic at work in this teaser:
           

I was in Nashville a week and a half ago for work and someone drove an hour so we could have dinner!  It was great getting to talk to Aileen in person.  I will also post photos of the yumminess that was dinner.  We both chose Grits Casserole and Green Beans as our side dishes.  If you are in Nashville and want some fantastic BBQ, head to Eldey's.  

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Meat trio.  Brisket, Chicken, and Pulled Pork
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Ribs and Brisket
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We had storms yesterday.  That is my excuse for not starting a daily as I had planned.  Please ignore the fact that the storms didn't arrive until nearly 7PM.  We got gumball sized hail and lots of rain for an hour.  People were "trapped" in the picnic pavilion in the park.  From my front porch I could see them huddling, trying not to get hit by hail.  They were having such a nice time all day in the park that they must not have seen the dark clouds come in.  I'd say they were here in about 20 minutes.  I had made note of clouds earlier but thought they were headed north.  I was wrong.  They were coming due east......towards us.       

I had to ask someone on the phone today for confirmation it was Tuesday, mainly because Occupational Therapy wasn't on time, so that had me confused about what day it was. I did eventually have occupational therapy today, and my shoulder feels looser. Only 28 more days until my next appointment with the orthopedic surgeon.

Other things I did today:

• got paid for a freelance project
• ordered new toner for my printer
• filled out a fun form for my annuity, then sent that in
• Went on our shortened morning walk (I'm trying to work up to our normal walk, but I do not have the energy)

Coming next year:

I'm finally seeing this on the Broad Way next Sunday, a week from today.  Sadly, Daniel Radcliffe will be out next weekend.  But I already enjoyed his Charley at NYTW last year, so it will be interesting to see his understudy this time.