Mary Rodgers & Adam Guettel

[scenicdesign71]

At 50, my longstanding relative lack of interest in the lives of -- still less in gossip about -- theatre-world personalities has lately struck me as almost odd.  (Who knows, it might even strike others as sanctimonious).  Should I be more curious?

Regardless, even I may prove unable to resist the late Mary Rodgers's memoir, written with Jesse Green and due out next week:

https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/interview-jesse-green-mary-rodgers-memoir-shy_94080.html

As detailed in that article, Green first met Rodgers while writing this probing but sympathetic NYT Magazine profile of her son in 2003, as The Light in the Piazza was premiering in Seattle:

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/a-complicated-gift.html

This earlier piece verges on TMI about a composer whose work I was always perfectly content to admire, not uncritically, from a distance; it's not too surprising that Guettel might've found the finished article a little discomforting.  But Green is such a good writer that I came away grateful for the read anyway (and not too worried about his subject, who, for all his vulnerability here, walks away with the writer's, and reader's, sympathy and admiration sewn up about as securely as could be hoped without descending into pure fawning puffery).

So I'm hopeful that Green's work with the "alarmingly" filter-free Rodgers will prove similarly nuanced and insightful.  The stuff about her relationship to Sondheim that he teases in that Theatermania interview may be old news to insiders, but I found it fascinating indeed.  And Green's regard for her little-known later theatre work certainly piques my interest.

[scenicdesign71]

https://www.vulture.com/article/mary-rodgers-memoir-shy-stephen-sondheim-trial-marriage.html