The National Theatre is top destination and he wants to see his friend

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Ballet Shoes Center.com

Published: September 2, 2010

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The National Theatre is top destination, and he wants to see his friend Judi Dench in Hay Fever. When we discuss the new David Hare translation of Maxim Gorky’s Enemies at the Almeida, he promptly adds it to his list.Curiously, mathematics, rather than music or literature, was his passion when young “Math was like candy to me, so mesmerising,” he says. But I’ve often said, glibly, that if Oscar had been a geologist, that’s what I would have become.”Stephen Sondheim is, it seems, modest to a fault and reluctant to talk about himself. “There was a part of me that responded to theatre, and Oscar saw in me somebody he could pass his knowledge on to He’d got a sponge I was a perfect age – in my teens – and took in everything. She knew the Hammersteins slightly and they had a son my age. I osmosed myself into the Hammersteins and they became surrogate parents.”The move was “as crucial as crucial can be” to everything that happened to Sondheim thereafter.

“She wanted a place in the country, she liked celebrities, and she wanted me off her hands. “I empathise with George simply because I empathise with anyone who does the hard work that art implies. So many people who are not creative artists don’t understand that art is hard work It’s one of the things I feel passionately about. That’s where my identity with George comes in most – how hard it is to write songs.”And it is getting harder all the time, he says. “The more you know, the less you know.”At present, he is trying to finish Bounce, a musical comedy about American enterprise that he began years ago. It deals with two brothers across half a century, looking at both the creativity and the hype of his native country.

It sounds unlikely to do anything but confirm Sondheim’s reputation as the thinking man of musicals, but it has been panned in try-outs in Chicago and New York. “I’m doing a final rewrite now, hope to get it on next year, and if not, then not. I’ve spent too much time on it.”Whether it is completed or abandoned, he will then find a new project, for fear of boredom, and of losing energy and confidence as age creeps up on him. A film version of Sweeney Todd is also on the cards.Sondheim feels that it is not his cleverness alone that has won him enemies. He suspects that the dislike of Merrily We Roll Along, a collaboration with Hal Prince, was partly the consequence of their successful partnership on shows such as Follies and Company “We were mavericks, but we made a decent living. It’s all right if you’re a maverick in a cold-water flat, five storeys up, with a baby crying. Or it’s all right to be popularly successful, to be thought of as kitsch and make money and earn everybody’s contempt.

But to try to do original stuff and have some success irritates people,” he says.The US still hasn’t enjoyed a good professional production of Merrily… It takes as its starting point Seurat’s aforementioned painting, Un Dimanche d’? ?a Grande-Jatte, and creates a story around the people depicted in it, centring on Seurat’s mistress.Some have taken the obsessive artist George in the piece to be Sondheim himself, but the composer dismisses the notion. Then, when it was revived at the National Theatre [in 1993], suddenly the general response was positive.”Sunday in the Park with George, which opened on Broadway in 1984, was his first collaboration with Lapine, and his first show since Merrily We Roll Along had been panned three years earlier. Mrs Watts pledged to give any refund she won to a medical charity.The ruling by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said that the British Government had wrongly interpreted patient’s rights to get treatment in other countries.Mrs Watts was told in 2002 that she had to wait a year for treatment but, after complaining of severe pain, she was reassessed by a consultant in January 2003 who said that she needed the operation within three or four months. She decided that was still too long and travelled to France for the operation and later billed the NHS for the cost.Bedford Primary Care Trust argued that, as treatment was offered within the Government’s NHS targets, it was not an undue delay.


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