Arts & Entertainment

Home of Michigan Opera Theatre

Aockhalit

Side Order from page 45

("hoir

A Hand-Clapping,

Soul-Stirring

Holiday Rapture

"One of the 12 best
ways to salute the
holiday season!

The Detroit News

The Rackham Symphony Choir and
The Detroit Opera House Present

TICKETS
ON SALE
NOW!

Featuring

Alfreda Burke, Victor Trent Cook and Rodrick Dixon
Conducted by

Suzanne Mallare Acton
Arrangements by
Gary Anderson and Robert Christianson

This Production
Sponsored By

Detroit Opera House Ticket Services Office
(313) 237-SING (7464)
or Ticketmaster (248) 645-6666

Real TimeTicketing 24/7 at www.michiganopera.org

Let us light up your

on Broadway. Music- by Jewish composer
Richard Rodgers and his daughter Mary
Rodgers also creep into Side by Side to
accompany Sondheim's lyrics. The cast
also does a 15-minute medley of snippets
- of songs from other Sondheim shows not
covered individually by the performers.
"Ifs really a sophisticated production
— and our scenic designer, Christopher
Carothers, has come up with a real work
of art as a backdrop depicting most of
Sondheim's shows," said Jurkiewicz, who
once toured the country as a performer in
Hair.

Naz Edwards

Music Man

Regional performances of Side by Side
culminate a year of musical tributes to '
Sondheim in honor of his 75th birthday.
Born into a prosperous but nonreli-
gious Jewish family on New York's Upper
West Side, he didn't have a bar mitzvah
and was pretty much neglected as a
youngster; his biographers note. He was
10 when his father, Herbert, a business-
man, abandoned the family; and his
mother, Janet "Foxy" Sondheim, reported-
ly became an emotionally abusive
hypochondriac.
The intense love-hate relationship with
his mother re-emerged in his later works,
where he treated love and commitment as
claustrophobic and smothering, most
notably in Company. Sondheim gave
words and music to several strong, manip-
ulative, somewhat unstable female charac-
ters, such as Mama Rose in Gypsy, Mrs.
Lovett in Sweeney Todd (now playing in a
revival on Broadway) and the Witch in
. Into the Woods, all of whom are obsessive
about biding on to their child or lover.
Around the time of his parents' divorce,
Sondheim moved to Pennsylvania with
his mother and befriended the son of
well-known lyricist and playwright Oscar
Hammerstein II, who became a surrogate
father to him and designed for the young
Sondheim his own course on the con-
struction of a musical. Sondheim received
a more formal education at Williams
College in -Massachusetts.
At the age of 25, Sondheim got his big
break when he became part of the quartet
of "Jewish geniuses" who created West Side
Story, one of the most successful Broadway
musicals of all time — although the show's
popularity received a strong boost from the
movie version. Sondheim wrote most of the
lyrics — to music by composer Bernstein,
book by Arthur Laurents and .choreography
by Jerome Robbins. Like his collaborators
on Story Sondheim is gay, although he did
not acknowledge his homosexuality pub-
licly until 2000.
Sondheim went on to win many Tony

.

Since 1905

48

New York's Famous

December 8 • 2005

jw

f

Available at your neighborhood store.

Peter Kevoian

Shannon Nicole
Locke

Brian Thibault

Awards and honors, including a Pulitzer
Prize for Sunday in the Park With George in
1985.
-
After the success of West Side Story,
Bernstein, who had written only two lines of
the lyrics, offered to reapportion the royal-
ties from the songs to 2 percent each for
himself and Sondheim, instead of 3 percent
for Bernstein and one percent for
Sondheim.
"Like an idiot:' Sondheim once recalled,
"I said, 'don't be silly. I don't care about
the money. I just wanted to work with
you."' Sondheim said he shudders when
he thinks of the amount that single
remark has cost him over the years. Fl

JET's production of Side by Side
by Sondheim opens 7:30 p.m.

Tuesday, Dec.13, at the Aaron
DeRoy Theatre in the Jewish
Community Center, 6600 W.
Maple, West Bloomfield. After
opening night, performances are
7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Thursdays;
5 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m.
Sundays (except Dec. 25), with
-special 2 p.m. matinees
Wednesdays, Dec. 28 and Jan. 4.
Tickets: $27-$37, with discounts for
seniors and students. Information
and tickets: (248) 788-2900. ❑