Favourite song from Stephen Sondheim's Company

Need to watch more of those Documentary Now! episodes, such as the one mentioned here: Yacht Rock

The Stop Making Sense one, called Test Pattern, is a lot of fun.

Thanks, seems to be called “Final Transmission” though.

Oh lord, yeah, Test Pattern is the band, apologies

I've had the Pennebaker Company DVD on hold at NYPL for something like several years, the queue hardly ever moves and I've presumed it's lost. Hope to see it one day.

Think you can find it on YouTube. Might not get the extra commentary track though.

So you can :D
thanks for the heads up!

there's a version with the commentary too

Totally did a double take when George Furth showed up in the real doc and thought I was back in parody land.

Beth Howland was married to another Company original cast member when she died.

Seems like there was the twenty-year-old commentary by D.A. Pennebaker, Harold Prince and Elaine Prince and there might be a new Sondheim commentary on the latest physical release, I think I read.

Ah, Ned posted about that upthread.

Does anybody know what the instrument at the start of 'Another Hundred People' is?

It's some sort of electro-mechanical organ/keyboard instrument that I recognise from TV and Film themes of the same period, sort like a short duration organ meets celeste with a bit of harpsichord.

Can be seen/heard at 17:38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IU80Ium0dM

I believe it's an RMI Electra-piano:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMI9brWq_kw

Also used wonderfully on Miles Davis's "Mademoiselle Mabry"

Yes, I read a few things about that over the weekend. The Co-op team sought to duplicate that sound and may have tracked down one of those instruments, or perhaps got a sample patch of one at least.

There was the Electra-piano and also its older brother, the cleverly named Rock-Si-Chord.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mount_Instruments

Okay, so does anyone know what other famous (or well-known, at least) TV or Film theme uses it prominently? It's making me a bit crazy.

I originally thought it was one of these - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpraz85asA

Tempted to start referring to one poster as "Bobby Bubi" but am resisting the govnaming instinct for now.

Also seeing some intriguing stuff about Sweeney Todd and the "Herrmann chord."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFaWBmVrCAM

Good stuff, thanks.

This thread is colliding with In every 70s US home ever for a serious time instability/anomaly.

And the brown and the beige and the brown and the beige and the brown ...

very tied with follies for best sondheim musical and obviously both drenched in 70s divorce misery and paranoia

Captain Fantastic and the Brown and Beige Cowboy.

I did wonder about the value of a thread that itemised the tropes, themes, and details of that upper-middle-class 70s NYC diaspora, or I could just leaf through my New Yorker Magazine coffee table book.

!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrRDrz53Q1E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTsuK_HGFJg

I liked the joke at Strich's expense.

Still down the Company rabbit hole this week, Seth Rudetsky's deconstruction videos are addicting.

In one he goes into great detail about the title song's big 'We Loooooooooooooove You' bit and how Elaine boldly sings a half step flat and then just ducks out a full 10 seconds before everyone else, gloriously dgaf and cannot be unheard.

I was wondering if Joni Mitchell was a fan of SS, there are so many parallels there between Company and 'The Hissing of Summer Lawns'

RIP

rip :(

Damn :(

I chose, and my world was shaken
So what?
The choice may have been mistaken
The choosing was not

You have to move on

RIP

A legend, my favorite musical composer :(

Any film list with both Elephant and The Elephant Man on it is OK by me

About 15 years ago, Stephen Sondheim was asked by The Sondheim Review to make a list of his favorite movies. It's a really fascinating and eclectic list - I don't think I've even seen half of them - but a lot of my favorite films are on there too. pic.twitter.com/hV7dVUqu1e

— Jeremy Fassler (@J_fassler) November 27, 2021

Elephant? Alan Clarke?

The other one

Gus Van Sant school shooting movie.

(which is a more-or-less-remake of the Clarke film)

This is a pretty fascinating detail - Sondheim almost quit musicals in 1981 to work on video games instead, and was a big fan of Myst

This was real. Steve loved video games and took them seriously as an art form. Especially adventure games—an extension of his love of math and puzzles and, later on, escape rooms, which he and his partner Jeff really crushed. We talked about his love of Myst a lot over the years. https://t.co/fJMUH5nxx4

— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) November 27, 2021

it is super interesting to me that ILM is utterly disengaged from the death of this man…just a few posts since his universally lamented passing…
but maybe someone steeped in broadway/musical theatre, which I performed in as a kid but foreswore for the kinds of music that ILM concerns itself with, and which I have since strongly disliked, can help me out here…my impression is that Sondheim changed broadway/musical theatre, what, several times over? Who else pushed musical theatre forward during his lifetime? myself and every other ILMnik can go all day long talking about hundreds of artists who changed R&B, rock and roll, country, hip hop, electronic music and on and on… but I struggle to name Sondheim's artistic peers…
like, Lloyd Webber is younger, but did he introduce formal innovations? I am wondering if this paucity could be down to musical theatre being possibly more risk averse than almost any other american, or rather, popular idiom? Like, almost any other idiom has relatively infinite amounts of flexibility…for musical theatre to succeed and to later enter the popular consciousness over the past 50 years, there has to be such ironclad fealty to formula as to make the pop craftsmanship that ILMniks tend to valorize seem like alvin Lucier or some shit…
I so dislike broadway that hamilton annoys the shit out of me…I do think that LMN deserves credit for bringing something new to musical theatre (and is he the first one to do so since Sondheim?) but I can't stand the goddamn thing…

FWIW, Alex in Montreal is a Sondheim superfan (as I've discovered via Twitter), but he hasn't posted on ILM over a year.

I'd guess Jonathan Larson would be considered influential between Sondheim and LMM.

my partner has been super down about this

the video game thing is a shock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf_I_oHHc4I

definitely thinking of heading to NYC in 2022 for the gender-swapped version with Katrina Lenk - she was marvelous in The Band's Visit

― Feta Van Cheese (Neanderthal)

I saw this last night. Will maybe write a longer post about it soon but Katrina Lenk was indeed magnificent and her interpretation of 'Being Alive' had me weeping uncontrollably. The gender reversals mostly felt pretty seamless during the show. It wasn't until i got home listened to the original cast recording that i realized how *necessary* it is to present the show this way.

Patti Lupone was great on 'The Little Things' but her 'Ladies who Lunch' wasn't nearly grizzled enough, Elaine Stritch still defines that role for me.

https://playbill.com/article/hours-of-unseen-sondheim-interviews-released-by-library-of-congress

Cool. I just found out about this weird unproduced Sondheim project, a musical version of The Jet-Propelled Couch.

i can't find a better thread to update about this, but the current revival of into the woods is utterly dope