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By
ESTHER SMITH
News staff writer
July 19, 2006
Broadway comes to Hood River Friday
evening with CAST’s first performance in its new theater at Columbia
Center for the Arts, doing the musical revue, “Side by Side by
Sondheim.”
Director Mark Steighner says he is very honored to be directing the
first play in this theater and that there are a lot of great things
about it — “I don’t think there is a bad seat in the house.”
The two-act revue is a collection of songs from the first half of
Stephen Sondheim’s 50-year career, and includes some of his most
innovative work, says Steighner.
“His melodies are often angular — meaning they have some tricky jumps
or intervals — and he almost never repeats anything exactly the same,”
he says. “However, those things are all sort of ‘hidden’ and only
apparent to the performer. “The listener just notices that the songs
sound unique and not cliché.”
Steighner felt this show was a “perfect first vehicle” for the
theater.
“It is intimate and direct and requires little in the way of elaborate
staging,” he says. “This is a new and somewhat unconventional space,
and there are a lot of unknowns — at least to me — acoustics, lighting
angles, staging and blocking. Better to do something technically
simpler for the first show.”
Richard Parker, John Bryan and Liz Ghiz
rehearse a
scene in “Side By Side By Sondheim,” opening July 21
in the new CAST Theater at the Columbia Center
for the Arts.
There is nothing simple about the music,
however. According to Steighner, Sondheim was trained as a serious
composer in the 1950s and has a natural affinity for the complex.
“Sondheim is noted for writing tricky, vocally demanding and
technically sophisticated songs,” he says. Thus, this production would
require “incredibly good singers,” he says. So the cast is made up of
six veteran performers with whom he has worked: Liz Ghiz, Alison Fitts,
Julie Raefield-Gobbo, Jeff Kline, John Bryan and Richard Parker.
Steighner says that each production of Side by Side by Sondheim is
different — for instance, the original had three cast members, but
this production has six. The 25-30 songs may be grouped together
differently.
“We have reordered the songs so that they are thematically related,”
he says. “Act 1 is primarily love songs; Act 2 is songs about ‘the
human experience.’”
“Side by Side by Sondheim” features music from “West Side Story” and
“Gypsy,” which both contain his lyrics, and “Company,” “Follies” and
“A Little Night Music,” which spawned one of his greatest hits: “Send
in the Clowns.”
“As a lyricist, Sondheim is without peer,” Steighner says. “He is
generally regarded as the best lyricist of the middle and late 20th
century. No one even comes close to his wit, imagination and verbal
sophistication.”
The musical revue opens Friday and will run Thursday, Friday and
Saturday evenings for four weeks: July 21-22, July 27-29, Aug. 3-5,
and Aug. 10-12.
For more information call (541) 387-8877. |
