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Stephen Sondheim's criminal mind
Published: 4/16/2010 3:30 PM
Last Modified: 4/16/2010 3:30 PM

This Sunday's Tulsa World will have an interview with Stephen Sondheim, the composer and lyricist of "Sunday in the Park With George," "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" and "Into the Woods," among others.

He and New York Times writer Frank Rich will be having a public conversation at the University of Tulsa's Reynolds Center Monday evening.

We had our own pretty wide ranging conversation with Mr. Sondheim, which took place in March, just one week before he -- and most of the New York music and theater world -- celebrated his 80th birthday.

One topic discussed -- and for which there wasn't room in the printed version of the story -- was an interest I share with Mr. Sondheim: the seemingly lost art of the stage thriller.

Sondheim has always had a passion for games and puzzles. He created crossword puzzles for the New York Times and during the 1960s and '70s would construct elaborate scavenger hunts for friends.

A New Yorker article from 1993 described one of these events, which he created with actor Anthony Perkins. In one sequence, the players were directed to a "non-descript door with a mail slot. But if you stuck your ear near the slot, you could hear the faint voice of Frank Sinatra singing 'One for My Baby' -- which might still have stumped you unless you recognized that the lyric begins, 'It's a quarter to three.' A quarter to three: the number was 245."

I love that sort of thing, even though if I had been involved with such a game, I probably wouldn't have made the connection to solve the clue properly.

Sondheim and Perkins incorporated the format of their treasure hunts into the screenplay for the 1973 film "The Last of Sheila." And Sondheim and playwright-actor George Furth, the team that wrote "Company" and "Merrily We Roll Along," collaborated on the play "Getting Away with Murder" (a work Sondheim was surprised I knew about, much less had read).

"I love thrillers," Sondheim said. "It used to be that every season had at least one or two good murder mysteries playing in New York. And in London, you could find three or four playing in the West End every time you went there.

"But that's all gone now," he said. "That's probably the worst thing television has done to the theater -- it took away all the thrillers."

Sondheim and Perkins wrote two other mysteries -- one that was to be set in the '40s and be a musical -- but he said it was unlikely these would see the light of a stage.

"I toy with ideas for mysteries all the time, maybe going so far as to jot something down," he said. "But I doubt anything will come of them. I mean, nobody writes a mystery play just for your own amusement. In any case, I just think that playwrighting is the hardest of the literary arts."

As to why he thinks this...that's something we'll save for Sunday.


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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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