From: "Preston Foerder" <preston-AT-pfpuppetry.com> To: <puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org> Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:40:16 -0500 Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] Stephen Sondheim I have to agree with Steve that "God is in the details" rather than being a religious sentiment deals with attention to detail. Rather than brush past insignificant items in your work that perhaps no one may notice, one should concentrate on every little detail because the overall impression is formed from a combination of all the smallest details. Regarding "Sunday in the Park with George", the recent Broadway production was a brilliant and subtle use of animation in live theatre, including such things as painted dogs on easels coming to life, and Seurat's painting coming together and to life in the background. The line from "Finishing the Hat" that always brings a tear to my eye is "Look I made a hat....where there never was a hat." Preston -----Original Message----- From: puptcrit-bounces-AT-puptcrit.org [mailto:puptcrit-bounces-AT-puptcrit.org] On Behalf Of Steve Abrams Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 12:36 AM To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] Stephen Sondheim To some extent I agree with Alan the phrase "God is in the details" is a cop out. It is glib and very non-specific, perhaps a sound byte. But the Sondheim event was like a glorious seminar on theatre. I might have some sense of what Mr Sondheim meant.I just googled the phrase to check- "God is in the details" is attributed to Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, the modernist, minimalist architect. Mies work is very disciplined. If you are working with a very few elements, every detail is of great importance. The same is true in cooking. If your dish has only a few ingredients, they should be of t good quality and very carefully prepared. There is no fussy ornamentation to hide behind. The Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George is about the painter George Seurat. George is obsessed by his work, and neglects his long-time mistress. Sondheim was asked if the character of George was also somewhat autobiographical. The song that speaks most directly about artistic dedication/ isolation/ obsession/ and reward is "Finishing the Hat." Sondheim said that "finishing the hat" was not so much about himself but It was about the creative process, and it is something every artist would understand Another example. Sondheim loves puzzles- a collection of small details where everything fits together perfectly at the end- building a song is something like that I think most performers and audiences love patter songs, songs that are lists that are loaded with clever words and rhymes and performed at great speed. Such a song will not work if the lyrics use words that do not fit together in just the right way. Sondheim's song "(Not) Getting Married Today" from Company is perhaps one of the most fiendishly difficult (and hilarious) tongue twisters of a song ever written. A simple fact- there must be places in such a song for a performer to breathe! Sondheim said that the last third of the song is not quite as good as it should be, I think he called it a tangle of spaghetti. Some actress's manage to make it work but he said he would sometimes relent, and allow an actress to change a word or 2 in the last third of the song, because the fault was his, and not hers. Steve On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Alan Cook <alangregorycook-AT-msn.com> wrote: > I think "God is in the details" means EVERYTHING ELSE INVOLVED. It is a > wonderful cop-out when you only have so much time to talk to an audience. > > One can also look at that phrase as a theological shorthand. A lot of > "God-fearing people" have a very limited sense of Creation and > Creator---rather ironic since they tend to foce narrow beliefs on the rest > of us. Adam & Eve and the Garden of Eden were the center of the Universe > until we learned that the sun did not revolve around Earth. Rather, it was > the other way around. Now we know that Creation is bigger than we could > imagine, that Creation is ongoing, that things as part of the plan, happy > accident, or whatever are changing, and that people can change too. > > Lots of artists can relate to that & Sondheim is one of them. I see > Artistic creation as a Spiritual expression. And some atheist friends are a > hell of a lot more spiritual than some true believers,--- they have wider > more encompassing outlooks, and figure if they are to do good works it has > to be done in a single lifetime instead of an afterlife. > > Heaven is supposed to be UP, but which way is UP from a round planet? If we > make it to Heaven, do we have to dodge meteors & comets and defunct space > debris? > > So definitely, "God is in the details". You can spend the rest of your life > looking into those details. No reason to be bored when there are so many > questions to ask, and solutions to discover. > > ALAN > > > _______________________________________________ > List address: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org > Admin interface: http://lists.puptcrit.org/mailman/listinfo/puptcrit > Archives: http://www.driftline.org > _______________________________________________ List address: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org Admin interface: http://lists.puptcrit.org/mailman/listinfo/puptcrit Archives: http://www.driftline.org _______________________________________________ List address: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org Admin interface: http://lists.puptcrit.org/mailman/listinfo/puptcrit Archives: http://www.driftline.org
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