File puptcrit/puptcrit.0902, message 709


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
>
>
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