When I was singing Gypsy, we talked a lot about motherhood, and bad parenting. Imelda Staunton with Kevin Whately and Lara Pulver in Gypsy at Chichester Festival theatre, 2014. They are challenging and intricate but that makes them more satisfying to do. He wrote monologues and then, in the music, he gave you the rhythm and the heartbeat of each one. You don’t have to worry about how you are going to make the songs work you just have to read them. In one respect, he’s done so much of the work for you. Jim is really into that as well, so the whole night I didn’t get a word in edgeways.įor me, his work is not about how the songs sound. There were also all these wonderful things to do with magic and circus.
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We went into this lovely room full of what I thought were awards, but they turned out to be the most extraordinary metal puzzles. He was never locked into a vision of how something should be done.Ī year later, when I knew I was going to be playing Momma Rose in Gypsy, my husband, Jim, and I went to Stephen’s house in New York for dinner. I am sure he gave the director and the music director loads of things to think about, but he created an atmosphere where it was easy to be creative, not to be stifled by someone else’s view. I thought: gosh, this is a lesson, isn’t it? To be so present and so very encouraging about what was happening now. He would never say, well you know, we did it like this at such and such a time, or imply that he wished we were doing it differently. What struck me was his joy at seeing a production of his work. He knew that and sat with them he was never someone who just wanted to sit with the director or the producer. We were in Chichester, which is lovely because you can gather in the bar after the show, and all the younger actors were beside themselves with excitement. I didn’t see him again until I took on Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd in 2011. He only ever wanted all of us to be our very best. After that, of course, I decided I’d really try to do it as he’d written it. Just change it.” That was such a shock to me because I wasn’t really a Sondheim aficionado at that point, and people who were said you couldn’t touch anything in his work. There was a particular note I couldn’t get, and I told him. He was never locked into a vision of how something should be done
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And because I was nervous, I just sort of blurted out: “Well, you don’t write an easy tune, do you Stephen?” He created an atmosphere where it was easy to be creative. He said he’d like to thank me for what I was doing with the character.
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We first met in 1990 in my dressing room at the Phoenix theatre when I was playing the Baker’s Wife in Richard Jones’s production of Into the Woods. He set down such a very good path that led in so many different directions. He changed musicals, made unhappy musicals happen. He was so extraordinary, the last of the big boys, the final link with the great American songbook, a man with personal connections to Oscar Hammerstein and Leonard Bernstein. Even at the time, I thought, blimey, here is this legend, having a beer in my kitchen. He was this amazing, mellow man, so personable and warm.
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It was just talking about nothing, about life, about dogs. I f I close my eyes and think of Stephen Sondheim, I remember him sitting in my kitchen in north London.