Actor

last quarter of the show, no scene goes on for more than about two pages.) Secondly, we have a narrator who is constantly interrupting the flow, so we wanted to keep the ball bouncing back and forth between him and the stage. This meant lots of little song fragments, and resulted in the sort of coitus interruptus technique that I've built into the score. CHIP ZIEN, ACTOR The real genius of Sondheim is his ability to make the music land precisely where the emotional line falls. That's why what he does is so actable. Sondheim writes songs that are like monologues, and the origin of some of his songs in Woods were actually monologues. In places where a song was indicated but not written in the script, Lapine would often have long passages of single-spaced speeches that were meant to be musicalized. Sondheim would take Lapine's indications of what sort of piece should go there, and he would develop it into a song. a) 0 Cn 1.to r.: CHIP ZIEN AND TOM ALDREDGE TOM ALDREDGE, ACTOR The Narrator is the one character who never uses the word "I" (except for the one time when he is about to be tossed off-stage). He has no self identity , no history. This has been the most difficult thing for me in the show, the Narrator is so much of an outsider that he is almost entirely cut off from the interaction that I have always relied on as an actor. 61 ...