Composer

STEPHEN SONDHEIM, COMPOSER There are certain themes in Woods that come out of nowhere and go nowhere-songs or song ideas that are never finished. In this respect, Woods is closest to Merrily We Roll Along, in that I decided to use musical ideas not as developmental leit motifs, but in the functional way you would use modular furniture. The same theme becomes an inner voice, an accompaniment , a counterpoint. It may be fragmented, but it is not really developed. In terms of the relation between the book and the music, the model for Woods is closest to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, in that a large portion of Woods is built like farce: very fast paced, with a quick, short song/scene format. But unlike Forum, in which the songs were deliberately designed to stop the action (to prevent the relentlessness of the farce from exhausting the audience), Jim and I wanted this piece to have a seamless flow. This has to do with two factors; firstly, with Jim's notion of maintaining a strong narrative line within the structure he created of crosscutting within the stories themselves. (Until the group scenes in the 60 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 ...