That sweet, silly old queen, Stephen Holden once again demonstrates that his greatest wish would be to crawl between Guettel's legs and take up permanent residence. This piece is a delightful pot-full of worshipful hyperbole.
Don't get me wrong - I adore the score to
Light in the Piazza, and found the music beautiful in the otherwise dramatically inert
Floyd Collins. But to say that Guettel's Town Hall concert from 14 years ago was "legendary," to claim that America awaits Guettel's next notes with bated breath like they did for Sondheim, Bernstein, and Wagner (!)... well, come on, Stephen.
The terribly-wealthy, amazingly-neurotic, almost-50-year old
enfant terrible has produced two musicals and a song cycle in the same amount of time Sondheim wrote 8 full Broadway scores (plus lyrics to 3 more, incidental music to several plays, a TV musical, and scripts for a tv series), and Bernstein had created 5 Broadway musicals (plus 1 opera, 2 ballets, 1 film score, 2 symphonies, and a bushel of other full-length concert pieces).
The lad has a tiny-yet-lovely
oeuvre, but hardly enough to warrant
quite this much obsequiousness (I think).
Holden genuflects
Updated On: 2/21/13 at 10:41 AM