Stephen Sondheim talks about Glee

Do you watch the TV series "Glee"?
SS: I've only seen it about, oh gosh, half a dozen times. I don't like to sit in front of the television set at a certain hour. I never got in that habit when I was a kid. I was brought up on movies and even when I was brought up on movies, you didn't go at 6 o'clock, 8 o'clock and 10 o'clock. You went to a double feature, you walked in any time you wanted. And walked out any time you wanted. I stopped going to movie theatres when everybody had to go at 6, 8 and 10 o'clock. 'Cause that's like going to the dentist. You know, you wouldn't want to listen to a CD [if it had to be scheduled]. "OK, you want to hear the Beethoven Fifth? Four o'clock this afternoon, you can put the CD on." It's not in any way attractive to me. So, I never got into the habit of watching television. Once VCRs came in, where you could tape things and watch it any time you wanted, that's a different matter. So that's what I do with "Glee," or what I intend to do: To get a season, and then watch it. That's what I've done with other TV series, like "Friday Night Lights" and "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" and "The Sopranos." You know, I wouldn't've dreamed of tuning in every Sunday at 9 o'clock.

Are you caught up on "Mad Men"?
SS: Oh, no, as a matter of fact I'm waiting for the fourth season to finish — I think it just did. Same thing with "Friday Night Lights." "Friday Night Lights" is one of the great inventions.

It has such an improvisatory quality to it —
SS: Seemingly. That's what's so great. And so beautifully controlled. I could go on about it. And, you know, I'm about as interested in football in Texas as I am in, you know, ballet. It's all about character, of course. That's always interesting and always moving. My feeling about "Glee," is, it's fresh and it's original and I want to see more, but I'm not gonna look at my TV schedule and say, "Oh, God, I'm gonna stay home this evening and watch 'Glee.'"

The songs of "Glee" often seem, to me, unconnected to plot, so I lose interest.
SS: Well, ah! But that's, to me, that's part of the fun of it, when they use the music right and freshly and it is in some way connected to plot — even if it's just emotionally, even if the lyric doesn't seem to be connected to plot, but the feeling of the song is. I like that. Obviously, it's very up and down, the episodes I've seen — even within the episodes they're up and down. In a way, it's a very daring show, and they are taking chances, and a lot of it is whimsical in the true sense of the word.

I do wonder if it teaches a new generation to go for jukebox shows.
SS: Well, I don't know, you know, jukebox shows are also partly the result of producing on Broadway, where shows are so expensive that producers don't want to take a chance on anything that's unknown to an audience, so they want an audience coming in whistling the tunes. You know, young people, maybe that's what they're used to going to in the theatre, [but] I think young writers wanna write their own stuff.

source: playbill.com

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