ABBA to reunite?

[Guest fountainhall]

Here's news everyone wants to hear. It seems there is a possibility - just a possibility - that ABBA will reunite for a one-off concert later this year.

 

Rumours are swirling after singer Agnetha F

[TotallyOz]

Thank you for that article. I would love for this to happen! I have been a huge fan and think the wedding would be great. Do you have your invitation yet? Mine hasn't arrived yet but I am assuming they will wait till closer to the date?

[Guest fountainhall]

Do you have your invitation yet?

I am told they hand deliver the invites. I wrote to the Palace when I heard the news to suggest they might save some cash by not sending a flunky to Thailand just to deliver mine. DHL will do just fine

 

I believe I should be somewhere on the list because there has been a vacant Dukedom with my family name attached to it since the mid 19th century. The Duke seemed to vanish off the face of the earth, apparently. Sadly my father was a younger son and so I would not inherit, even if it were in our family. However, as another guy in the UK did a few decades ago, I am in the process of legally changing my two names to Lord Fountainhall. Whilst this may not get me into all Palace functions, I am told it helps greatly with upgrades on British Airways - "This way to first class, my Lord!" Now where did I leave my coronet??

[KhorTose]

Thank you for that article. I would love for this to happen! I have been a huge fan and think the wedding would be great.

 

This is great news. So I hope you two are as "free as a bumblebee" to "get on the carousel".

I am sure you both will be "givin a little bit more" "under the sun". I just hope your motto will be "I let the music speak" because after all it is a "crazy world." But keep in mind you must not be "burning my bridges" or we will be "crying over you".

[Guest fountainhall]

Yes, indeed. We'll both be "dancing queens, young and sweet, only seventeen."

 

Since KhorTose has brought up the subject of lyrics, I will go off on a slight but related tangent.

 

Fortunately it's another 11 months before we have to think of Christmas gifts once again. Whilst I have always enjoyed working out what I think others will want, I know it is too much to expect that an iPad might wing its way to Bangkok from one of my relatives. My spirits have been known to sink when I find another squishy parcel in the letter box, knowing that it is more than likely another sweater, but ever hopeful that this time it might be the right size and a colour I like – not navy blue, again!

 

This year, all was forgiven. My interest in Broadway musicals being well-known, I was delighted to open a heavy parcel from amazon containing an absolute gem of a book. Finishing The Hat is an unlikely title for a collection of lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, one of the greatest personalities in the history of the musical genre. The subtitle immediately excites ones interest, though: “Collected Lyrics with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes.”

 

Most if us will have seen at least the movie versions of Sondheim’s great early works, Gypsy and West Side Story, for which he wrote only the lyrics. When he turned his hand to writing both music and lyrics, his music was never to find the same degree of popularity as a Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein or an Andrew Lloyd Webber. Yet, he is rightly regarded as one of the giants of musical theatre.

 

In the book, in addition to his lyrics and their background, he discusses his relationship with his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and his collaborations with such extraordinary talents as Leonard Bernstein, RIchard Rodgers, Hal Prince, Ethel Merman, Jerome Robbins and a host of others.

 

The first show I saw was the London production of Company, a tale about relationships focussing on a single man whose friends all try to help get him married off. The show-stopper comes near the end in a number written for its performer, the glorious Elaine Stritch. “The Ladies Who Lunch” is a wry, acerbic toast from one rather drunk lady of a certain age about society ladies who spend their days busily doing – well, not much. Sondheim tells us in the book that he was inspired by a story of the well-oiled Ms. Stritch entering a bar in New York at two in the morning and telling the barman, “Just give me a bottle of vodka and a floor plan!”

 

After a few years, it was A Little Night Music also in London, with the recently deceased Jean Simmons and Hermione Gingold. This is a jewel of a show with another magnificent show-stopper, “Send in the Clowns”, to a melody everyone will recognize. A decade or so later it was Sweeney Todd, recently made into a movie with Johnny Depp as the Demon Barber and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, the shopkeeper whose pies miraculously improve once she adds some of the barber’s victims into the recipe. When the Barber slits his first throat, the Broadway audience gasped and all but screamed! My favourite lyric is when Mrs. Lovett describes the content of one of her pies –

 

“What is that?”

“It’s priest

Have a little priest.”

“Is it really good”

“Sir, it’s too good at least.

Then again, they don’t commit sins of the flesh

So it’s pretty fresh . . . ”

 

The last one I saw on Broadway was Follies. This centres on a reunion party in a crumbling Broadway theatre featuring a lot of artists in their latter years who had decades earlier starred in a sort of Ziefeld Follies. During the reunion, “emotions and relationships buried in the past gradually resurface with the help of nostalgia and alcohol.”

 

'”Good times and bum times,

I've seen them all, and, my dear –

I'm still here.'”

 

Finishing The Hat is a delicious read for anyone interested in musical theatre, and an illuminating background into the creation of some of the 20th century’s great shows.

 

Stephen Sondheim: Finishing The Hat

Published 2010 by Alfred A Knopf