That Sondheim Bounce That Matters

Maybe it was predictable – Stephen Sondheim’s “Bounce” wasn’t a hit when it first played last year. “Though Bounce closed in Washington last fall with an air of failure, any show with a name as big as Sondheim’s on it will have the shortest of stints in musical-theater purgatory. It’s part of a death-and-transfiguration cycle that has been going on at least since the mid-1950s, when the Leonard Bernstein musical Candide went down like a rock, but whose original cast album became a classic that continues to inspire increasingly successful revisions. Failure? Success? Not for nothing is show biz mythology full of “Springtime for Hitler” instances in which failure and success are mere matters of perception that change from moment to moment.”