Stephen Sondheim thought he had made a really bad decision when he agreed to write the lyrics to Richard Rodgers’ music. The two men did not get on. The 1965 musical was based on a popular Broadway play, The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents, which was about a repressed American secretary in her early thirties who goes to Venice on holiday and falls in love with an Italian antique shop owner, only to find he is married and has two children. It had already been made into a film with Katharine Hepburn, ideal casting, and called Summer Madness.
“It was not a bad show,” said Sondheim, “merely a dead one. It was well-written, eloquently performed and a failure in every respect.” Now poorly directed and poorly acted, there is also even less point in reviving this indifferent musical if you can’t actually hear Sondheim’s lyrics.