The Last of Sheila is a must for Sondheim fans, but also for anyone who enjoys murder-mystery comedy-thriller plays or movies such as Sleuth, Deathtrap, Knives Out, or any of the various Hercule Poirot adaptations, whether with Kenneth Branagh or, better yet, the ones from the 70s and 80s with Peter Ustinov and Albert Finney. Unlike any of those movies, though, I have yet to meet or hear of anyone who 'figured it out' while watching it. The mystery and puzzle IS solvable, for certain – it's just even more clever than any of the ones I've mentioned above, and so more than any of those I've never known of anyone who solved it while on a first viewing. (I'm sure they're out there.)
At the same time, though: one of the most perplexing things about the new Mary Rodgers book "Shy" is that only 5 or 6 pages in, while discussing Sondheim's legendary NYC puzzle games, she says, "Steve's scavenger hunts were especially ambitious, and eventually famous – or in the case of that movie, infamous; the plot was so complicated I eventually gave up." Which only made me think that she either must not have been nearly as good at games as she otherwise claims to be in that chapter– or at the very least, didn't have much interest in playing games when others planned them (not unlike 1 or 2 of the characters in The Last of Sheila... which Sondheim had explictly based on several of his friends!!) |
