To Steve With Love: Liz Callaway – Feinstein’s/54 Below, New York

To Steve With Love: Liz Callaway at Feinstein’s/54 Below, New York (livestream on 26 March).

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Many have come to honour Stephen Sondheim since his death and many more will do so until the end of time – there’s a big one coming up in London next month – but no one will do so more personally or endearingly as the great Liz Callaway.

In front of the warmest of 54 Below audiences, you could almost feel her talking to Sondheim’s spirit as she sang “All I’ll ever be, I owe to you”, “thanks for everything we did” and “it was marvellous to know you… and it isn’t really through” as she brought her 90-minute celebration of his life to a teary close with ‘With So Little to Be Sure Of’.

Ever since she was taken “as a 9 or 10-year-old” to see the original Company at the Alvin Theatre, Callaway has not only been a ‘Broadway Baby’ but a Sondheim Baby too. He was “a friend, a teacher and a man who changed my life”.

And after “thousands of auditions and hundreds of rejections”, it was in Sondheim’s ill-fated Merrily We Roll Along 41 years ago that she made her Broadway bow. Given just two lines – “yesterday is done, see the pretty countryside” – it took a long time to deliver them in public. The show had to be put back nine months because director Hal Prince was committed elsewhere. Then came the anti-climax of it closing after just 16 performances.

Their paths crossed again when she debuted ‘What More Do I Need?’, from Saturday Night, his first but at-that-time unproduced musical, at A Stephen Sondheim Evening concert.

Later and more famously, Callaway played Young Sally in the 1985 all-star Follies made-for-TV concert alongside legends Elaine Stritch, Lee Remick, Barbara Cook, Mandy Patinkin and Carol Burnett. One bizarre memory of that was of turning round in rehearsal and seeing Stritch naked from the waist down injecting herself with insulin.

In between came Petra’s ‘The Miller’s Son’ from a cold January night in Buffalo for A Little Night Music and the witty ‘What Do We Do? We Fly!’ from Do I Hear A Waltz? with Callaway saying how she loved travel but hated planes, recounting the tale of her baby son Nick colourfully throwing up three times during one messy flight.

This was the same Nick, now 31 and a giant beside his diminutive mum, who joined her in the wonderful ‘Move On’ duet from Sunday in the Park With George, her favourite Sondheim musical, she said. It was quite a family occasion with husband Dan Foster directing the show.

As a mother she remembered the only way she could soothe young Nick’s endless crying was by singing ‘Not While I’m Around’ from Sweeney Todd, a number not previously known as a lullaby!

After a moving ‘In Buddy’s Eyes’ Callaway recalled that when her parents went to see Follies for the first time, they walked out at the interval. At that time they were on the point of splitting up and the theme too close to their own situation for comfort. Cue ‘The Road I Didn’t Take’, a painfully reflective song that made her think of her father.

Not all the songs fitted into her well-rehearsed, flawlessly-delivered narrative but were simply in the show because she loved them so much she couldn’t bear to leave them out, particularly two,  ‘I Remember’ and ‘Take Me to the World’,’ from the TV movie Evening Primrose. And later on ‘Now You Know’ and ‘Loving You’.

The song which brought the biggest laugh wasn’t by Sondheim at all but has long been a staple of Callaway cabarets. That was Lauren Mayer’s ‘Another Hundred People’ spoof ‘Another Hundred Lyrics Just Flew Out of My Brain’ in which “every song is too damn long” but “we’re all singing Sondheim!”

Then a hauntingly spare ‘Send in the Clowns’, as delicate a version as any of us is ever likely to hear, and, with the wheel turning full circle, it was back to Merrily… “this is where we began, being what we can, something is stirring” from ‘Our Time’.

Through it all, the personal stuff, the favourite note, the reminiscences, the simple joy of knowing the great man, Callaway created a beautiful tableau, a true love story between composer and the perfectly-pitched living instrument that brought his genius to life, this was a cabaret masterclass and as close to perfection as you can get.

Adding lustre to an already special evening was musical director Alex Rybeck – they first met when he was a young intern in the music department on Merrily – on piano alongside Ritt Henn (bass) and Ron Tierno (drums).

How Steve would have loved to be there…

Jeremy Chapman