Take Me To The World: Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration – Live on Broadway.com’s YouTube channel.
Never mind it’s over a month since Stephen Sondheim celebrated his 90th birthday, never mind the show started 70 minutes past its advertised time because of technical difficulties, this almighty love-in for a musical legend was well worth the wait.
All that was missing was an audience and the atmosphere you can only get in a theatre. And even if, like me, sleep took over before it eventually curtained-up around 2.15am UK time, Broadway.com YouTubed the show for posterity and it’s up there now if you missed it (accompanied by some classy, stylish graphics).
Surely the greatest collection of Sondheim specialists ever assembled at any one time, the whole showbiz gamut, young and old, from A to Z, from Armitage to Zien – Chip Zien was Into The Woods’ first Broadway Baker in 1987 – was represented.
They performed the big 11 o’clock numbers like ‘Send in the Clowns’ from Donna Murphy and ‘Broadway Baby’ from Maria Friedman (“the first Sondheim I sang in front of him”), most of them working in a personal anecdote, alongside one I’d never heard before ‘The Flag Song’ (performed by Brian Stokes Mitchell), workshopped for Assassins but ditched for the 1991 opening.
Meryl Streep, Bernadette Peters, Audra McDonald, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, Friedman, Lea Salonga, Nathan Lane, Melissa Errico, Christine Baranski, Jake Gyllenhaal, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kelli O’Hara and Ben Platt. They were all there (well, singing at home thanks to Covid-19)… and that’s just for starters.
Patinkin did his number from Sunday in the Park With George while walking the dog in a field (or was it the garden?). Peters’ unaccompanied ‘No One is Alone’ was a bit of magic.
Streep, McDonald and Baranski, all armed with alcohol of one colour or other in their respective isolations, were a well-oiled hoot in ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ – what else could it have been?!
Whether Mandy’s dog or 11-year-old actor Iain Armitage (Young Sheldon) was the youngest performer on parade was not revealed, but the latter did get to confidently open a rendition of ‘I’m Still Here’. By the way, Iain is spelt the Scottish way because his dad hails from Falkirk.
Nathan Lane, who won a Tony for his Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum and was closely involved in the expanding of The Frogs, cracked everyone up by drily referring to his old pal as an “unsung hero” as there seems to be a Sondheim celebration every five years. Maybe it will become annual now that Steve has started his tenth decade.
Lane also said never to spurn any opportunity of working with a genius “because it’s fun and they tend to bring out the best in you”.
Raul Esparza (Bobby in the 2006 Broadway revival of Company) hosted the concert and must have been tearing his hair out at the nightmare start; Steven Spielberg, who is directing the new West Side Story movie (scheduled for US release on 20 December but who knows?), told some tales; fellow composer Stephen Schwartz played the Prologue from Follies; Paul Wontorek directed and Mary-Mitchell Campbell was MD.
Apart from honouring Sondheim on what was the 50th anniversary of Company opening on Broadway, they were all raising funds for ASTEP (Artists Striving To End Poverty). No cause could be more appropriate in these murderous months.
Jeremy Chapman
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