To Steve With Love: Liz Callaway Celebrates Sondheim continues at Crazy Coqs, London until 22 October 2022.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
A rare sighting on the London cabaret scene of Broadway legend Liz Callaway – last seen with big sister Ann in Sibling Revelry at the Hippodrome back in 2015 – brought a week of sell-out performances and, on opening night at least, two standing ovations.
If you give the people something special, they will come. And so popular is this intimate tribute to Sondheim, entitled To Steve With Love, that an extra show at Crazy Coqs on Saturday afternoon has been added. Those lucky enough to have a ticket will see a blissful 90 minutes that is as close to perfection as it gets.
It is song for song the same show I streamed from Feinstein’s 54 Below in March but with two significant differences: first, it is live which gives it a warmth and vitality no stream could hope to match; secondly, instead of Callaway’s big-voiced son Nick joining her on stage to duet on ‘Move On’, she enlisted the help of Damian Humbley – “the cheapest tenor I could find! – to share the same Sunday in the Park With George moment.
And what a wow moment it was, with Humbley in terrific voice and the two friends together reducing the audience to rapt silence and awe. The two have a common denominator in Merrily We Roll Along: Callaway, in a tiny part, made her Broadway debut in the original back in 1981, Humbley was a brilliant Charley Kringas in Maria Friedman’s award-winning London revival in 2013.
Additionally, Callaway worked in a little story about the much-missed Angela Lansbury, relating that as a 22-year-old she shared a dressing room with her during a Stephen Sondheim evening “and she made me a cup of tea”.
For the rest it is Callaway solo with the redoubtable Alex Rybeck on piano, a relationship that goes back 41 years to when Rybeck was an intern in the Merrily music department and she was perfecting the only two lines required of her as a waitress.
In reprising those lines “yesterday is done, see the pretty countryside”, Callaway recalled it was nine months before she was able to deliver them onstage as the director Hal Prince was away in Houston looking after an opera. What a blow it must have been after such a long delay when the show bombed after just 16 performances.
Callaway’s love-in with Sondheim began when as a nine-year-old her parents took her to the original Company at the Alvin Theatre and she was hooked, deciding straight away she not only wanted to be a ‘Broadway Baby’ but a Sondheim baby too.
The next part of the story saw her as a singing waitress in a piano bar and countless failed auditions until that big break came – and it was in a Sondheim show! What bliss, but sadly it didn’t quite work out the way she wanted.
After the Merrily fiasco, their paths crossed again when she debuted ‘What More Do I Need?’ from Sondheim’s first and until-then unproduced musical, Saturday Night, in another Sondheim concert. Sondheim didn’t seem that thrilled that she was singing this early, immature work but “when he heard the applause, he suddenly became proud of it”.
Later and more famously Callaway played Young Sally in the 1985 all-star Follies made-for-TV concert alongside Elaine Stritch, Barbara Cook, Lee Remick, Mandy Patinkin and Carol Burnett. One bizarre memory from that was turning round at rehearsals and seeing Stritch “butt-naked from the waist down injecting herself with insulin”.
There are tales galore. After a heart-breaking ‘In Buddy’s Eyes’, Callaway remembers her parents, not long before they divorced, walking out at the interval of Follies as its theme was too close to home and they couldn’t take any more. Cue the equally affecting ‘The Road I Didn’t Take’ from the same show.
In lighter vein comes the story of the two envelopes delivered to the stage door after the opening night of Baby, the Maltby and Shire musical she starred in on Broadway in 1983.
One, from Hal Prince, said ‘Never mind what Steve says, you were pretty good” and the other, from Sondheim, said ‘Never mind what Hal says, you were pretty good!”
From ‘The Miller’s Son’ (Callaway played Petra in A Little Night Music on a freezing January night in Buffalo) we went on to Do I Hear A Waltz? and the comedy number ‘What Do We Do? We Fly!’ that’s as relevant now as when Sondheim and Richard Rodgers wrote it. Callaway loves travel but hates flying, still remembering son Nick as a baby colourfully throwing up three times during one uncomfortable flight.
As a mother, the only way she could stop Nick crying was to sing ‘Not While I’m Around’ from Sweeney Todd, not a song previously known as a lullaby!
Some of the songs have no back story. She just sings them because she loves them. Into that category comes the gorgeous ‘I Remember Sky’ and ‘Take Me to the World’ from the TV movie Evening Primrose about someone who has lived in a department store all his life from the age of six and never sees the outside world.
The loudest applause of the evening was reserved for the one song Sondheim didn’t write (but approved of!). That was Lauren Mayer’s ‘Another 100 Lyrics Just Flew Out Of My Brain’, a wicked send-up of the Sondheim tongue-twister from Company with a bit of ‘Not Getting Married Today’ thrown in and “every song is too damn long”. It has long been a staple in Callaway cabarets.
Not a word is missed in a beautifully rehearsed and polished programme that is definitely not “too damn long”.
Everyone does ‘Send in the Clowns’, the only Sondheim number everybody knows, but no one does it better than Callaway whose delicate, haunting treatment sends shivers down the spine. And with the wheel turning full circle to Merrily and ‘Our Time’ – “this is where we began, being what we can”. And one final bit of magic for the encore, ‘With So Little to Be Sure Of’ from Anyone Can Whistle, a show that did no better than Merrily back in the day but thankfully has memorable numbers like that one to rescue it.
From start to finish, through all the stories and the unforgettable songs, this is a love story starring Sondheim and the clear-as-a-bell, perfectly-pitched instrument that brings his genius to life. A marriage made in heaven.
Jeremy Chapman
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