If you can’t have Elaine Stritch on stage paying homage to “The Ladies Who Lunch,” the next best thing is Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, and Audra McDonald spectacularly divvying up the Upper East Side threnody as something more like “The Ladies Who Imbibe.”
This gem for the ages has been prepared as an ASTEP fundraiser for Take Me to the World: A 90th Birthday Celebration, a Broadway.com/YouTube.com virtual concert. The two-and-a-half-hour salute—which will remain accessible online—features just about every extant and gifted Broadway musical performer working theater district boards today. Okay, not today, of course; but over the last couple of decades.
Once the intimate extravaganza began after what must have been daunting technical problems, it turned into highlight after highlight—as directed by Paul Wontorek and musical-directed by Mary-Mitchell Campbell. The peaks can’t be itemized in their entirety, except to say that had this been presented live, the group curtain call(s) would have lasted until who-knows-when and might have demanded Sondheim’s presence, which this compilation doesn’t boast.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s review here.]
Nevertheless, the number of transcendent star turns only begin with the Streep-Baranski-McDonald inebriated hilarity. Other special shout-outs go to Raul Esparza, the nominal host and producer. He appears as host only infrequently but towards the night’s wrap-up sings—no, not “Being Alive,” but “Take Me to the World” (from television’s Evening Primrose) with his usual gut feeling. Without question, he ranks among the outstanding modern-day Sondheim interpreters.
Perhaps the most trenchantly acted inclusion is Judy Kuhn’s take on the one movie song selected, the not-heard-often-enough “What Can You Lose?” (Dick Tracy), which she introduces as a one-act play and admirably treats it that way. (Stritch, possibly Sondheim’s greatest interpreter, always made the same point about the most venerated Broadway songwriter of the 20th century’s second half.)
Sitting comfortably in a corner of her home (a living room? a den?), Melissa Errico sings “Children and Art” (Sunday in the Park With George) as if explaining her maternal philosophy to favorite visitors. Laura Benanti, sitting on the floor (her bathroom?) approaches ”I Remember Sky” (Evening Primrose) with profound heartache. Whether intentional or not, the song, about a young woman confined indoors for a long time, acquires a noticeably topical resonance. So do several others.
Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, the stars of the original production of Sunday in the Park with George, both sing a capella. He reprises “Lesson #8” (from the George Seurat tribute) not in a park but almost as appropriately on a sloping country green with a stream nearby. She does “No One is Alone” (Into the Woods) indoors with the gritty vulnerability that’s one of her trademarks. Needless to say, this song also has pandemic undertones.
Randy Rainbow, a ringer due to his online celebrity and his Sondheim endorsement, puts aside Campbell’s accompaniment for his studio-produced “By the Sea” (Sweeney Todd). As expected from an adorably cockamamie mind like his, the version is both hilarious and a grateful homage.
Brian Stokes Mitchell has the opportunity to unfurl a rousing discovery. It’s “The Flag Song,” cut from the Assassins score. Although the outburst is delivered by someone disappointed at the America he sees, he forgets his misgivings when he sees the flag carried by. No reason is given for its Assassins excision, but could it be that Sondheim just wouldn’t bring himself to claim an out-and-out flag-waver for his own? No reason to be embarrassed about it. This is a marvelous John Philip Sousa-George M Cohan-like addition to his songbook. Mitchell does the stars-and-stripes-forever anthem as he does so many songs, with joy hurtling from way down inside him.
Noteworthy contributions come from, to name only a few, Elizabeth Stanley, Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt, Aaron Tveit, Brandon Uranowitz, Donna Murphy, Maria Friedman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, and certainly Alexander Gemignani twirling on a swivel chair to “Buddy’s Blues” (Follies). Nathan Lane, Victor Garber, Joanna Gleason, Lonny Price, Jason Alexander, and Stephen Spielberg of the forthcoming West Side Story flick speak their Sondheim idolatry.
Listening to this once-in-a-lifetime, homespun parade of Sondheim favorites has its effect, not only as a testament to his indisputable genius but as a chance for a hurried analysis of his writing interests, if not his outright obsessions.
Foremost is an observation made repeatedly over his career: Sondheim is the Master of Ambiguity. This is what Kelli O’Hara seems to be getting at when, introducing “What More Do I Need?” (Saturday Night), she declares that Sondheim is the composer-lyricist to whom she turns when she wants to reveal emotion.
Surely, she isn’t ignoring Jerome Kern, Hammerstein, Rodgers, Berlin, Porter, the Gershwins, et cetera, all of whom delved into the emotions time and again. What she must mean is that it’s Sondheim who understands—is fascinated by—psychologically complex emotions, who is caught in life’s all too recurring sorry-grateful aspects. Yup, he has that realm all sewed up.
Then there’s Sondheim’s rhyming expertise. Expertise? Yes, and even every once in a while, his rhyming compulsion. There are moments throughout his canon when he doesn’t resist the temptation to rhyme, sometimes unfortunately distracting listeners from the lyric’s intention. No fewer than six Into the Woods songs get their due here. (Chip Zien, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Josh Groban are three of the Woods singers.) Eventually, the proliferation of insistent rhymes palls.
Sondheim has always maintained he writes for characters, and surely he does. He is never autobiographical. Well, almost never. On December 3, 1973, the man was feted at the Shubert Theatre. It was the Broadway cream of that time rising to the top, Nancy Walker stealing the festival with her feet-planted “I’m Still Here.”
That night Sondheim himself performed, choosing the Anyone Can Whistle title tune. (Patti Lupone does it with enormous subtlety in Take Me to the World.) Clearly, he was copping to his own problems doing the simplest things when dancing a tango and reading Greek come so easily. But wait, there’s more: Michael Cerveris intones a brooding “Finishing the Hat.” No one can argue that the soliloquy’s artistic ruminations are limited to Seurat. They’re Sondheim openly expressing his attitudes as well.
During Take Me to the World, many of the Broadway contingent send their love to Sondheim—Steve to more than a few of them—and blow their kisses. Who wouldn’t do the same with a way-way-off-Broadway show like this? Thanks, Steve, on your 90th birthday. Keep up the good work.
Take Me to the World: A Virtual Concert Celebrating Sondheim’s 90th Birthday was livestreamed April 26, 2020.
