Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration presented by Broadway.com

Context is the key – apt for Sondheim, whose guiding artistic principle is ‘Content dictates Form’. The concert was organised by broadway.com, and the spirit and mood of New York City enlivened each performance; it often threatened to crack the surface of the performance space. The theatres in Australia (indeed worldwide) have gone dark, but there is no more symbolic a closure as that of Broadway. Grief and loss seemed to infect the concert as surely as a cluster of Covid-19. The result wasn’t tragic, though: it was profoundly moving, ‘a spark to pierce the dark from Battery Park to Washington Heights’.

It started conventionally enough. Stephen Schwartz (himself a legendary composer, from Godspell to Wicked) played beautifully the prologue from Follies (1971), which was followed by an orchestral rendition of the overture to Merrily We Roll Along (1981). Renowned as a lyricist, this was a gentle reminder that Sondheim also writes rich, complex musical compositions divorced from the wit and wordplay of his lyrics. Of course, he is foremost a dramatist, which Sutton Foster demonstrated with ‘There Won’t be Trumpets’ from Anyone Can Whistle (1964), a song that teaches us that ‘the biggest things that happen to you are often the quietest’. Her reading evoked the doctors, nurses, and frontline responders to the Covid-19 pandemic as much as it did knights in shining armour. That exquisite silky texture to her voice was on full display, and it proved a galvanising opening.

Several solos followed, some of them beautifully controlled like Judy Kuhn’s ‘What Can You Lose?’ from Dick Tracy (1990), and some a little too cutesy, such as Neil Patrick Harris’s ‘The Witch’s Rap’ from Into the Woods. One of the great delights for Australian audiences was the introduction of singers unfamiliar to us, such as Melissa Errico and Elizabeth Stanley: the former created a small one-act play out of ‘Children and Art’ from Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and the latter gave what will surely go down in history as a signature ‘The Miller’s Son’ from A Little Night Music (1973).

The concert was not without big hitters: not just famous stage legends who cut their teeth on, and were made famous by, Sondheim’s work – both Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters appeared – but also Hollywood stars including Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal, who may have come late to the Sondheim party but have certainly proved themselves since. Patinkin delivered an a cappella performance of ‘Lesson #8’ from Sunday in the Park that was heartbreakingly true: lines like ‘George would have liked to see people out strolling on Sunday’ assumed an almost impossible resonance, given that Central Park is filling up with bodies.

Stephen Sondheim (photograph via Brittanica)

Sondheim is, of course, an excoriating wit, so naturally much of the concert was hilarious. Streep’s appearance, a trio with Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald, was a grog-soaked rendition of ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’, from Company (1970). It was riotous, raunchy, and – given how many of us have taken to drink in isolation – savagely relevant. This was undeniably a highlight, but it shouldn’t become the sole popular cultural takeaway.

Because the true meaning of Take Me to the World is that the greatest art (and Sondheim is rightfully mentioned here in the same breath as Mozart and Shakespeare) soaked up and enfolded new meanings, adding layers of significance like fossils in sediment; it not only incorporated contemporary events but mirrored those events back at us in real time. Thus, a song like ‘I Remember’ from Evening Primrose (1966), a television film about people living their entire lives inside a department store, took on a tragic lilt. When Laura Benanti sang ‘And at times I think I would gladly die for a day of sky’, it didn’t feel remotely theoretical.

The concert ended, fittingly, with Bernadette Peters singing ‘No One is Alone’ from Into the Woods. In a city that has had more than 12,500 deaths (a toll still rising horribly every day), the line ‘sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood’ acquired an unbearable weight. But there was also a kind of flinty, hard-won hope there. ‘Hard to see the light now; just don’t let it go.’

This is what made Take Me to the World so special: it can never be repeated; it is the content dictating the form.

Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration was live-streamed from broadway.com on 27 April 2020. Paul Wontorek was the director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell the musical director.