Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration, review: too earnest, but he's the ideal artist for lockdown
The two transatlantic titans of musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, happen to share a birthday – March 22. Whereas the latter (72) has kept morale up by tickling the ivories and sharing his recitals – Sondheim, who has just turned 90, has been more elusive during lockdown. He was to have come over to bestow his blessing on the Sondheim Theatre (as the Queen’s has been renamed) but Covid-19 put paid to that.
Refusing to let the big milestone pass without due ceremony, all the same, parts of the extended Sondheim family – a starry cluster of (mainly American) actors and musicians with connections to the man and his work, with Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal the big Hollywood draws – have convened to create a digital gala in his honour. The venture, two hours plus of fresh renditions, pre-recorded separately then streamed in one fell (free to consume) swoop, aims to raise money for Astep (Artists Striving to End Poverty).
Good cause aside, the concert gives a health-giving fillip to millions of stuck-at-homes and a timely reminder of Sondheim’s genius. The kind of relationship angst explored in some of his numbers might seem by the bye at the moment – redolent of small-scale concerns, a functioning society taken for granted – yet it’s his core sense of our fragile relationship with the wider world that makes Sondheim the perfect artist for the lockdown hour.
These are video dispatches from ordinary sitting-rooms and studies, even in one arresting case a bathroom (Laura Benanti – surrounded by grey tiles – singing, stirringly, I Remember, from the great “lost” Sondheim musical, the made-for-TV Evening Primrose). What’s lacking in Broadway razzmatazz is made up for by an intellectually apt quality of boxed-in confinement. Somehow the contributions – masterminded by Raúl Esparza – aren’t grimly DIY in sound even though they’re acoustically constrained.
That said, while the selection understandably eschews the spikier side of the Sondheim oeuvre in favour of numbers more soulful and solace-giving, a lot of the attendant mood music in the personal greetings errs towards suffocating earnestness (“This is your birthday, but you are the gift”). Camp comedian Randy Rainbow’s account of Mrs Lovett’s marital reverie By the Sea from Sweeney Todd provides a wonderful break-out moment of flippancy – honouring Sondheim’s wit with interpolated lines and zany visuals: “I can see us now, you respecting social distancing guidelines from six feet away, me in a face-mask I made from my own underwear.”
Send in the Clowns (A Little Night Music) remains his best-known number – exemplifying his taut, conversational way with a line – and Sondheim stalwart Donna Murphy catches its thinking-aloud ruefulness beautifully. Annaleigh Ashford and Jake Gyllenhaal – who, fingers crossed, we’ll still see in the West End in Sunday in the Park with George – distance-duet on Move On, Gyllenhaal welling up as he imparts its anthemic message in hard-won acceptance.
Streep, every wintry and wry facial expression a treat, joins Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald, again on split-screen, to swill liquor and ooze satirical contempt in The Ladies Who Lunch (Company). That number has been sung to perfection by Patti LuPone in the recent West End production, but the latter here gives us something so contrastingly pure and heartfelt in the song of Anyone Can Whistle that you barely register her surrounding furniture.
This will stand both as a testament of Sondheimite devotion and a document of this crisis: a frail-looking Mandy Patinkin, say, out of doors, voice breathless as he croons Sunday’s “Lesson #8’ (“George feels afraid, where are the people out strolling on Sunday?”), or Bernadette Peters, unaccompanied, offering up – how plainly resonant – No One Is Alone from Into the Woods (“Sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood”). And we’re not out of those woods yet.
Available on YouTube
