From Broadway’s prodigious boy wonder to its beloved aging monarch: For Stephen Sondheim, whose forthcoming 80th birthday on March 22 was celebrated in a thrilling concert at Avery Fisher Hall on Monday evening, it must have seemed like a hop, skip and a jump from one to the other. Inside the hall, where the mood was more exhilarated than elegiac, an unspoken question hung in the air: Where did all that time go?
In recent years the tributes to Mr. Sondheim have come so thick and fast that they have begun to blur. While such celebrations tend to be messy affairs, “Sondheim: The Birthday Concert” (directed by Lonny Price), was a model of organization, with a suave host (David Hyde Pierce) and witty leitmotifs woven into its structure. Performances by an all-star guest list that included Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Elaine Stritch and Nathan Gunn proceeded at a brisk pace; there was no speechifying.
In one running joke, the orchestra was continually striking up a theme from “Sweeney Todd,” only to be told to change songs. Mr. Hyde Pierce, comically determined to prove Mr. Sondheim’s global reach, sang parts of “Beautiful Girls” (from “Follies”) in German and Italian.
Recent revivals of Sondheim shows using chamber orchestrations have shown how sturdy his music is, even in drastically reduced arrangements. But Monday’s concert demonstrated that there is still no substitute for a force as mighty as the New York Philharmonic (conducted by Paul Gemignani) playing songs conceived and orchestrated (most often by Jonathan Tunick) for a symphonic palette. The major songs from “Follies” and “A Little Night Music” in particular, are far-reaching ballads with melodic lines that sweep to the horizon.
The program began with a special birthday overture and continued with three 1960s collaborations, including an amusing obscurity, “Don’t Laugh” (written with Mary Rodgers and Martin Charnin, and sung by Victoria Clark), from the 1963 show “Hot Spot.” Then the concert dug into the ’70s and ’80s with many of the great ballads from “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George.” (Perhaps because “A Little Night Music” is now on Broadway, there was only one selection, and it was not “Send in the Clowns.”) The evening’s single most beautiful performance — Ms. McDonald and Mr. Gunn’s “Too Many Mornings” (from “Follies”) could have been a master class in the deployment of operatic voices with natural diction.
There were clever theatrical jokes. One Sweeney Todd (Michael Cerveris from the recent revival) got to slit the throat of another (George Hearn, who took over the role in the original Broadway production, this time playing the villainous Judge Turpin) during “Pretty Women.” The Sweeneys, standing on either side of Ms. LuPone (also from the revival), swapped the lyrics to “A Little Priest,” while she imparted a wickedly lewd attitude to the number. Ms. Peters and Mr. Patinkin (both in excellent voice) reunited to sing “Move On,” from “Sunday in the Park With George,” and John McMartin, from the original cast of “Follies,” offered a searching version of “The Road You Didn’t Take.”
Shortly after intermission, six divas — Ms. LuPone, Ms. McDonald, Marin Mazzie, Donna Murphy, Ms. Peters and Ms. Stritch, clad in shades of red — sashayed to the stage for solo turns from a variety of shows as Mr. Hyde Pierce sang “Beautiful Girls.” In a conceptual coup, Ms. LuPone directed “The Ladies Who Lunch” to Ms. Stritch, its original interpreter, who wore a cap as if to answer the song’s question, “Does anyone still wear a hat?” Ms. Mazzie delivered an increasingly angry “Losing My Mind,” Ms. Murphy a furious “Could I Leave You?,” Ms. McDonald a luscious “Glamorous Life” and Ms. Peters a plaintive “Not a Day Goes By.”
It remained for Ms. Stritch to deliver the evening’s showstopper, “I’m Still Here.” This great trouper, now 85, used her increasing physical fragility to maximum dramatic effect, building the anthem of show business survival from a dismissive casualness to a peak that was not the usual triumphal assertion of ego. Instead, it became a struggle for the character to break through her own fatigue in little bursts. The final phrases of this daring interpretation ended on a note of ambivalence, as if to say, “I may still be here, but at this point, what does it really matter?” The performance received a standing ovation.
As the concert drew to a close, the aisles filled up with a chorus of young, black-clad Broadway performers joining to sing “Sunday,” the climactic anthem from “Sunday in the Park With George.” As Mr. Sondheim, with tears in his eyes, acknowledged the thunderous applause, he remarked, “Alice Longworth Roosevelt said, ‘First you’re young, then you’re middle-aged, then you’re wonderful.’ This was wonderful — thank you all.”
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