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It was hard enough when Broadway shut down, says Raúl Esparza, but letting Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday pass without a celebration? Impossible. And so, while quarantining in his Chelsea apartment, he and friends hit on the answer: a virtual bash, “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration.” Starting at 8 p.m. Sunday, …
It was hard enough when Broadway shut down, says Raúl Esparza, but letting Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday pass without a celebration? Impossible.
And so, while quarantining in his Chelsea apartment, he and friends hit on the answer: a virtual bash, “Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration.” Starting at 8 p.m. Sunday, the 50th anniversary of the opening of the composer’s “Company” — a revival of which is awaiting Broadway’s own revival — it airs for free at Broadway.com and the Broadway.com YouTube channel.
What started with 10 performers, Esparza tells The Post, quickly grew to more than two dozen, including Patti LuPone, Mandy Patinkin, Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara and Meryl Streep. That last, he says, was a pushover.
“I wrote to her and she got back to me in about five minutes,” he says. “Meryl’s cooler than cool, especially now that she’s stuck at home.”
And home is where all these performances will be coming from, many accompanied — remotely — by Mary-Mitchell Campbell on piano. The longtime orchestrator is also the founder of ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty), a program for disadvantaged kids for which the concert is raising funds.
Just don’t expect perfection, Esparza says. “Songs that would knock you out in a concert hall probably won’t look and sound so great from someone’s living room. We’ll try to polish it up, but you have to appreciate the DYI quality of it.”
Nor will this be a retrospective of Sondheim’s greatest hits. “We asked everyone to choose something that brings them joy or comforts them,” says Esparza, the evening’s emcee. And while he can’t or won’t say who’s singing what, it’s safe to assume you’ll hear more from Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” than his “Assassins.”
Mostly, though, it’s a chance to salute the man who changed musical theater forever, through his own songs and those of the composers he inspired.
“You can’t believe that one man wrote all of this,” Esparza says, of a career that began with the lyrics to 1957’s “West Side Story” and grew monumentally since. “It’s like looking at the Sistine Chapel. Steve would kill me for talking about him like this!”
