“I’m not a writer, but if I could write, I would write everything he writes,” Patinkin said of Sondheim. “He expresses everything I wish I could say, and everything I wish I could believe in, and everything I wish I could live. He simply turns my darkness into light.”
Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford also reprised their roles from the 2017 revival of Sunday in the Park, singing “Move On”; Melissa Errico sang “Children and Art”; and Michael Cerveris and Iain Armitage both put their spin on “Finishing the Hat.”
Later, Patinkin’s Sunday in the Park co-lead Bernadette Peters also sang sans accompaniment, closing out the 2.5-hour program with “No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods, a song she had to previously listen in on from the wings while playing the Witch on Broadway in 1987. Touchingly, she got a bit teary-eyed on the line, “Things will come out right now / We can make it so.” Into the Woods’ original Broadway cast member Chip Zien was also on hand for “No More,” while others—including Miranda, Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt, and Neil Patrick Harris—also tackled songs from the prescient musical retelling of our favorite fairy tales.
“Stephen Sondheim taught me music, taught me music theory, by way of being a young kid in a small town in New Mexico listening to the CD of Into the Woods and not knowing that music could work that way,” Harris said. “From that point forward, I was just hooked. He made me love theater, he made me love music, made me love rhythm—and I’ll never forget it.”
Spoken-word tributes were peppered throughout the program from the likes of Jason Alexander, who recalled hammering out the composer’s singular style while originating the role of Joe in Merrily We Roll Along; West Side Story director Steven Spielberg, who praised Sondheim’s surprisingly photographic memory of Golden Age Hollywood (“It turns out you’re that guy who knows more about Hollywood’s cultural heritage than maybe me and Marty Scorsese put together”); and Nathan Lane, who teasingly applauded the technical difficulties-delayed evening as arriving “not a moment too soon” before looking back to The Frogs, the mixed-reviewed 2004 musical for which he wrote the book.
“Here’s my little show business adage for this evening: If at all possible, try to work with a genius. They’re fun, they’re smart, they’re inspiring, and they tend to bring out the best in you. And that’s the kind of genius Steve is,” Lane said. “I mean, there are angry geniuses, tortured geniuses, self-destructive geniuses—he’s a nice genius, and a great collaborator.”
Other highlights included Kelli O’Hara breaking from her Rodgers and Hammerstein roots to sing “What More Do I Need” from Saturday Night; Brandon Uranowitz on Anyone Can Whistle’s “With So Little to Be Sure Of”; Laura Benanti’s “I Remember” from Evening Primrose; Brian Stokes Mitchell’s “The Flag Song,” a cut number from Assassins; and Sutton Foster’s show-opening “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” also from Anyone Can Whistle.
That opening number was in equal parts irksomely, charmingly, and hilariously delayed by over an hour after the broadcast went live with Stephen Schwartz playing the Follies prologue just to have Esparza jump on for a live intro without working audio. (The actor’s wide-eyed realization that he’d been soundlessly talking for several minutes to an audience of 105,000 is already the go-to meme of theater Twitter.) But as it always does, the show went on—eventually. As if bracing himself, Esparza even joked with Vanity Fair in the lead-up: “There will be surprises full of all kinds of crazy flaws that will live forever.”