New Sondheim revue celebrates ‘Being Alive’

The cast of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s Being Alive: A Sondheim Celebration includes (from left) Melissa WolfKlain, Nick Nakashima, Solona Husband, Noel Anthony, Anne Tolpegin and Sleiman Alahmadieh. Photo by Kevin Berne

The work of Stephen Sondheim is so beloved that admirers keep trying to find new ways to feature the songs outside the context of the shows for which they were written – all in the hope that more and more people will fall in love with Sondheim’s music and lyrics.

Even during Sondheim’s lifetime, there were a number of revues of his work, including Side by Side by Sondheim, Marry Me a Little, Putting It Together, and Sondheim on Sondheim. London saw the latest tribute (following Sondheim’s death in 2021 at age 91) with Old Friends, a starry, beautifully programmed concert that’s heading to Broadway in the spring of 2025.

Helen (WolfKlain), the minister (Tolpegin) and Gene (Nakashima) kick off the wedding ceremony. Photo by Kevin Berne

Closer to home we now have the world premiere of Being Alive: A Sondheim Celebration, a TheatreWorks Silicon Valley production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Created by TheatreWorks’ founding artistic director (now retired), Robert Kelley, and resident musical director William Liberatore, the show is less a straightforward celebration and more of a traditional revue where the characters have names they don’t need and there’s a loose story as they flow through cycles of friendship, courtship, marriage, family, divorce, etc. You know: they live life.

It’s not innovative, but it’s an efficient way to recycle tunes from the Sondheim songbook. Heck, we’re even at the point where revues are borrowing from previous revues. This one includes Sondheim-tinkered lyrics from Putting It Together and cut songs that previously resurfaced in Marry Me a Little and Sondheim on Sondheim.

Let’s be clear: it’s always a good night when you’re able to sit down and listen to talented singers bring Sondheim songs to life. If Being Alive were simply more of a tribute concert, I probably would have enjoyed it more. But this is a revue that takes being a revue very seriously. That means it’s over-directed (by Kelley) and over-choreographed (by Alex Perez) with not enough focus on the songs and singers themselves. The result is a peppy and cheerful two hours that seems to want to turn Stephen Sondheim into Irving Berlin.

Gene (Nakashima), Sally (Husband) and George (Alahmadieh) revel in the excitement of a future ahead in Robert Kelley and William Liberatore’s Being Alive: A Sondheim Celebration. Photo by Kevin Berne

That’s not necessarily a bad thing – Sondheim and Berlin are two of this country’s greatest writers for the musical theater. But Sondheim needs space and darkness and cynicism mixed in with the bounce and the light. For every heartfelt tearjerker like “Children Will Listen” or “Not While I’m Around,” there’s should be a cigarette smoke cloud and whiskey-scented aura around songs like “Could I Leave You” or “We Do Not Belong Together” or “The Little Things You Do Together.” Revues don’t always feel like theater at its most mature, and Sondheim is most definitely theater at its most mature.

This amiable show is much more light than dark. For instance, during “The Miller’s Son” from A Little Night Music, Kelley gets laughs from having actors appear as some of the men the singer is singing about as she contemplates a lusty if limited future. And these figures get laughs – laughs in a song with lyrics that acknowledge a woman’s sexual power and joy mixed with her resignation that it can’t last:

It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch
To the paunch and the pouch and the pension.

This is a song that should be sung so the audience hangs on every brilliant word and beat, and though Solona Husband sings it beautifully, the staging minimizes and distracts from her performance.

It’s almost as if Kelley is afraid that just giving the audience straight Sondheim minus all the cocktail mixers of little costume or prop tweaks or forced ensemble smiles will be too much for them to take. So he’s goading them into taking their Sondheim medicine with a two-act structure that (very loosely) replicates a “run-through” of a show in Act 1 and a “dress rehearsal” in Act 2. From the set, where we see costume racks, prop trunks and the backs of set pieces labeled with the names of Sondheim shows, it would seem all this performing is taking place backstage.

If Act 1 feels like a pretty good cruise ship entertainment, Act 2 slows down a bit and calms the waters with more straightforward performances. The comedy of “Agony” from Into the Woods is effectively turned from whiny fairy tale princes in the woods to two cocktail-swilling bros in a bar, and the most recent inclusion in the revue, “You Are the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” from Sondheim’s last completed show, Bounce/Road Show (the fact they could never really settle on a title tells you a lot about that show’s troubles), is absolutely charming.

The six performers, Husband, Sleiman Alahmadieh, Noel Anthony, Nick Nakashima, Anne Tolpegin and Melissa WolfKlain, are polished and energetic. When given a chance to shine, they absolutely do, and the very best thing, musically speaking, about the show are the sumptuous harmonies that Liberatore weaves throughout the three dozen numbers.

Since Sondheim’s death, we’ve entered something of a Golden Age of Steve with Broadway revivals of Company, Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along along with a sterling production of his final, not-quite-finished show Here We Are. It’s not at all surprising that artists who love him, like Kelley and Liberatore, want to pay homage by creating celebratory shows like Being Alive.

But what’s really going to be interesting is to see how the Sondheim songbook is reinterpreted for new audiences. It’s absolutely lovely to hear a lovely version of Sondheim’s “greatest hit,” “Send in the Clowns” as we do here from Tolpgein. But we’ve heard many, many, many absolutely lovely versions of that song. What else does it have to reveal? There’s definitely more, but it’s not going to be in a very traditional, kinda cheesy but ultimately very sweet show like this one.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Being Alive: A Sondheim Celebration by Robert Kelley and William Liberatore continues through June 30 in a TheatreWorks Silicon Valley production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Running time: 2 hours (including one intermission). Tickets: $27-$100 (subject to change). Call 877-662-8978 or visit theatreworks.org.