Sondheim 90th

Just a quick link, while I think of it. Kate and I just finished watching Take Me To the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration on YouTube.

If you haven't seen it yet, do so -- it's setting down a marker as the first contender for best art of the Covid Era. I have no clue when they started planning this, but it's surely been designed and filmed entirely in the past six weeks, and it's great. Mind, it's Zoom Art: just people singing in their own socially-distanced lives. But it is such a cast: singers and actors both great and small (mostly great) doing tributes to Sondheim's work -- over two hours of delightful music.

Mind, it's quirky stuff, and not all of it is stage-worthy. Some of the artists are past their prime, but it's still a wonderfully intimate chance for them to perform. Many are just quiet little bits (Mandy Patinkin out in his yard). But some are clever, and some are fabulously weird. And the best numbers -- well, the performance of The Ladies Who Lunch is worth the price of admission all on its own.

Worth watching on a big screen with good speakers, if you have YouTube set up to be able to do that. (Fortunately, I figured out how to connect my Roku to YouTube last week, so that we could watch the Hamilton Zoom-bombing on SGN, which is also worth checking out if you haven't done so already.)

It's a weird time, and the world has gone strange. But there is still great music in it, if you look around...