KT Sullivan & Jeff Harnar
#SondheimMontage
Laurie Beechman Theatre, NYC, February 12, 2018
Reviewed by Ron Forman for Cabaret Scenes
KT Sullivan and Jeff Harnar’s #SondheimMontage was put together with as much thought and care as any cabaret show that I have seen in years. While watching and listening to it at the Laurie Beechman, I remarked to myself that this show, directed by Sondra Lee, is like viewing a show on a Broadway stage. There is no spoken dialogue, but there is much said in the 40 Stephen Sondheim songs, broken into seven pieces in an amazing 70 minutes. Sullivan and Harnar are two of today’s top cabaret performers, but when they work together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Their voices blend well and their interaction on stage is unforced and natural. Music director Jon Weber’s work on piano is perfectly in sync with the duo, and he even added an encore vocal of “Broadway Baby.” The seven pieces and 40 songs give you a deep insight into Sondheim’s thoughts and feelings about human relations.
The memorable moments are many, but some especially stick out in my mind. The “Who Wants to Live in New York?” section with Harnar texting on his phone while singing “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” (Company) and the final number of the section, the two combining for “Another Hundred People” is one. In another, Harnar walked into the audience singing “More, I want more/ Nothing’s better than more” (“More”; Dick Tracy) directly into the faces of audience members (including me). Harnar sang “Love is like sand/ You can’t get it out of your hair” (“Sand,” written for a never-made film), describing the third sequence, which included a lushly beautiful “Good Thing Going” from Merrily We Roll Along which segued wonderfully into another selection from the same score, Harnar’s dramatic “Not a Day Goes By.” Sullivan’s soprano was especially effective on “Pretty Women.” The duo combined to make “Send in the Clowns” especially effective as a duet. The final piece, including a reprise of “Our Time” had Harnar doing “Could I Leave You?” followed by duo’s moving “No One Is Alone. The second encore was a touching reading of the lyric of the the earliest Sondheim song, written when he was fifteen, “How Do I Know?”