Playwright David Hirson and director Matthew Warchus are brave to revive La Bête, only a modest success when first seen here in 1992. You can understand why an audience might find it difficult. First, it’s written in rhyming couplets. Second, it’s set in the 17th century, in a French chateau. Third, it’s about the friction between a classically formal playwright (Elomire, an unsubtle anagram for Moliere) and Valere, an exponent of dumbed-down comedy, and their rivalry for the patronage of a very rich French Princess – not much to get excited about there, apparently.

But that’s before you know that the Princess is acted by Joanna Lumley (Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous), that Elomire is played by David Hyde Pierce (Niles in Frasier) and Valere by one of the greatest living actors, Mark Rylance. Mr Hirson has daringly given Valere an uninterrupted monologue in the first act, lasting at least 30 minutes. The subject of this incredible feat of comic memory is Valere himself. His teeth protruding and plastic mouth going in every direction, Mr Rylance gnaws on a slice of melon. And sprays bits of it over the simmering, but not yet boiling-over Mr Pierce, as he lauds himself and his works, interrupting his flow of self-praise only to belch or break wind.

It is a tour de force for which the audience’s prolonged applause and cheers seemed inadequate, as did Mr Pierce’s no longer bottled-up outrage. This plot is simple: will the purist Elomire yield to his patron, the Princess, who insists that he add Valere to her resident theatrical troupe. One of Valere’s plays is staged as his audition piece, but it is nowhere near bad enough to alienate our sympathy from the egomaniac, or make us side with poor Elomire.

Like Ms Lumley, Mr Pierce doesn’t have enough to do – or say – in this weird beast of a play. But his eyes are so eloquent that he has little need of speech to carry his burdensome half of the plot. Who is the fool of the French title – Elomire, Valere or the Princess? No idea; but I’d not have missed it for the world.

Strategies don’t get riskier than this: Take one heavily award-nommed Broadway bomb from 1991, set up a new London production and add a locked-in five-month Broadway transfer. Happily, thanks to seriously smart creatives helmed by comedy maestro Matthew Warchus, this ebullient revival of David Hirson’s high-art-vs.-commerce comedy La Bete is largely a winner. But it’s a case of how to succeed in business while really trying and often too hard.

Given that the play is built around an epic turn from a character who considers himself a comedy genius, it makes complete sense to cast Mark Rylance, hot on the heels of his dynamite performance in Jerusalem, not to mention his uproarious Tony-winning stint in Boeing-Boeing.

Rylance plays Valere, a street entertainer-cum-writer so wildly popular that he has caught the attention of Princess Conti (Joanna Lumley) whose court in 17th-century France already has a playwright, the high-minded Elomire (David Hyde Pierce).

Elomire (yes, that’s an anagram of Moliere) and his sidekick Bejart (a coolly forbearing Stephen Ouimette) are aghast at the notion of having to meet, let alone work with, someone so crass. What seems like snobbery suddenly seems like common sense with the arrival of the man himself.

Sweeping in with a riot of bombastic period flourishes and pheasant-feathered hat, clutching a wine decanter and showering melon segments from between insanely grinning buck teeth, Rylance is a sight to behold. That’s just the beginning. For the next 30 minutes and more, he literally holds court with a virtuoso solo comic display of unstoppable self-aggrandizement.

With the odd patently bogus flash of false modesty, his breathless, bravura tirade leaves the audience mostly helpless with laughter and the increasingly furious Elomire impotently dumbstruck.It comes, however, at a price. It gradually becomes clear that we’re watching Rylance’s virtuosity rather than a character, a division widened still further when the princess declares that Elomire’s acting company must perform his latest deathless triumph, The Parable of the Two Boys From Cadiz.

Rylance’s solipsism now flattens what should be funny. He needs to act with the ensemble to prove the popularity of his work so as to reveal Elomire as nothing but a snob. But Rylance and Warchus over-egg the pudding, making the play-within-the-play so labored and unfunny that Valere’s status seems baffling.

This, in turn, undermines the play itself. For Hirson’s satire to have real teeth, popular culture, the destroyer of high art, should at least appear to be popular. Warchus could be trying to take the argument one stage further, suggesting that work like that of Valere is so crass as to be unenjoyable. That might account for Claire Van Kampen’s doom-laden soundscape. Either way, it’s at the expense of audience pleasure.

Lumley can, and does, deadpan with the best of them, but as she attempts to top Rylance, her voice slips into stridency. Pierce, on the other hand, quietly steals the show, beautifully calibrating everything from disdain to outrage via good-old-fashioned visceral fury with immense dignity. He can deftly slay an audience, making loathing legible with just a tilt of the head.

Warchus saves his biggest surprise for the play’s coda. As two unforeseen allies hug, Mark Thompson’s huge set of vertiginous bookcases swings wide to reveal the world beyond, and the production lands an unexpected emotional punch. It’s a rocky ride, but the highs make you giddy. In a good way.

This critic really dug it.

We’ve waited for this one, in wondering hope. Joanna Lumley! David Hyde Pierce who was Niles Crane in Frasier! A Broadway transfer in the bag, and our own peerless changeling sprite, Mark Rylance! It even promised a debate: high culture versus populism and the conscience of the artist. Wow!

It’s a tough gig, raising that much expectation, and it’s no common play. Written for Broadway in 1991, set in a French court in 1654, entirely in rhyming couplets, it defies categorisation. You are forced to laugh all through and then confront a bleak unresolved ending to the central question. The bête of the title is the beast in us which triumphs when we laugh at deep concepts. Maybe it wins.

As it opens, we observe an angry colloquy between Elomire the court playwright (Pierce) and his colleague Béjart about a street-clown their patroness has foisted on them: a bombastic ninny who does gags like dressing up a cow as Anne of Austria.

The comic rhymes were brilliantly delivered from the start yet we stiffened, longing for the star. So in he flounces, chewing on a melon and spitting uncouthly: Rylance as Valere the clown, in a multifeather hat and layers of grimy frills, ringlets, stripes, slit-sleeves, gallygaskins and random frogging. His introductory monologue lasts 35 minutes including a fart, several burps, a visit to the lavatory, insane boasting, and wilful misreading of the (beautifully judged) expressions of horror on the faces of the resident artistes. Imagine a drunken hybrid of Ken Dodd and Jim Carrey invading a senior common room: Pierce’s face alone is worth the ticket.

Rylance, of course, shines. Who else could hold us, hysterical yet horrified, for the first half of David Hirson’s headlong play as he preens and digresses, a compulsive deluded entertainer rebuilding the very language. Yet the world around him is as clownish: after an absurdist interlude with a monosyllabic maidservant we see the Princess herself: Lumley in Gloriana deshabillé and scarlet wig like the Red Queen in Alice. She tries to reconcile the two camps by getting Valere to perform his play about twin brothers, in which the girl chooses the juggler over the philosopher. Elomire is enraged, the Princess rages back, praising artists without “a moral cross to bear”. By which time Rylance is ten feet up the bookshelves, treating us to an elfin, wounded, sensitive yet crazy expression I cannot erase from my retinas even now, not that I want to.

At one stage, standing on the table, he declares “God love the critics! Bless their picky hearts!” Much nervous laughter in the stalls.

But why pick? It’s grown-up panto, it’s clever, it’s quite deep, it could not be better done. You may hate it, but you’ll never see anything quite like it again.

Which touches us more, highbrow art or lowbrow farce? That is the question that powers David Hirson’s oddball comedy; it is also a dilemma that the director Matthew Warchus has delighted in tackling before, with his brilliant productions of Boeing-Boeing and Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. But, in spite of the ingenuity of the piece, in spite of Warchus’s excellent pedigree, and in spite of a cast with impeccable comic credentials – Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce – this show doesn’t fly.

Hirson’s 1991 comedy has the flavour of Molière: it is set in 17th-century France, written in rhyming couplets and features a face-off between Elomire, idealistic leader of the royal theatre troupe, and Valere, an earthy street entertainer. Elomire might be an anagram of Molière but he clearly fancies himself as the next Corneille, penning tragedies on weighty themes. The royal patron, wearying of onerous cogitation and fancying something more accessible, thinks Valere’s rough and ready approach might spice things up. Elomire greets the idea with the sort of welcome Lord Reith might have extended to Big Brother.

Thus Hirson raises the issue of “dumbing down” but puts a neat spin on it with a setting that massages the intellects of the audience. Warchus adds another twist by making the ghastly Valere by far the most entertaining character on stage and his play-within-a-play rather enjoyable. The piece is clever and the rhyming couplets can be inspired. Yet there is something too brittle and empty about it. It ought to dig deep but it doesn’t. After a while, it begins to feel like a very long joke.

It is sustained largely by the brilliance of the performances. Rylance, as Valere, is in superb form. With a hairstyle inspired by Captain Jack Sparrow, teeth that belong in a larger mouth and breeches that gape and billow distressingly, he makes a fabulous entrance, spitting melon about the stage. He then proceeds to hold forth for a good half-hour, interrupted only by the occasional fart or belch. It is a virtuoso performance but Rylance also brings an edge of desperation to it. This is a man who is terrified that if he stops performing he will cease to exist.

In reply, Pierce as Elomire gives a beautifully modulated portrait of disdain, his face settling into a studied mask of pain. But though he handles the part delicately, he has frustratingly little to do. The same is true of Lumley, who makes a drolly imperious royal but is woefully underused. These are actors of great comic subtlety; they look rather stranded in this witty but surprisingly insubstantial play.

It’s easy to see why La Bete wasn’t belle of the ball on its first run in 1991, lasting only 25 performances on Broadway. David Hirson’s play is a self-referential comedy about the battle between art and commerce, set in 17th-century France and written in mock-Moliere rhyming couplets. No wonder audiences were wary.

The play is a very peculiar object indeed, but this Broadway-bound production starring Mark Rylance and David Hyde Pierce is a bright, entertaining bauble. Directed by Matthew Warchus, La Bete opens on Broadway at the end of September after a summer West End run.

Its chief delight is a bravura performance by Rylance, one of the most compelling stage actors on either side of the Atlantic. He plays Valere, a fairground performer and creator of vulgar entertainment who is invited by a royal patron to work alongside the fastidious, highbrow writer Elomire (Pierce).

Rylance’s Valere is an anarchic monster, equally compelling and repulsive, who spits, burps, breaks wind and unleashes a torrent of words on the stunned Valere.

It’s the latest in an extraordinary run of roles for Rylance, who won a best actor Tony in 2008 for Boeing-Boeing and this year took London’s Olivier Award for his performance as rural rapscallion Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem.

His performance here is equally bewitching, verbally dexterous and almost recklessly physical. His opening monologue is a swooping torrent of fancy and digression that lasts half an hour — an astonishing, exhausting piece of acting.

British critics were full of praise for Rylance on Thursday: “a virtuoso triumph,” said Michael Coveney in The Independent. The Daily Mail‘s Quentin Letts praised his “sheer feat of memory … and his comedic inventiveness.”

Some were less keen on the play itself. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph said it “begins brilliantly only to turn dismally flat as it runs out of comic invention and momentum.” Letts found it “self-indulgent.”

Warchus has scored a string of successes by polishing up neglected bits of recent theater history to a shiny 21st-century gloss. The director’s take on the 1960s sex farce Boeing-Boeing won a pair of Tonys, and he made Alan Ayckbourn’s 1970s trilogy of suburban infidelity The Norman Conquests seem like an overlooked masterpiece. It won raves in both London and New York.

Here he has a trans-Atlantic cast well able to tackle the play’s peculiar rhythms. Rhyming verse can — as the play itself points out in one of its many in-jokes — get pretty tiresome if the rhythm isn’t varied, but Warchus has a firm grip on the throttle.

Pierce — most famous as Niles Crane in Frasier — is the austere Elomire, a writer who has secured his acting troupe a place at the court of the Princess, played by Joanna Lumley. He’s is subtly amusing in a role that requires him to spend much of the play reacting to Rylance in silent fury.

Lumley — known to millions as booze-soaked fashionista Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous — sports a wig that makes her look like Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, but ably suggests the childlike capriciousness and fleeting enthusiasms of the truly powerful. Her performance is reminiscent of modern celebrities in their well-meaning goodwill ambassador modes.

The rest of the cast, which includes the richly expressive Stephen Ouimette as Elomire’s pragmatic sidekick Bejart, is equally fine.

Running at under two hours with no intermission, the play is an enjoyable ride, though its overall effect is puzzling. Hirson’s verses are very clever, but also full of jokes about actors and critics of the sort theatrical people love but wider audience may find self-indulgent.

The play pits crass commercial theater against high-minded “art,” and neither comes out looking good. Valere is beastly, but the underwritten Elomire’s rigidity is equally unappetizing. Given a choice between them, many people may well answer: “Neither.”

This may be part of Hirson’s point — we must seek to reconcile art and commerce. But the play goes over the ground at a rapid clip without ever making the dilemma feel urgent.

Maybe the anticipation of seeing Mark Rylance, Joanna Lumley and David Hyde Pierce together on one stage in American playwright David Hirson’s La Bête, a theatrical comedy of rhyming couplets set in the 17th century court of Languedoc, was too much.

For what seemed, on its London premiere in 1992, to be a gorgeously explosive and unexpected treat – Alan Cumming played the Rylance role of a bumptious vaudevillian actor, Valère – now appears trite and over-extended, even at a playing time of just over 100 minutes.

We get the point very early on: a decadent court theatre needs a shot in the arm. The argument is put forward in an astonishing tour de force by Rylance, spitting, burping and farting through his headlong monologue for well over half an hour.

But once the parameters of the play are set, and Joanna Lumley’s subdued but fickle princess – transformed from a flouncing, much funnier prince played by Timothy Walker in the Cumming version – presides over the contest between Valère and the wiped-out dramatist, the evening becomes repetitive and, dare one say it, even rather boring.

The dramatist, Elomire, an anagram of Molière, is portrayed by David Hyde Pierce as a distinctly reticent, and subtly inflected, writer first of all trapped in his lair – the library design of Mark Thompson, breathtakingly well lit by Hugh Vanstone, is an extravagant marvel – and then compelled to face the truth of his shortcomings by this intrusive, comic vandal.

The situation reflects the real one of Molière touring the southern provinces in 1654 with a motley crew including the well-known Béjart family, here represented by Stephen Ouimette and Sally Wingert; they, and a few others including Liza Sadovy as Catherine De Brie and Robert Lonsdale as Rene Du Parc, are seen in a painterly representation of a celebratory banquet at the start and as a well sculptured little crowd towards the end.

In a curious way, though, the excellence of Matthew Warchus’ production exposes the emptiness at the heart of the piece, which never really lives up to its own billing as a heated debate about the place of art, integrity and popular passion in the commercial theatre. It’s a shadowy gloss on several Molière plays, notably The Misanthrope, which, despite all its cleverness and facility of elasticated doggerel, remains just that: an insubstantial shadow and a theatrical sleight-of-hand.

I’ll say this much: David Hirson’s piece of Broadway-originating, pastiche Molière seems less smugly self-admiring than it did on its first appearance in 1992. That may be because Hirson now gives the action an uninterrupted flow; it may be because Mark Rylance virtuosically adorns the current cast; but I suspect the real change stems from director Matthew Warchus, who has discovered a hidden tension in what at first seemed a dramatically inert piece.

Hirson’s setting is Languedoc in 1654, his form that of rhyming couplets. And the contest he presents is between opposing visions of art: the crowd-pleasing and the visionary. The action, in fact, stems from an injunction placed on Elomire, an idealistic actor-playwright, by his patron that he should incorporate a vulgar street-entertainer, Valere, into his troupe. In an opening monologue of 25 minutes, Valere is noisily established as a logorrheic buffoon. But when, with the aid of Elomire’s company, he acts out one of his plays before the patron, one gets a glimpse of the possibilities of what Peter Brook aptly termed “rough theatre.”
Warchus’s production is infinitely better balanced than the original. He allows us to see that Valere’s work has a crude vigour, and that the principled Elomire, who argues that “good verse conceals its artifice ideally,” is dogmatic. But, even if there is now a hint of dialectical debate, Hirson’s play still contains two fundamental flaws.

We actually get to see Valere’s lowbrow art, whereas Elomire’s credentials as a serious artist have to be taken on trust. Valere himself, set up as a boorish idiot, is also miraculously allowed to turn into an articulate spokesman who impresses the patron by talk of “the slipping standards of our shallow culture.”

Not even Rylance can reconcile this contradiction. But he gives a riveting comic display by turning Valere into a 17th century equivalent of Barry Humphries’s Les Patterson: he spits, farts, burps, and at one point retires to a visible privy to defecate. Rylance presents us, dazzlingly, with a vain poseur: my favourite moment comes when, announcing his verbatim recall of the Pentateuch, he dries up after “In the beginning” and desperately resorts to humming what sounds like a Yiddish anthem. But, having brilliantly displayed the bulletproof egoism of the second-rate, Rylance cannot persuade us of Valere’s transformation into a populist champion. David Hyde Pierce, meanwhile, is very good at conveying Elomire’s volcanic rage as his booklined study is colonised by Valere. But, although he captures Elomire’s increasing Alceste-like isolation, he is given insufficent support by Hirson’s text in enriching the character. I have no complaints, however, about Joanna Lumley’s spoilt brat of a patron, who has undergone a gender-change since the original production, nor about Stephen Ouimette as Elomire’s sidekick.

Behind the play, of course, lurks the shadow of Molière’s The Misanthrope: a masterpiece that examines, much more fully, the problems faced by the uncompromising idealist in an imperfect world. But at least Hirson’s play, which initially seemed like a snobbish attack on popular culture, has been reclaimed by Warchus’s intelligent production and Rylance’s high-octane performance.

“La Bête” is a “beast” and a “fool” in French, and it’s one of the puzzles in Matthew Warchus’s colourfully inflated, Broadway-bound revival of this 1992, 17th-century oddity that you never really know to whom the title refers: the actor, the writer or the patron.

These are the three protagonists in a stylish, one-off rhyming text by the American playwright David Hirson, and they are played at the Comedy by Mark Rylance, David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley; casting with the feel of covering all bases demanded by some critical Polonius: respectable classical, comical sit-com musical and cut-glass posh national treasure.

For about one hour of its length, the show is enjoyable because it’s so intriguing. A magnificently lit banquet is in progress on the Languedoc estate of the princess. The stage then literally deliquesces in Mark Thompson’s design into a grand library where battle is joined between the favoured playwright, Elomire (ie Molière) and the upstart vaudevillian Valère, played with Ken Dodd comedy teeth by Mark Rylance, spitting on every line and chomping on his own integrity.

I saw the British premiere directed by Richard Jones, with Alan Cumming playing this bolshie new actor, and have an idea that the whole thing is about Molière’s vagabond company, including the Béjart family, touring the southern provinces in 1654, several years before the Parisian glory days at the Palais Royal. But I’m stymied, now, as to what it all really means.

None of the issues in the “comic war” debate and Molière’s famous preface to Tartuffe come across, nor are they meant to. So, what is Hirson actually proposing? An argument about the theatre, the conflict between intellectual and commercial imperatives, and an age-old bust-up between old and new orders in showbusiness?

It should be more than enough, but the play runs badly out of steam in the last 45 minutes, which seem to go on forever. This is where Joanna Lumley’s princess – a role rewritten, to no great effect, from the masculine, preening arts-loving aristocratic booby of the original – supervises a command performance of Valère’s parable of the Two Boys of Cadiz, and Pierce’s slow-burning Elomire is left to contemplate the beast within his rising comic muse.

Rhyming couplets have to be exceptionally good to sustain a whole evening and we now see that Hirson’s are not in the Tony Harrison class of Molière adaptations, nor even the Richard Gilman. But Rylance makes a virtuoso triumph of his uninterrupted 40-minute monologue (Cumming came in at just 25 minutes; he was more tumultuous), despite the lack of stage vivacity around him.

The Russian dramatist Mikhail Bulghakov, in his Molière play, pitted the successful dramatist against his sponsoring monarch, whereas Hirson flirts with history in his artistic stand-off and suffers by not being specific enough. Elomire is in trouble with the prince, but you get no sense in the production of a serious dispute. Ms Lumley is gorgeous and beautifully coiffed and dressed, but you don’t know, really, where she’s coming from.

At a time when good new plays like Jerusalem and Enron have made serious inroads in the West End, I was expecting, and hoping, that La Bête would have elucidated the shock of the new in the land of the dinosaurs, but it hasn’t worked out like that.

Pierce’s banked-down acting is a subtle delight, and Rylance proves yet again his astonishing, protean versatility. But his Valère is a feeble follow-up to his shape-shifting Johnny Rooster in Jerusalem in a play that promises much more than it delivers and ends up curling into a cul-de-sac of self-referential platitudes.

From Broadway’s prodigious boy wonder to its beloved aging monarch: for Stephen Sondheim, whose forthcoming 80th birthday on March 22 was celebrated in a thrilling concert at Avery Fisher Hall on Monday evening, it must have seemed like a hop, skip and a jump from one to the other. Inside the hall, where the mood was more exhilarated than elegiac, an unspoken question hung in the air: where did all that time go?

In recent years the tributes to Mr Sondheim have come so thick and fast that they have begun to blur. While such celebrations tend to be messy affairs, Sondheim: The Birthday Concert (directed by Lonny Price) was a model of organization, with a suave host (David Hyde Pierce) and witty leitmotifs woven into its structure. Performances by an all-star guest list that included Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Elaine Stritch and Nathan Gunn proceeded at a brisk pace; there was no speechifying.

In one running joke, the orchestra was continually striking up a theme from Sweeney Todd, only to be told to change songs. Mr Pierce, comically determined to prove Mr Sondheim’s global reach, sang parts of ‘Beautiful Girls’ (from Follies) in German and Italian.

Recent revivals of Sondheim shows using chamber orchestrations have shown how sturdy his music is, even in drastically reduced arrangements. But Monday’s concert demonstrated that there is still no substitute for a force as mighty as the New York Philharmonic (conducted by Paul Gemignani) playing songs conceived and orchestrated (most often by Jonathan Tunick) for a symphonic palette. The major songs from Follies and A Little Night Music in particular, are far-reaching ballads with melodic lines that sweep to the horizon.

The program began with a special birthday overture and continued with three 1960s collaborations, including an amusing obscurity, ‘Don’t Laugh’ (written with Mary Rodgers and Martin Charnin, and sung by Victoria Clark), from the 1963 show Hot Spot. Then the concert dug into the ’70s and ’80s with many of the great ballads from Follies, Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park With George. (Perhaps because A Little Night Music is now on Broadway, there was only one selection, and it was not ‘Send In the Clowns.’) The evening’s single most beautiful performance — Ms McDonald and Mr Gunn’s ‘Too Many Mornings’ (from Follies) could have been a master class in the deployment of operatic voices with natural diction.

There were clever theatrical jokes. One Sweeney Todd (Michael Cerveris from the recent revival) got to slit the throat of another (George Hearn, who took over the role in the original Broadway production, this time playing the villainous Judge Turpin) during ‘Pretty Women.’ The Sweeneys, standing on either side of Ms LuPone (also from the revival), swapped the lyrics to ‘A Little Priest,’ while she imparted a wickedly lewd attitude to the number. Ms Peters and Mr Patinkin (both in excellent voice) reunited to sing ‘Move On’ from Sunday in the Park With George, and John McMartin, from the original cast of Follies, offered a searching version of ‘The Road You Didn’t Take.’

Shortly after intermission, six divas — Ms LuPone, Ms McDonald, Marin Mazzie, Donna Murphy, Ms Peters and Ms Stritch, clad in shades of red — sashayed to the stage for solo turns from a variety of shows as Mr Pierce sang ‘Beautiful Girls.’ In a conceptual coup, Ms LuPone directed ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ to Ms Stritch, its original interpreter, who wore a cap as if to answer the song’s question, “Does anyone still wear a hat?” Ms Mazzie delivered an increasingly angry ‘Losing My Mind,’ Ms Murphy a furious ‘Could I Leave You?’, Ms McDonald a luscious ‘Glamorous Life’ and Ms Peters a plaintive ‘Not a Day Goes By.’

It remained for Ms Stritch to deliver the evening’s showstopper, ‘I’m Still Here.’ This great trouper, now 85, used her increasing physical fragility to maximum dramatic effect, building the anthem of show business survival from a dismissive casualness to a peak that was not the usual triumphal assertion of ego. Instead, it became a struggle for the character to break through her own fatigue in little bursts. The final phrases of this daring interpretation ended on a note of ambivalence, as if to say, “I may still be here, but at this point, what does it really matter?” The performance received a standing ovation.

As the concert drew to a close, the aisles filled up with a chorus of young, black-clad Broadway performers joining to sing ‘Sunday,’ the climactic anthem from Sunday in the Park With George. As Mr Sondheim, with tears in his eyes, acknowledged the thunderous applause, he remarked, “Alice Longworth Roosevelt said, ‘First you’re young, then you’re middle-aged, then you’re wonderful.’ This was wonderful — thank you all.”

The collective gratitude in the house was accompanied by a silent prayer to the powers on high: please, may it never end.

To any die-hard theater geek, a show that begins with Joel Grey and ends with Liza Minnelli ranks as a good one — so well done, Monday night’s benefit for the Vineyard Theatre! The evening, honoring John Kander (of legendary Broadway songwriting duo Kander and Ebb) was hosted by a dependably droll David Hyde Pierce, who told bad theater jokes (“I’m hosting, so it’s a gay-la”; “We wanted to capture the perfect tenor for this evening — and we did, he’s waiting off stage”) and gave a wonderfully deadpan rendition of ‘Ten Percent’, a lost Chicago ode to theater agents.



Grey, iconic as Kander and Ebb’s Emcee in Cabaret, was the night’s surprise opening guest, performing “Wilkommen” with cane in hand. If he couldn’t quite hit the ending high note, his creepy charm was still very much intact. Debra Monk hustled in a yellow boa for Steel Pier‘s cheeky ‘Everybody’s Girl’; Karen Ziemba turned in a moving, wistful rendition of ‘New York, New York’; Mario Cantone blustered through ‘Chief Cook and Bottle Washer’ (from The Rink, which he called Kander and Ebb’s “first Italian-American musical”); and Kristin Chenoweth showed up to introduce Ziemba, sadly not gracing us with her rendition of the Cabaret showstopper ‘Maybe This Time,’ which she killed with on Glee (Heidi Blinkenstaff of Title of Show took on the song, though her performance was vocally meek). Grand dame Chita Rivera, still feisty at 77, blew the relative youngsters out of the water with a saucy performance of ‘All That Jazz.’ Rivera, who originated the role of Chicago‘s Velma Kelly onstage, shared an amusing anecdote of meeting Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar for the same role. Referring to the famed piano intro to the song, she recalled telling Zeta-Jones, “You can keep the Oscar — I’ll keep ma’ vamp!”

Liza, the draw of the evening, was conspicuously absent from her midpoint slot on the program. We worried the absence was due to a Minnelli meltdown, but it seems that her move to the closing spot (a more apropos placement, anyway) was because of nothing more than a wardrobe malfunction. She arrived in fantastically Liza fashion: fur coat, black sweatshirt, and black velour sweatpants tucked into black Uggs (one encircled with a sparkly bracelet, one not. Mistake, or genius?). “A funny thing happened on the way to the theater,” she began with a sigh, to outbursts of laughter. “You see, I had this wonderful gown to wear, and I’ve lost some weight since my knee replacement. It was a spiffy outfit, spiffy! And then the strap broke, it’s so old.” Cue the laughs! “And I had these shoes — but I couldn’t walk in them because they were too high. But Johnny [Kander] once told me, ‘Sew up!’” More laughs! Banter aside, Minnelli sat on her fur and killed her tailor-made Kander and Ebb anthem, ‘And the World Goes Round,’ setting up Kander’s own appropriately kooky thank-you. Ushered to the stage by Minnelli, he sighed, “I’m glad my parents taught us to drink.”