“Today” and “tonight” signify Friday, May 29.
SEQUIM — In the beginning, just a tiny note on the piano: Ting.
Then the box opens and the sweet secret is revealed: Songs, love and joy according to Stephen Sondheim and his tight handful of singers.
“Side by Side by Sondheim,” the acclaimed Broadway revue, arrives on stage tonight for a two-weekend run starring Carol Swarbrick Dries, Ric Munhall and Janice Parks, with Jim Dries as narrator and Linda Dowdell and Darrell Plank as the piano-playing pair.
With just six performances at the SunLand Golf & Country Club, the show is the annual benefit for Readers Theatre Plus, the nonprofit company presenting staged readings and other events throughout the year.
Swarbrick Dries is also the director, and one with more than average familiarity with Sondheim.
She starred in “Side by Side by Sondheim” on Broadway, then toured with the show; she credits it with launching her nearly 40-year career in theater.
The singer and actor has starred in stage productions in Switzerland, Japan, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Seattle, and is now developing a one-woman show, “The Lionmaker,” on the life of Lillian Carter.
It was 1978 when Swarbrick Dries was cast in “Side by Side” in New York City, where Sondheim himself befriended each performer. He’s won an Oscar, a Tony, three Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize — and knew how to host a cast party, she said.
In rehearsal earlier this week, Swarbrick Dries felt herself enchanted once again by what she calls Sondheim’s genius. Many know him for “Send in the Clowns” from the musical “A Little Night Music,” but may not recall that he collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on the songs in “West Side Story,” and was the lyricist behind many other musicals, including “Into the Woods,” “Follies,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Gypsy.”
Selected songs from these and other Sondheim musicals fill “Side by Side,” while narrator Dries strings them together with a little background.
Swarbrick Dries gets to play a variety of roles. She sings “Ah, Paree!,” a drippingly French ode to the City of Light. In a duet with Parks of “A Boy Like That” from “West Side Story,” she’s a hard Puerto Rican — softened by the story of young love. And in “I’m Still Here,” she tells the veteran actress’ tale:
First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp
Then someone’s mother, then you’re camp
Then you career from career to career
I’m almost through my memoirs, and I’m here …
Oh, and then there is “I Never Do Anything Twice,” aka “The Madam’s Song.” From the movie “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” is it ever loaded with sexy double entendre.
“It is such a hoot,” said Dries, who is not only the narrator but the singer’s husband. Yes, the song pushes the envelope, she and he agree. Obviously that’s fun to do now and again.
With the small cast, you get to know each performer, Dries said, adding that the two pianists bring another dimension to the show. Dowdell, a composer and arranger, is also noted for her work with the Mark Morris Dance Group in New York City, as well as on the North Olympic Peninsula with Key City Public Theatre, on musicals at Port Townsend High School and as the bandleader on a tribute to Dave Brubeck, a show that debuted in Port Angeles this spring and will go to Seattle’s Royal Room on June 23.
Plank, meanwhile, received an honorable mention from the 5th Avenue Theatre for his work on Port Townsend High School’s “Little Shop of Horrors.” The Seattle theater will present the awards June 8. A computer programmer by day, Plank has also played piano in Key City Public Theatre’s “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” and in “Little Shop of Horrors,” “The Spitfire Grill,” and “Broadway and Bordeaux” at Sequim’s Olympic Theatre Arts.
For Plank, the song “Losing My Mind,” sung by Parks, is quintessential Sondheim.
It’s about someone enmeshed in a troubled relationship, a woman who’s not sure where to turn.
“It really hits you in the gut,” he said.
The “Side by Side” cast and crew hope to lift those who come to SunLand — on the wings of Sondheim’s music.
As the lyricist himself wrote: “If I cannot fly, let me sing.”
