Feature: THE BIRTHDAY MONTH / SONDHEIM 2 - Five performances we won't forget

Earlier this month, we marked the 91st birthday of the living legend that is Stephen Sondheim with a look back at five London productions of his work that are embedded in the memory. This week, we honour a quintet of performances that has achieved the same result, even if this has meant choosing from an astonishing array of riches worthy of populating a column like this ten times over. In any case, here are just a few of the Sondheim star turns that linger in the mind and to which I would willingly return if only that were possible.

Julia McKenzie, Follies, Shaftesbury Theatre (1987)

This extraordinary performer could fill this list more or less singlehandedly, and a strong case could just as fully be made for McKenzie's subsequent Mrs Lovett in The National Theatre revival of Sweeney Todd or her whiplash-smart Witch in Richard Jones's darkly subversive West End premiere of Into the Woods. If I've gone for her Sally Durant Plummer in the 1987 West End premiere of Follies, that's only because I can feel the impact to this day of her character's arrival in the darkened theatre at that show's start, as the wounded Arizona housewife prepares to do battle with unfinished romantic business that may well finish her off. The performance, as always with McKenzie, was as emotionally acute as one could wish for, not to mention ravishingly sung.

Maria Friedman, Sunday in the Park with George, National Theatre (1990)

As is true of Julia McKenzie, Maria Friedman is a second talent whose career is inextricably linked to Sondheim, not just as a performer but as a director, too. (Friedman, a one-time Mary in Merrily We Roll Along, directed the Menier Chocolate Factory revival of Merrily that boasted a near-definitive Franklin - that show's trickiest part - from Mark Umbers.) But as a lifelong devotee of the Broadway original of Sunday in the Park with George, I wasn't prepared to be transported afresh by the show in a 1990 National Theatre debut that paired the redoubtable Philip Quast with Friedman as a sweet, slyly witty Dot whose gossamer voice shimmered "from the heart", as if taking its cue from Sondheim's own lyric.

David Thaxton, Passion, Donmar Warehouse (2010)

A signature drumroll from this show, please, for David Thaxton, who remains to this day the only Giorgio in my experience to recalibrate the balance of power in a fiendishly demanding musical that tends to be dominated by its Fosca - and no surprise when one considers the roll call of ladies who have played that part, from Donna Murphy, who won a Tony for it, to Patti LuPone, Maria Friedman, and, opposite Thaxton, a memorably wraithlike Elena Roger. But the fact is, Giorgio remains the person most dramatically transformed during a show that lands his character in thrall to the overwhelming demands - is this passion or obsession? - of a damaged heroine. And so it was under Jamie Lloyd's direction that Thaxton charted every minute of Georgio's psychic surrender with a forensic (and beautifully sung) attention to his every emotional swerve. The performer won an Olivier some while after the limited Donmar engagement had ended, a result cheered on the night by no one more fully than Sondheim himself.

Michael Ball, Sweeney Todd, Adelphi Theatre (2012)

First seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre, a venue now run by another indispensable Sondheim interpreter in Daniel Evans, Jonathan Kent's bruising Sweeney Todd boasted a pairing for the ages in Imelda Staunton's spry, sparky Mrs Lovett and a career-redefining performance from Michael Ball. Both stars won Olivier Awards and rightly so, but Ball's achievement is doubly remarkable in view of the image he had to shed in order to take on the unfettered ferocity of Sweeney, a character far removed from the clarion-voiced juve leads that Ball had made his own across such titles as Phantom and Les Mis. Playing a vengeful figure consumed by his own savagery, Ball in a casting masterstroke suggested new horizons to a singular career.: a man previously known for Aspects of Love here showed us what it means to hate.

Rosalie Craig, Company, Gielgud Theatre (2018)

I charted Marianne Elliott's entirely revelatory "revisal" of this 1970 title from a late preview across six different visits that included closing night. And so I had multiple opportunities to assess the sea change wrought on the show not just by transforming that eternal bachelor, Bobby, into the female Bobbie but by Rosalie Craig's ability to reveal the hidden reserves in a character who can sometimes be sidelined by the showier supporting turns around her (which in this occasion included a bounteously feisty Joanne from an Olivier-winning Patti LuPone). In her speech, LuPone praised "the very brilliant and incandescent" Craig. That's an aptly synoptic way of saying that the English actress located a moment-by-moment watchfulness to the character that led to a resounding "Being Alive" in which one very much felt that a door had indeed been opened for Bobbie, even if where it would lead remains anyone's guess: time for a sequel, maybe?

Rosalie Craig and the cast of Company photo credit: Tristram Kenton

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