Improbably—or not, given how nimble and ingenious theater people are—the pandemic yielded some truly wonderful dramatic experiments, from world-class performances filmed in empty studios and on vacant stages, to productions created for Zoom or rejiggered for the radio. What was perhaps my very favorite, however, came very close to being a total disaster. When, in April 2020, giants of the musical theater world gathered to honor Stephen Sondheim’s birthday (he, the king giant, had turned 90 in March), the tribute was initially beset with technical difficulties: a long delay, issues with the sound, some troubling live feed of the stricken director. But when the show did finally get going, it was the best. Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski, and Audra McDonald singing “The Ladies Who Lunch”! Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt doing “It Takes Two”! Aaron Tveit’s “Mary Me a Little”! Elizabeth Stanley’s gorgeous “The Miller’s Son”! Plus selections from Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, Raúl Esparza, Patti LuPone, Lea Salonga, and, and, and! (Devoid of their usual engagements, anyone who was anyone was very available to participate.) Yet the one I’d like to single out is Laura Benanti’s performance of “I Remember” from Evening Primrose, the hour-long musical, set in a nightmarish department store, that Sondheim and James Goldman created for ABC in the 1960s, with Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr as its stars. It’s a hauntingly beautiful number any day of the week, but at that very bewildering moment, when those of us trapped in the city were spending a lot of time staring at the walls, its opening lines—“I remember sky / It was blue as ink / Or at least I think / I remember sky…”—made a lasting impression. – Marley Marius
Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now
I remember reading online that Charli XCX was planning to create a new album in six weeks as a pandemic project, and thinking: finally! Something is happening! It felt like quarantine had lasted forever by that point. (It was, in fact, April 2020, and it had been two weeks.) Admittedly, I didn’t tune into the Zoom calls she was hosting with fans and collaborators to refine what would eventually become How I’m Feeling Now, and it wasn’t until the album was released in full that I listened to it properly—but it hit me like an emotional sledgehammer from my very first listen. There were the songs that made me miss my friends: the blast of sour Skittles pop on “Claws” and its fizzy overflows of affection (“I like, I like, I like everything about you!”), or the thundering “Anthems” and its perfect summary of the latent urge to hit the town and get wrecked (“I want anthems, late nights, my friends, New York.”) There were the songs that reflected the inevitable fixation on past romantic relationships that plagued us singletons during the dark days of lockdown, like the criminally underrated “7 Years,” which still causes a speck of dust to get in my eye every time it comes on shuffle. And then there’s what is (in my humble opinion) her masterpiece, “Party 4 U,” so perfectly encapsulating the bittersweet mix of heartache and hedonism that makes Charli’s best music so powerful. (At the time, I could have sworn she was singing it directly to—and about—me.) It was also the first time I felt like Charli’s magic as a musician came into focus across an entire, cohesive record, like she was offering us all another world to escape to—all of which is to say, without How I’m Feeling Now, it’s hard to imagine Brat. I remember going to see her perform the album at an intimate gig in London in November 2021—the energy in the room was electric, as we all danced and jumped and chanted the lyrics we’d sung along to so many times in our bedrooms, but this time we were finally shoulder-to-shoulder with other people again. And it still holds up: To me, How I’m Feeling Now isn’t just a great pandemic album, but an all-time great album, period. – Liam Hess
