Raúl Esparza and Mary-Mitchell Campbell Share Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Sondheim's 90th Birthday Celebration Concert

It would be a massive understatement to say the starry Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration was a huge success. With over one million views in 24 hours and over $260,000 raised for ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty) and named a New York Times Critic's Pick, Take Me to the World truly was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To toast the people who made it happen, we had the night's producer and host Raúl Esparza and musical director Mary-Mitchell Campbell join Broadway.com's Beth Stevens and Paul Wontorek, who also served as the concert's director, on a recent episode of #LiveatFive: Home Edition. Yes, they shared what really happened at 8PM when the curtain didn't rise.

Take Me to the World started late due to technical difficulties, and when it finally did begin, hundreds of thousands of viewers were transported into musical theater heaven. Esparza explained the situtation by saying, "I think we were getting videos and final touch-ups up until seven o'clock. We were doing both live and to-video simultaneously with a gigantic concert that had been created for ASTEP and found that it's very hard to put that together from a laptop at Paul's house," Esparza said. "We did this over the dining room table in my apartment and on the other side there's Mary-Mitchell running a full music department. The short answer is we weren't quite ready right at eight. Thankfully, everyone liked it in the end."

The event was a benefit for ASTEP, a nonprofit organization founded by Campbell. "It is an organization that uses the arts to work with children who are in extreme situations as a tool for life skills, healing, and connection," she said. " I went to India and I spent four months working in orphanages. I came back and felt motivated to change my life and to use the arts as the kind of transformative thing that I know it to be to work with kids that were really struggling. It was right around when we were starting [the 2006 revival of] Company because I remember [director] John Doyle asking me to do it and I said, 'I don't know if I can because I'm starting this nonprofit.'" As the concert's musical director, Campbell was in charge of creating new arrangements and working with the artist's so their performance was as pristine as possible. "I think the biggest challenge was trying to create and illuminate the lyrics in a way that would work for the actors without being able to actually do it live," she said. "They were all brilliant."

Although the concert has received a lot praise, there's only one person whose opinion really matters: Stephen Sondheim. "I can tell you that he is very, very, very very, very happy," Esparza said. "I can tell you that he said it was a truly great gift and he is grateful and moved. And you know what? That's it. That's what it was for. He said that the greatest gift he received was from each of these amazing friends and performers, who he considers friends, how each and every single one of them gave him the gift of songs that they had never done to show him new sides of themselves. That was a very precious thing that they did for him." 

Watch the entire episode below to hear more secrets about how they made the show happen and more!