‘Sondheim Unplugged: The New York Sessions’ (Yellow Sound Label)

It was a Sunday near the Park with Steve: The occasion was the 103rd presentation of 54 Below’s series “Sondheim Unplugged,” and the first surprise of the evening was something I truly did not expect to encounter:  a boy, maybe 10 years old, seated with his parents, directly in front of the stage.  

I’m guessing he was there just as part of a family night out, but it left me wondering: What if he is really into Sondheim? I would envy him for that, as I didn’t fully appreciate Sondheim (or Bob Dylan, for that matter) until I was about 40 and had a divorce or two under my belt. 

The mind boggles: I couldn’t help but ponder what lessons, both musical and moral, Sondheim’s music might impart to a youngster. I don’t just mean about the art of songwriting and musical theater, or about performing and accompanying. (The latter was done on this occasion by pianist/musical director John Fischer.) These songs have so much wisdom to impart regarding, say, romantic love between two people, or between parents and children, or the larger meaning of being alive.

The side benefit of 54 Below’s “Sondheim Unplugged” shows is a series of albums bearing that title: three two-CD sets that contain in toto all of 128 tracks — seven and a half hours of Sondheim songs both famous and otherwise — sung by artists who have appeared in the 54 Below shows, including many of those present at this latest performance. 

Each live program samples a few Sondheim shows; this one highlighted the classics, “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd,” but also a few songs from the lesser known “Do I Hear a Waltz” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Forum.” 

The CD series is similarly structured. Using Apple Music, one can resequence the whole works in a variety of revealing ways, and I’m sure the first idea of many listeners would be to reconstruct much of the scores to classics like “Company” and “Into The Woods” or lesser-known works like “The Frogs.”

Or one could pick out favorite performers, and my first choice would be Gabrielle Stravelli. She’s more often hailed as a jazz artist than a Broadway or cabaret singer, but her three appearances, one on each volume, are highlights. The most valuable of these is a real Sondheim rarity, “The Girls of Summer,” which comes from so early in his career — it was originally composed as instrumental music to a 1956 play — that it doesn’t even sound like Sondheim.

For our tween friend, though, I might suggest rearranging the songs by mood and concept. Nobody is better at an angry song than Sondheim, as Dee Hoty shows on “Could I Leave You?” This uses the Sondheimian device of contrasting a lovely lilting waltz — it could be Cole Porter or Noel Coward, though Sondheim professed to dislike the latter — with a devastatingly bitter lyric. On Sunday, Marissa McGowan whipped up so much contempt for her fictional husband that I felt sorry for the poor slob. It gets darker still: “The Ballad of Booth” by John Treacy Egan and Harris Doran isn’t merely disturbing but positively bone-chilling.

Yet there are also tender songs here, the two highlights on Sunday being “In Buddy’s Eyes” by Jon-Michael Reese and “Not While I’m Around” by Alex Joseph Grayson. In both cases, they were able to step out of the shows and bring the material into their own lives. So, Mr. Grayson wasn’t singing as Tobias, he was singing as himself — or some appreciable version of himself — and that’s what made it especially touching.

Although the series and the albums were “conceived/directed/produced/hosted” by Phil Geoffrey Bond, the new host of the live events is the affable, extroverted Rob Maitner. He also performed “Buddy’s Blues,” a classic Sondheimian cocktail of mixed messages in which a bouncy vaudeville melody helps camouflage a bittersweet subtext. Likewise, Ramona Mallory expertly essayed two complex narratives about loving someone who, to put it mildly, is difficult, “That Dirty Old Man” and the title number of “Sunday in the Park with George.” 

The albums are also distinguished by some unusual arrangements, particularly a vocal group called Marquee Five doing a contrapuntal treatment of “Another Hundred People” that makes it sound even more like Burt Bacharach. Jim Brochu sings “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” in homage to his friend, David Burns, the Broadway character actor supreme, which amounts to a kind of Easter Egg.

I wish I could have asked our 10-year-old friend just what he thought of it all. I would bet you anything that, like Red Riding Hood going “Into the Woods,” he knows things now that he didn’t before.

Correction: The number of tracks on the three two-CD sets is 128. An earlier version contained an incorrect number.