Remember days? The ones with a distinct beginning, middle and end? You’d go to work, battle transport, perhaps slip out for lunch. There’d be nocturnal activities. A meal. A movie. A Pinter play. Nineteen-year-old Ella has been imprisoned so long the colours, sounds and textures of the world outside are dim. Skies “blue as ink, or at least I think”, she sings. “Light and noise, bees and boys, and days. I remember days.” The sweetly retrospective number I Remember is not, in fact, the lament of 2020 lockdowners. It is, rather, from that age-old tale of a girl who falls asleep among the women’s hats in a New York City department store who then must live in a community of sentient mannequins who spring to life at night when the security guard isn’t looking. Yes, that one. Until, of course, the dashing Charles enters, a dewy-eyed poet searching for some tranquility to write, who captures Ella’s heart and opens the door to freedom. Evening Primrose was a 1966 hour-long made-for-TV musical, part of an anthology series on the ABC network in the US. It’s available to stream at Amazon (and grainy segments can be found, of course, on YouTube). It’s a strange and strangely comforting ride in 60s televisual romanticism. The sudsy pantomime, as absurd as its gender roles are dated, was far from a ratings hit and was never broadcast again. It would have long been taped over, perhaps, were it not for the up-and-coming young composer who penned the music and lyrics, one Stephen Joshua Sondheim. (In fact, the original colour mastertape was lost; only a black-and-white recording remains.) Long before Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods, before he became the greatest balladeer of the English language theatre, 30-something Sondheim was still proving himself on Broadway. He’d served an apprenticeship as lyricist to Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story), Jule Styne (Gypsy) and Richard Rodgers (Do I Hear a Waltz?). And ushered one moderate hit (Roman farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and one box office bomb (Anyone Can Whistle) to the stage as composer. Here was a prime-time TV platform to showcase his skills, with a post-Psycho heartthrob in Anthony Perkins as leading man, opposite a coquettish Charmian Carr (eldest Von Trapp daughter Liesl in The Sound of Music, on screen a year earlier) as Ella. It’s an important document in Sondheim’s artistic legacy. But it’s also found new meaning in a global pandemic. For Sondheim’s 90th birthday concert earlier this month, a socially distanced but emotionally adjacent Zoom affair, I Remember reverberated off the tiled walls of crystalline soprano Laura Benanti’s bathroom. Crouched next to her tub, as if it was the safest place to brace against the storm outside (plus the acoustics weren’t bad), Benanti repined of days as a “sort of haze”. “At times I think,” she trilled, ”I would gladly die for a day of sky.” And fellow New Yorkers locked down in their compact walk-ups, craning for a view of star-less city skies, knew exactly what she and Sondheim meant. Later in Primrose, after Charles hatches a plan to free his new love, Sondheim gives the couple the gorgeous Take Me to the World duet, another with uncanny prescience: “Let me see the world with clouds / Take me to the world / Out where I could push through crowds / Take me to the world.” Who doesn’t long to cut through a crowded footpath with impunity? To be among a thong of office workers or cinemagoers or footy fans or any other public space? Take Me to the World is for a world out of reach. Beset by plague, perhaps, or simply fenced off to the sick, the poor, the lonely, the other. This past Memorial Day weekend, the Broadway star Kelli O’Hara offered the song as balm to those mourning victims of Covid-19. Raúl Esparza chose the song to title the Sondheim concert, and sang it during the performance with acute yearning. Esparza said of the song he “loved the desperate hopefulness in it”. Note the apparent contradiction. Ben Brantley, reviewing the concert for The New York Times, wrote that Esparza’s performance had “passion warred with caution, and hope with a draining fatalism”. That’s Sondheim. With surgical precision, a simple rhyming couplet speaks not to love or loss but both at once, the much more human grey of life where the world is beautiful and ugly and it’s yours to have unless it isn’t. Last year, Sondheim was said to be enjoying a “new heyday” with big screen characters breaking into his songs, from Joker to Marriage Story to Knives Out. It’s no coincidence. Sondheim’s songwriting is a skin for every mood, whether you’re breaking up in a Noah Baumbach indie drama or planning a murderous rampage in a comic book blockbuster. Or, you’re in the middle of a global disease pandemic and you ache for the world outside. And a ‘60s TV movie about dummies coming to life is, it turns out, exactly what you needed. “A world of skies / That’s bursting with surprise / To open up your eyes for joy / We shall see the world come true / We shall have the world.” • Evening Primrose is available to stream via Amazon