It was Monday in the dark with Mandy Patinkin as Signature Theatre feted this year’s Stephen Sondheim Award honoree with a glowing musical tribute to his career on stage and screen. Joined by Kathryn Grody, his wife of 45 years, Patinkin sat center table at the annual gala, held for the second consecutive year at The Anthem. 

The concert venue was ever apt for singing the praises of the Tony and Emmy winning performer, whose artistry in creating roles on Broadway in Evita, The Secret Garden, The Wild Party, and, of course, Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, helped earn him the Sondheim Award, established by Signature in 2009 “to honor an individual for his or her contributions to American Musical Theater.”

This year’s event on Monday, April 14, also raised a record amount to benefit the Arlington-based theater’s “Signature in the Schools” program, and was the best-attended in the gala’s history, according to the evening intros by Signature’s Christine Stanley.

That record turnout was treated to a tender, even reverent program of powerhouse songs associated with Patinkin, sung by a lineup of clearly inspired performers, including Ben Platt, Annaleigh Ashford, Matthew Scott, Àngel Lozada, Tracy Lynn Olivera, and Awa Sal Secka.

Following a well-edited video tribute — which also highlighted Patinkin’s indelible film and TV roles, from Yentl, The Princess Bride, and Criminal Minds, to singing Sondheim with Madonna in Dick Tracy — Secka started the show with a state of the art rendition of Sunday’s “Putting it Together.”

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Backing up the singers, the Jon Kalbfleisch-led band indeed found every tiny syncopation in every tiny orchestration. Next up was Olivera, whipping out a jaunty Sondheim ditty from Dick Tracy — frankly, not the Patinkin-associated Dick Tracy song I most wanted to hear sung live, but a lesser known gem, the jazzy “Live Alone and Like It.”

Olivera then brought her friend Secka back out for a lovely duet on “Lily’s Eyes,” a song Patinkin introduced in The Secret Garden, composed by Lucy Simon with lyrics by Marsha Norman. Lozada, currently leading In the Heights at Signature, followed with a passionate performance of another song Patinkin sang first on Broadway, Che’s “High Flying, Adored” from Evita.

Scott, standing in for an under-the-weather Nathan Gunn, expressed the sentiment of many artists in the room, addressing Patinkin from the stage: “How lucky are we to have you?” Thrilled to honor one of his heroes, he said, Scott offered a touching “The Games I Play,” from Falsettos.

Ashford maintained the stirring mood with a mini-medley of Sunday’s “Children and Art” with “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods, before Tony, Grammy, and Emmy winner Platt closed the performance portion singing, in his words, “one of the best songs ever created,” Sunday’s “Finishing the Hat.”

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On that beautiful note, James Lapine, the esteemed writer and director responsible for finishing many hats in collaboration with Sondheim — Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along, Passion — took the stage, to a standing ovation, to present the award to his friend of 40 years.

“We started with Sunday,” Lapine recalled. “Mandy had all the experience. I was just doing my first real show, my first show with Steve, my first Broadway show.” Acknowledging that during rehearsals for the production, the two “went through some times together and came out the other side,” Lapine credited Patinkin and his Sunday co-star Bernadette Peters with helping shape him as an artist.

“Those two people made me a director,” he said. “Because they came into the room. They were lovely, charming, and when they started working, they worked.” Praising the pair’s total concentration, he added, “They were doing it as if it were the most important thing they had to do, ever, day after day after day, and I realized I had to come up to their standards, to do the best I could do for them.”

In turn, when Patinkin made it onstage to accept the award, he gave credit to Lapine, the 2015 recipient of this honor. “James changed my life, not just Steve,” he said. “Steve wrote [music] from the words that James put down on paper first.”

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There was one word of direction from Lapine during rehearsals for Sunday, Patinkin said, that stayed with him throughout his career. “He gave me the word to repeat throughout George’s life in this play, and I’ve been privileged to carry it on in my life,” Patinkin said.

“And the word is: connect. ‘Connect, George, connect.’ I don’t have the courage to decide what will happen when my time is up, how they will deal with whatever this mess is called. But if there is a stone or anything, anywhere, where any part of me remains that my children or grandchildren want to sit by, I would like it to simply say, ‘He tried to connect.’”

Patinkin certainly connected with the gala audience, noting what he called the most important thing to remember. “I was thinking, ‘What do I say?’, and then it hit me, ‘Mandy, this has nothing to do with you, this evening, nothing at all to do with you,’” he said. 

“This has everything to do with the theater, and the people who make the theater stay alive and support the theater. And the world at large, who cannot live without the theater and the morality, and the ethics, and the nobleness, and the humanity, and the kindness, and the entertainment, and the lesson to fight for life and see life everywhere, in everyone, in everything.”

To hearty applause, he continued, “It is so important that you understand this evening that you are the ones who are being honored, that it is the Signature Theatre that is being honored this evening, those of you that support it. It is every theater across the planet that is gathering humanity together, and sharing their likeness, their kindness, their care for their fellow human beings, and celebrating the existence of humanity, not tearing it down!

“Thank you for letting me be a part of this extraordinary, wonderful theater, for this town, this town needs you more than any town in the world right now. Bless you!” 

With that, the full cast of performers returned for the grand finale, a robust “Sunday” from Sunday. To everyone’s surprise, Patinkin blessed us by joining in with the ensemble behind Platt, sweetly singing the evening to a close, “People strolling through the trees…on an ordinary Sunday.”