Lord Knows, At Least I Was There: Working with Stephen Sondheim

Paul Ford recalls his decades long professional relationship with Broadway’s masterful songwriter Stephen Sondheim, who has publicly declared Ford the “indefatigable master of the musical theatre” and “the world’s most tireless rehearsal pianist and a walking memory bank of every song that has ever been written for any musical on any continent.” Ford worked on the original productions of Sunday in the Park with George, Follies in Concert, Into the Woods, Assassins (both off-Broadway and the Broadway revival), Passion, Wiseguys, Stephen Sondheim at Carnegie Hall, and numerous concerts, birthday tributes, and television spectaculars. For more than a quarter of a century, Paul Ford was also Mandy Patinkin’s exclusive accompanist and musical collaborator on a series of recordings and live concerts that took the duo from Broadway to London to Australia and beyond. Ford also provides a vivid portrait of a conflicted childhood in Atlanta, Georgia as a “sissy piano player,” followed by a self-destructive period of alcoholism. Miraculously, a haunting encounter in a Hell’s Kitchen saloon in May of 1995 with the leading lady of one of his favorite childhood movies, gave Ford the incentive to clean up his life.