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Associated Press

It was 2019 and aspiring Broadway actress Eleri Ward had Stephen Sondheim’s “Every Day a Little Death” stuck in her head.
“I would see friends at auditions and whatnot, and having been awake since like 4 or 5am, they’d ask me how I’m doing,” she recalls.
“And I responded with, ‘Oh, every day a little death’. I was saying it as a stupid joke.”
She decided to record an acoustic rendition in her New York apartment’s living room and posted the iPhone video to Instagram on a Friday afternoon that March.

Her innovation helped fulfil her aspiration: that simple post, amassing 120 likes, would lead to a recording contract, a job as the opening act for US singer Josh Groban on tour last summer and the release of her new and second indie-folk CD of Sondheim covers, Keep a Tender Distance, on Ghostlight Records.
“She’s completely unafraid of exploring the darkness of loneliness, as Sondheim does as well,” says two-time Tony Award winner Donna Murphy, the original Fosca in musical Passion. “She’s a fully present human in expressing both through her music and through what she shares in conversation with her audiences about what’s painful about being human.”
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After the initial Instagram post, Ward’s friend pushed her to explore more from Sondheim.
“So the very next day I came up with ‘Johanna (Reprise)’,” Ward says. During the pandemic, Ward and her boyfriend moved to Boston. By January 2021, she was posting her Sondheim videos to TikTok, at the suggestion of another friend.
“People really responded to them, wanted me to release these covers on streaming services,” Ward recalls. “So I said, ‘OK, I know how to record guitar and vocals and keyboard’, so we had a walk-in wardrobe in this flat in Boston and I started recording what I had already created and editing and creating new things along the way.”

She made a TikTok asking Broadway World to write about her album, and the theatre news website subsequently ran a Q&A.
Kurt Deutsch, founder of Ghostlight Records and a senior vice-president of Warner Music Entertainment & Theatrical Ventures, read that story, searched online, discovered “Johanna (Reprise)” and messaged Ward on Instagram. “I was in my Boston flat about to eat sushi with my boyfriend and I freaked out,” Ward says.
“I had never really heard Sondheim done in that way,” Deutsch says. “I found her music just glorious and I said, ‘Do you have more?’”
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Ward’s debut album of acoustic Sondheim covers, A Perfect Little Death, was recorded in the wardrobe of the Boston flat and released by Ghostlight on October 1, 2021.
For her second album, she was afforded 11 sessions last year at Brooklyn-based record label Better Company and got to lay down her own backing vocals.
The recording was initially issued digitally in September, and Ward made her off-Broadway debut last autumn as a swing in Only Gold. She is in the midst of a winter/spring solo tour with dates all over the country.
Now 28, Ward grew up in the Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge, Illinois, her mum an interior designer and real estate broker and her dad a consultant. She started piano lessons at five and remembers seeing Sweeney Todd at the suburban Drury Lane Theatre and attending a Sondheim talk with critic Frank Rich.

After graduation from high school at Chicago Academy of the Arts, where Ward sang Amy in Company, she enrolled at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Ward transferred across the street to the Boston Conservatory and earned a 2017 bachelor of fine arts degree in musical theatre with an emphasis in acting and songwriting.
She picked up a guitar in 2016 only because a friend was selling hers for US$40.
“It totally opened a whole new voice for me artistically,” Ward said. “I was writing completely different music on guitar and I just sort of fell in love with it.”
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Days after her debut album’s release, Ghostlight helped arrange a concert at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan, New York. Groban was there, having been given a copy of her recording by Kevin Gore, Warner’s president of global catalogue for recorded music.
Sondheim died that November at age 91, bringing wider attention to Ward’s covers. In December, Groban asked Ward to travel the US with him for a 26-show, six-week summer tour.
Emotion overflowed last March after Ward’s concert at New York’s 184-seat Joe’s Pub, where she sang a duet of “Loving You” with Murphy. Ward was introduced after the show to Rick Pappas, Sondheim’s lawyer and the executor of his estate.


“Rick says, ‘I want you to know that Sondheim loved your album and loved that you were doing something he never imagined with his music and bringing it to new audiences’,” Ward says.
“I’m holding onto Donna Murphy, crying, and she’s crying. It was just the most amazing moment and such validation that I just never thought I was going to get.”


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She posted her Stephen Sondheim covers on Instagram and TikTok – they led to a US tour with Josh Groban and her own music releases

Eleri Ward poses for a photo in the Long Island City neighbourhood of Queens in New York. Ward’s Stephen Sondheim covers have led to a recording contract, a US tour with Josh Groban and the release of two albums. Photo: AP

Ward poses for a photo in the Long Island City neighbourhood of Queens in New York. Photo: AP

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V in a teaser for Jinny’s Kitchen. Photo: tvN

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Xin Baiqing in a still from The Shadowless Tower, the new movie from Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu.

Xin Baiqing in a still from The Shadowless Tower.

Zhang Lu, director of The Shadowless Tower. Photo: Wenli Liu

Xin Baiqing (left) and Tian Zhuangzhuang in a still from The Shadowless Tower.

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Last month, NewJeans’ track “Ditto” made the group the fastest ever K-pop act to rank on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Photo: Ador

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A simple online post led to a recording contract, a job as the opening act for singer Josh Groban and the release of two albums for Broadway actress Eleri Ward
Ward recorded an acoustic rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Every Day a Little Death’ – her covers were so good that she was told ‘Sondheim loved your album’


Eleri Ward never could have imagined that her Stephen Sondheim covers would lead to a recording contract, a US tour with Josh Groban and the release of two albums – but they did.


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