Judy Collins, Mandy Patinkin, Renée Fleming, Michael R. Jackson, Melissa Errico, Tony Kushner, Sherman Irby and New York Times writers and editors pick 14 songs to seal the deal.

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‘Finishing the Hat,’ from ‘Sunday in the Park With George’

“Finishing the Hat” arises as George Seurat chooses the act of making art over the act of loving. Alone at his sketch pad, chasing images — fixing them! — before they disappear, he meditates on the “woman who is willing to wait” while he works. We are often sold on Sondheim for his words, but it’s the musicality that matters most here. There’s a liquid, lyrical sound to the melody, as if images forming off the tip of his pencil could dissolve before the singer’s very eyes; then there’s a rising fury in the melody as pain washes through as if to say: All the things I sacrifice! What begins as a lulling, almost childlike arpeggiation becomes a relentless pulse, the sound of a mind racing against time. Sondheim lets the lyric think in real time — “Look, I made a hat / Where there never was a hat” — as if creation itself were a form of breathless survival.

Sondheim once insisted to me, in a memorable exchange of letters, that the song was specific to Seurat and his setting, and resistant to gender swapping. Yet I still insist that when sung by a woman, the waiting lover carries a different charge, and the price of devotion (family, children and their absence) feels still more painful. This isn’t art as fulfillment, but art as compulsion: the terrible, sublime beauty of a focus so intense, it costs you human connection. — MELISSA ERRICO, actress and writer