Your feelings about the new Sondheim revue, Old Friends, will probably depend on your familiarity with the composer-lyricist’s work as well as whether you enjoy songs sung out of context.
I grew up with Sondheim musicals. One could say that Sunday in the Park with George changed my life and Into the Woods was formidable in shaping my values. When I was super young, I didn’t really get his work, it was too cerebral for me. But that soon change. In grade school I saw Sweeney Todd on Broadway (thank you mom and dad for never caring about subject matter). I was hooked. In high school, my friends and I became groupies of certain shows. I have proudly seen every incarnation of his work on Broadway since Sweeney. I also got to know the man, slightly, which is an entirely different story I may write about one day. But not today.
Because of my history, hearing certain songs—even the first few bars—gets me nostalgic, excited and curious. Often, though, the problem is that what I then experience is far inferior to my memory of when I first encountered the number, the moment, the character-driven song. But not always. I am forever open to a new interpretations, incarnations.
There have been many Sondheim revues since the 1970s. Putting It Together with Julie Andrews off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club in 1993, and then on Broadway with Carol Burnett in 1999, is one of the most famous, and, in style, similar to Old Friends. Like this show, Putting It Together began life in the UK. This is the first new revue since his death in November of 2021.
And with recent, impressive revivals of Merrily We Roll Along, Company, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods as well as this season’s Gypsy, one has to wonder why producer (and good friend to Sondheim) Cameron Mackintosh felt it necessary to showcase a production that would feel redundant. Perhaps it’s simply because he knew audiences would want to see the legendary Bernadette Peters reprise as few numbers and put her signature on some others.
Whatever the reason, I thoroughly enjoyed some of Old Friends and appreciated the love and tribute to the icon’s work. But some of the choices were, indeed, redundant. Lea Salonga’s rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses, from Gypsy, for instance, is good, but not earth-shattering. So, why not give her something less…done to death?
One of the very few times Old Friends features a lesser-known Sondheim ditty it works well. Kate Jenning Grant has a blast with the satiric, “The Boy From …,” a song originally sung by the great Linda Lavin that he wrote with Mary Rodgers for a 1966 revue, The Magic Show.
A most egregious omission here is Sondheim’s favorite (and it also happens to be mine) of all the songs he penned, the brilliant “Someone in a Tree,” from Pacific Overtures. I can only imagine the cautionary reasons for not including it.
Most of the rest of the production features songs most audiences will already be familiar with, like Peters’ haunting and evocative rendition of “Send in the Clowns,” which she performed in the 2009 revival of A Little Night Music, when she took over for a stunning Catherine Zeta-Jones, who put her own imprint on that classic.
We also get solid musical suites from Into The Woods and Sweeney Todd from the gifted ensemble as well as a vocally powerful version of the “Tonight Suite,” from West Side Story.
Not everything works. Gavin Lee’s “Could I Leave You?” and Jason Pennycooke’s “Buddy’s Blues,” both from Follies, fall completely flat due to misguided choices–and possibly that these just don’t work well out of context.
Strangely, the show highlights are two tunes we’ve heard too many times before, but here are given rousing and commanding interpretations. Beth Leavel makes “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from Company, her own, even after Patti LuPone recently put her Tony-and-Olivier-award-winning stamp on it.
And Bonnie Langford (who?) kills with one of my favorite showstoppers, “I’m Still Here,” from Follies. This is the first time I’ve heard lyrics incorporated from Mike Nichols’ 1990 gem, Postcards From the Edge, rewritten specifically for Shirley MacLaine and her Debbie Reynolds-inspired character and sung to her Carrie Fisher-as-played-by-Meryl-Streep daughter. The fact that Langford is a star in Britain but is not well known here made no difference in our believing she was once, and is, still here!
Incidentally, Sondheim was aghast at how Nichols butchered the sequence in the editing room and the only way to hear the full MacLaine version was through bootlegs of her concert tour.
Three Old Friends ensemble members truly standout and are simply fabulous, vocally, and have charm and stage presence to spare, Kyle Selig, Maria Wirries and Jacob Dickey.
Brit choreographer Matthew Bourne directs with grace but little of the flourish we’ve come to expect from him. It’s all very dignified.
I was quite moved by the first act finale which uses the reprise of “Sunday,” from Sunday in the Park with George, but that might have more to do with nostalgia, and seeing Peters as Dot one more time, although the performers were sublime. Regardless, it was nice to spend some time revisiting the musical theater master’s oeuvre.
Old Friends is currently playing, through June 15, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, NYC Tickets: sondheimoldfriends.com.
