Our love of Stephen Sondheim is approaching the “Beatlemania” phase.
One wonders what the Broadway maestro would have made of “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” which opened Thursday at the Ahmanson Theatre in preparation for its move to Broadway in the spring. A greatest-hits revue, devised by producer Cameron Mackintosh, the celebratory show is a true embarrassment of riches.
Mackintosh has spared no expense on an extravaganza that seems to have everything but a good editor.
Sondheim, who died in 2021, admitted to me in a 2010 interview that he found these birthday concerts and tribute shows “thrilling and embarrassing.”
“There’s an up- and downside to being venerated,” he said. “You start to believe your own notices, and that’s very dangerous. At the same time, it does feel like it’s gold-watch time. It’s ‘Thanks so much for coming to the party.’ They’re nails in the coffin, is what they are.”
Well, there’s no longer any worry about how all this public fanfare will affect his creativity. But could all this ballyhoo sap interest in his work? It would be an irony worthy of Sondheim if, after a lifetime of being dismissed as too highbrow, his posthumous career suffered from commercial overexposure.
Lea Salonga, who headlines “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends” alongside fellow Tony winner Bernadette Peters, is the brightest star of a production overloaded with majestic singing talent. There’s a purity to Salonga’s lyric soprano, which fills the Ahmanson with the distinctive glow not just of the song she happens to be singing but of the musical from which it derives.
In “Loving You” from “Passion,” a medley from “Sweeney Todd,” “Somewhere” from “West Side Story” and most unforgettably, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from “Gypsy,” Salonga allows us to momentarily inhabit the space of each show, intuitively conveying what I can only describe as the spiritual architecture of these musical landmarks.
The format of moving from one number to the next in TikTok fashion encourages some of the performers to overplay their hands. There’s a little too much mugging, italicizing and elbow-nudging, as if we might not be able to enjoy Sondheim’s unsparing wit on our own.
Salonga, however, is a model of restraint, allowing the lyrics to speak through her careful attention to Sondheim’s scores. Matthew Bourne seems to have lavished all his genius as a director on the elegant musical staging, leaving the actors to their own devices. But Salonga proves that less is indeed more when backed by trust in the material and guided by the artistic precision of a naturally gifted wonder.
Peters wasn’t in strong voice at the opening-night performance, and I wondered if she might be struggling with a cold. When she came out at the top of the show with Salonga, the two elegantly decked in the deep red of a Broadway stage curtain, the connection with the audience was instantaneous. The ovation that erupted threatened to derail the show.
Part of the original Broadway casts of “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods,” Peters is one of the great Sondheim interpreters. (I still rank her performance in “Gypsy” up there with the best.) There’s no one like this kewpie triple threat, and even at half-mast she was able to summon some of the old magic.
“Into the Woods” occasioned Peters’ best work, including a duet with Salonga of “Children Will Listen” and a coup de théâtre involving Little Red Riding Hood’s costume. A clumsily set-up “Broadway Baby” from “Follies,” in which Peters cheekily name-checks herself, eventually was redeemed when she was joined by other veteran troupers in leggy kick-line.
“Old Friends,” which was originally produced in London by Mackintosh, has a title that shouldn’t be taken too literally. The company brings together different generations united by their devotion to Sondheim. But the more seasoned pros get two of the biggest showstoppers. Beth Leavel delivers a defiantly louche rendition of “The Ladies Who Lunch” from “Company” and Bonnie Langford leaves it all out on the stage in a gorgeously guttural “I’m Still Here” from “Follies.”
The banquet of beautiful singing is too abundant for a complete inventory. But Jeremy Secomb and Jacob Dickey’s exquisite rendition of “Pretty Women,” a lilting melody amid the murderous machinations of “Sweeney Todd,” deserves special commendation. Jason Pennycooke makes a memorable impression in “Live Alone and Like It,” a song Sondheim wrote for the film “Dick Tracy” that was the only one I didn’t know all the lyrics to.
There were a few disappointments along the way. Peters had only intermittent success with “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music” and “Losing My Mind” from “Follies.” Her flickers of brilliance fell short of a flame.
Mackintosh, who made his greatest-hits selection favoring those shows he had a hand in producing, goes heavy on the comic numbers. The second act begins to drag with slapdash vaudeville showcases that seem like sops to the performers.
Sondheim always insisted that his book writers be given equal due. Songwriting for him was an act of collaborative playwriting. His harping on this point could come across as doctrinaire. But as “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends” unwittingly betrays, songs taken out of their context don’t have the same power as when dramatically embedded.
Mackintosh and Bourne mitigate the damage by grouping some songs together and presenting them in an ingeniously suggestive dramatic fashion. Matt Kinley’s shapeshifting scenic design, combined with Warren Letton’s hypnotic lighting and Jill Parker’s swank costumes, allow scenes to emerge like an impresario’s dreamscapes.
The irreplaceable Barbara Cook put her interpretive stamp on Sondheim’s songbook in her concert tributes, reanimating musical treasures through her own introspective moonlight. The cast of “Old Friends” is too numerous for that level of personal intimacy, so we’re left in a kind of limbo that’s neither cabaret nor full-scale revival.
But in addition to Salonga’s radiant example, there are group numbers that bring us closer to the sublime heights that Sondheim reached. “Sunday,” the culminating hymn of “Sunday in the Park With George,” closes Act 1 to magisterial effect. And “Being Alive” from “Company,” led by Dickey with soaring vocal accompaniment, takes us into the production’s rousing final stretch.
There are glimpses of Sondheim onscreen, but this isn’t another biographical show. It’s an overstuffed yet always stylish homage. While no substitute for the musicals themselves, the production will be cherished by those fans who need to worship regularly at the altar of their Broadway god.
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