Along with the usual Playbills, Manhattan Theatre Club should really supply handkerchiefs and tissues for those attending Sondheim’s Old Friends (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, booking to June 15). By the end—the result of a closing cascade of Stephen Sondheim’s most wrenching songs—your tears may be flowing extremely freely.
This Broadway greatest-hits revue is rooted in the productions Sondheim collaborated on with producer Cameron Mackintosh (who devised Old Friends). It is both a loving act of remembrance and fan service of the highest order, with Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga heading a cast of accomplished performers including Bonnie Langford, Beth Leavel, Jeremy Seacomb, and Joanna Riding alongside many others. (Sondheim died in November 2021, aged 91.)
With music director Annbritt duChateau conducting an immaculate orchestra, Old Friends is a plushly wrapped gift for Sondheim’s dedicated fans, featuring around 40 songs from his shows. If context is everything, it is also completely absent here; Old Friends is slickly structured as a compendium of numbers for those who know and treasure them. If you don’t, maybe go see Boop!
First, Peters and Salonga sing “Side by Side” from Company. Then the cast gathers for a delightfully fun “Comedy Tonight,” the opening song from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, with Stephen Mear’s choreography on a compact stage providing a crisp opening workout for the cast in both this and “Company” from Company after it. Act One closes with a slower group ballet for a glorious rendition of “Sunday” from Sunday in the Park With George.
Peters’ solo songs are inevitably emotional showstoppers, beginning with “Send in the Clowns.” Given the emotional demands of such numbers, it’s great to also see her let rip with Leavel and Riding for “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from Gypsy. More shenanigans erupt when all the women come together to vie for stage supremacy in “Broadway Baby.”
Leavel demolishes “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Company as exactly the slurred, snarling, insightful cri-de-coeur it should be. Langford’s “I’m Still Here” is a gleaming interpretation of that song’s lyrical pile-up of defiant wisecracks, wordplay, and catalog of hard knocks.
Some songs are grouped together from shows, such as a clutch from Company, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd. Standouts are Jacob Dickey as the lasciviously horny and murderous Wolf from Into the Woods, and Riding’s bug-eyed, furious meltdown in “Getting Married Today” from Company.
Some songs may meet the high standard of fans’ burnished memories, others may fall short; as animated as this show’s rendition of “Agony” from Into the Woods is, it made me think, sharply, of Gavin Creel and Joshua Henry bringing the house down singing the same. More levity comes from Secomb and Dickey’s “Pretty Women,” Jason Pennycooke’s “Buddy’s Blues,” and Leavel and Gavin Lee’s “The Little Things You Do Together.”
There is the odd puzzle. Salonga’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story is cut unnecessarily short; still, you can tell the fun she has as Mrs. Lovett singing “The Worst Pies in London” from Sweeney Todd, and as Mama Rose in Gypsy for “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (but no “Rose’s Turn”). Peters’ “Losing My Mind” is so raspily, devastatingly relayed you worry she may not reach its end.
Throughout, George Reeve’s subtle projections reveal Sondheim’s face through the years, a fun duet with Andrew Lloyd Webber, his signature, and sheet music. Jill Parker’s costumes are the perfect kind of swanky. Warren Letton’s lighting is as prettily soft and sharply dramatic as the numbers require. The just-as-pristine staging and direction is by Matthew Bourne, with Matt Kinley’s design serving up a curved staircase, and specifics including a pie shop and chopping board for Mrs. Lovett.
The tissues and handkerchiefs would be useful when the show’s canter to its end begins with the women singing “Not a Day Goes By” gazing up at images of Sondheim through his life, then being joined by the men for “Being Alive,” “Old Friends,” and a company reprise of “Side by Side.”
As at any concert, some songs and performances are better than others. But Old Friends doesn’t invite the kind of deep analysis Sondheim’s works in totality merit. As its title suggests, this is a classy, comfortable pair of slippers—or the warmest, most luxurious musical bubble bath a Sondheim fan could wish for. The only thing to do is bask in its warmth.
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