Old Friends
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
“Old friends do tend to become old habit,” sings a character in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, and when it comes to work by Sondheim—one of the best friends American musical theater ever had—it’s a habit that Broadway is happy to indulge. Not a year goes by lately, not a blessed year, without at least one Sondheim show on the big boards, all of them worth seeing: West Side Story in 2020, Company in 2021, Into the Woods in 2022, Sweeney Todd and Merrily in 2023, Gypsy in 2024. Artists keep returning to this well because the well is so deep; they can still throw down a bucket and come up with something new.
That’s less true of Old Friends, a revue of Sondheim songs that includes selections from all of the musicals listed above and several others besides. Devised by the British überproducer Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Matthew Bourne (Swan Lake), the show began as a 2022 gala concert, which was then reworked into a 2023 London production that featured some of the concert’s performers, most notably the great leading lady Bernadette Peters in what was somehow her West End debut. Now Manhattan Theatre Club has brought a copy of that copy to Broadway, with seven members of the 2023 cast—Peters, Lea Salonga, Bonnie Langford, Joanna Riding, Jeremy Secomb, Gavin Lee and Jason Pennycooke—performing alongside eight new additions, including The Prom's Beth Leavel.
Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
To those unfamiliar...