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 with Sondheim’s oeuvre, Old Friends offers a respectable and professional introduction to the late master’s voice, both as a peerlessly witty lyricist and as a unique compositional dramatist. What it doesn’t provide is context. The show contains vanishingly little biographical information about Sondheim’s personal or even professional life; neither, for the most part, does it place its songs in the dramatic moments they were written for. (When it tries, the results are spotty: The semirealized microstagings of suites from Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd seem out of place next to the show’s rather stodgy baseline style: performers in gowns and tuxedos, on a cheeseball set of light-bulb prosceniums and swoopy musical bars.) Extracting musical flowers from their original soil is fine for songwriters like Rodgers and Hart, but it’s a challenge with Sondheim, who tied his songs insistently to character and situation.
Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
For those who know Sondheim’s work well, Old Friends faces a different challenge: how to distinguish itself from the oceans of other Sondheim tribute shows that have flooded New York’s cabarets and concert halls for decades. What is special about this particular collection of mostly quite familiar songs? What, in this bucket, is new? Most of the show is solid, to be sure. Salonga sounds characteristically beautiful in “Loving You,” “Somewhere” and “Children Will Listen.” Leavel makes a scenery-chewing meal of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” Jacob Dickey powers ably through “Being Alive,” and Kate Jennings Grant, as a clueless party girl with the worst gaydar ever, squeezes fresh juice from the bossa nova spoof “The Boy From…” Kyle Selig brings assured vocals and an appealing light touch to his roles, and I could happily listen to Maria Wirries’s precise yet juicy soprano for hours.
Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
The British performers are more of a mixed bag. I am generally unpersuaded of the wisdom of bringing U.K. actors to sing American songs to American audiences, but sometimes it pans out: Joanna Riding is crisply funny as the panicky bride-maybe-not-to-be in “Getting Married Today,” and if you missed Jeremy Secomb’s thunderous performance in the title role of the delicious 2017 pie-shop revival of Sweeney, you get to sample of bit of it here (though somewhat undermatched by Salonga’s Mrs. Lovett). But Lee and Pennycooke fall into traps that sometimes bedevil English performers, especially men, in musicals: emotional slickness and physical overillustration. Lee delivers one of Sondheim’s most cutting songs, “Could I Leave You,” with the mechanical polish of a shoeshine machine.
Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
The import I was happiest to see was Bonnie Langford, who sings the showbiz survivor anthem “I’m Still Here.” Her performance surely registered differently in the West End—where, as her Playbill bio amusingly boasts, she has been in “over 14 productions”—than it does in New York. Her only previous Broadway credits are a 2009 stint in Chicago and, before that, Baby June in the 1974 Gypsy, when she was 10 years old. Still here? She’s barely been here to begin with! Yet that paradox works to her advantage; her pick-me energy is unusual for the song, and the result is quite endearing. (It’s closer in spirit to a different Follies song, “Broadway Baby,” which she performs earlier alongside the cast’s other women, and which she ends by doing the splits.)
Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Perhaps fittingly, the best reason to see Old Friends is the oldest thing in it: Bernadette Peters. At 77, she remains astonishingly youthful-looking; when she takes the stage to sing “I Know Things Now” as Little Red Riding Hood from Into the Woods, it really doesn’t seem like that big a stretch. She does a little cavorting—especially when clowning with Leavel and Riding in Gypsy’s “You Gotta Get a Gimmick”—but mainly she offers emotional ballads and ballast. Most of her solos are in songs she has done before, including some that she has done on Broadway (“Send in the Clowns,” “Losing My Mind”), but her versions are in constant, exquisite evolution. She knows things now, many valuable things, and she brings them to Sondheim’s work like the best kind of friends: the ones who can tell you the truth.
Old Friends. Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (Broadway). Music by Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Mary Rodgers. Lyrics by Sondheim. Directed by Matthew Bourne. With Bernadette Peters, Lea Salonga, Beth Leavel, Bonnie Langford, Joanna Riding, Gavin Lee, Jason Pennycooke, Kate Jennings Grant, Jeremy Secomb, Jacob Dickey, Kyle Selig, Maria Wirries, Kevin Earley, Daniel Yearwood, Jasmine Forsberg. Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.
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Old Friends | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
