This celebration of the late Stephen Sondheim assembles three generations of big guns from musical theatre – including Broadway legend Bernadette Peters, making her West End debut – to fire a selection of greatest hits at a receptive audience. Devised by Cameron Mackintosh, and focusing on works he has produced, it’s a partial, loving, starry spin through a dazzling back catalogue. Sondheim’s versatility and wit shine through.
When he died in 2021 aged 91, Sondheim had 15 musicals to his credit as composer and lyricist, one uncompleted, and three as lyricist alone. Old Friends features material from at least 10 of them, including Follies, Company, West Side Story, Gypsy, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. Not bad, eh? Director Matthew Bourne whisks us through the evening so deftly we don’t notice it’s a whistle-stop tour. And there are pleasures, guilty and sublime, at every turn.
Peters, who is 75 with a hayrick of Titian curls, oversells the emotion of Send in the Clowns (from A Little Night Music) and the comedy of I Know Things Now (from Into the Woods). She was nasal and sometimes flat. Who cares: it’s Bernadette bloody Peters, here at last!
Sharing top billing is Lea Salonga, who has perfect pitch and a voice so powerful it threatens to leave the first three rows deaf and blind when she does Everything’s Coming Up Roses from Gypsy. She’s also a wry, sly Mrs Lovett opposite Jeremy Secomb in the Sweeney Todd sequence.
Veteran Brits in the cast include Janie Dee, Clare Burt (who wrestles a strangely-arranged The Ladies Who Lunch to the ground) and the comically showboating Gavin Lee. The ever-game former child star Bonnie Langford, now 59, gives a peerless interpretation of I’m Still Here from Follies. She also earned a round of applause on opening night for her earlobe-skimming high-kick in Broadway Baby.
There’s undeniable emotional force in seeing such experienced interpreters of Sondheim pay tribute, but it’s refreshing too when newcomers like the charismatic Bradley Jaden and the captivating Beatrice Penny-Touré take the focus.
Although sets and costumes are sketched in for some segments, the default mode is cabaret-style dinner suits, black frocks and fishnets. Some songs reminded me in miniature of the wider genius of Sondheim shows that have been revived in recent years, like Follies and Company. Others made me hungry. Surely we’re due a new Sweeney Todd?
The first act ends with a sublime rendition of Sunday, from Sondheim’s musical about the French post-Impressionist painter Seurat, Sunday in the Park with George, and you wonder how Mackintosh and Co will top it. With a full-cast rendition of Being Alive from Company, of course, which feels both poignant and uplifting after we’ve seen a photomontage of Sondheim’s extraordinary life and career.
