What’s to Discuss? Old Friends Is a Familiar Trip Through the Sondheim Canon.

ABLUpdated 2 weeks Ago4 Mins read3

Rarely will you hear as much audience response to a song’s opening notes as you will at a Sondheim revue, especially one like Old Friends, which takes as its premise that we’re all here to listen to melodies and lyrics we already love. There’s the anticipatory intake of breath to the beelike piano before “Getting Married Today,” the thrill to the whistle that introduces industrial London and “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” and the sigh that accompanies those strings that descend like a red curtain as Bernadette readies herself for “Losing My Mind.” That’s a moment you know will be coming, even if you don’t look at the song listing in your Playbill. If you do look, though, you’ll notice that legend of Broadway Bernadette Peters is credited the way everyone else is: by her first name only, as if we are all pals here — though we may be less familiar with Alexa or Kyle. You might have heard her sing this song in Follies, in a concert of her own, or several thousand times over on a recording. Indulge your friend Bernadette a little and hear it again.

Old Friends, here on Broadway after starting out in the West End and stopping off in Los Angeles, is full of that kind of indulgence, like a rich, basic chocolate brownie — familiar ingredients and satisfying, if not necessarily a whole meal. The show is directed by Matthew Bourne and assembled by the producer Cameron Mackintosh, who’s best known here as the five-star general who led the British megamusical invasion of the 1980s. He worked with Sondheim on two other revues, Side by Side by Sondheim (on Broadway in 1977) and Putting It Together (on Broadway in 1999). Even though Mackintosh has said he started working on this third installment with the composer before his death, it’s very much a tribute show. Over in London, its first iteration was a charity concert turned memorial service studded with stars including Maria Friedman, Imelda Staunton, and Judi Dench alongside Bernadette (I guess I have to keep referring to her by first name). In this version, adapted from the London run’s extended one, Bernadette is the primary close collaborator with Sondheim onstage, occupying a position between ambassador to his oeuvre, high priestess of song, and family member in mourning. Images of the pair during their time on Sunday in the Park With George appear in a photo reel near the end of the show to powerful effect. If Peters’s voice has lost some of its tensile strength with the passage of time, her ability to imbue each bit of vibrato with meaning has not — and she retains her capricious taste. She will deliver on the plaintive shattered-glass reveries of “Losing My Mind” and “Send in the Clowns.” She will bend over and toot a trumpet between her legs in “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.” And in a send-up of her reputation for eternal youth, prance around in a cape as Into the Woods’s Little Red, mashing together “I Know Things Know” with a wink at Road Show heads by doing “Bounce.” When she’s trailed by Jacob Dickey’s shirtless, oversexed Wolf in “Hello Little Girl,” Bernadette delivers the punch line of the evening with the sui generis way she shouts “Birds!”

As her second-in-command, Lea Salonga, a relatively new friend of Sondheim’s work, takes on much of the vocal heavy lifting. Salonga, who rocketed to theatrical fame after being cast by Mackintosh in Miss Saigon, tends to be associated with those megamusicals and her Disney work — big romantic stuff, more lush than funny. Although she hasn’t done Sondheim on Broadway until now, she’s certainly demonstrating the chops, if anyone cares to ask going forward. In Old Friends, she’s a snarling, capricious Mrs. Lovett in an extended Sweeney sequence, a steely Momma Rose doing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” (which has to be stressful to attempt when there’s a former Rose just offstage), and a Fosca whose longing transmutes into liquid beauty in “Loving You.” The baton passes, rather frenetically, to other standout friends, too. Beth Leavel (remember how good she was in The Prom?) comes out in a big fur coat to lay down a furious “Ladies Who Lunch.” Gavin Lee (he of the fancy footwork as Squidward) does a gender-bent “Could I Leave You?” Bonnie Langford struts through “I’m Still Here” (in this case, the Shirley MacLaine edition), Joanna Riding panics about not getting married, and Kate Jennings Grant lusts after “The Boy From …” That last one, a comedy curio, reminds you that Sondheim was obsessed with bossa nova (“Ladies Who Lunch” does too) and that it really belonged to Linda Lavin. In a setting like this, you often think about the actors who originated these songs. Given how much of Old Friends is devoted to memorializing Sondheim, there’s an unspoken but accumulating awareness of how many of those collaborators have been lost in just the past few years: Lavin, Lansbury, Stritch. Who’s like them? To bastardize the title song, damn few.

Bourne and Mackintosh have tried to sprinkle in deeper cuts like that one, but Old Friends primarily, and frantically, jumps among the hits. In addition to all that Sweeney, there’s a lot of Follies and a lot of West Side Story (even if the melodies are Bernstein’s). Because these songs are so designed for drama, we’re yanked roughly from one scene and mood to another, skipping from a “A Little Priest” into “The Ladies Who Lunch” into “Sunday” in the manner of someone who can’t decide which wormhole he wants to fall into on YouTube one night. There’s also an absence of the thornier and angrier material — I’d love to hear some Assassins, especially at this historical moment, as well as a little Pacific Overtures. A hagiography may be deserved, but it’s not an interesting mode for a show to idle in forever.

Old Friends stretches to two and a half hours, counting an intermission, which is both way too long and woefully incomplete. You can’t take offense at the concept — it accomplishes exactly what it aims to do, which is to remind you that Sondheim wrote some really great songs — but you do start to fantasize about it all slowing down and just committing to the dramatic frames that contained them. Should we just revive Sweeney Todd again? Or Follies? Or wait, it’ll never make as much money as a revue, but let’s do Passion.

Old Friends is at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.