What Makes Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends Different From Other Revues

At the start of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, above-the-title stars Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga greet the audience and explain that this will be an evening of Sondheim’s music, focusing mostly on shows that British theatrical impresario Cameron Mackintosh produced. After that, there is no more dialogue, just song after song from Sondheim’s vast catalogue.

“It’s been designed to remind people that Stephen Sondheim was a great composer as well as a lyricist,” says director Matthew Bourne, who is known for ballets such as Swan Lake. “He’s famously a great lyricist, but also a great melodist. He wrote beautiful melodies. It was about reminding people that he was not this over-intellectualized creator. He wanted his work to be seen and enjoyed by as many people as possible. He loved Broadway. He loved theater. He loved telling a story.”

Running at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles through March 9 before a Broadway run at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre from March 25 to June 1, Old Friends started as a collaboration between producer Mackintosh and Sondheim himself. They had previously worked together on two other revues, Side by Side by Sondheim in 1976 and Putting It Together in 1992. After Sondheim’s death in 2021, Old Friends—the title can be taken literally, referring to the friendships between Sondheim and Mackintosh, Sondheim and Peters, and others involved in the show—was produced as a one-night tribute gala in London in 2022 before a West End run in 2023.

One thing that sets this production apart from the previous revues is its size. It has a company of 18 as opposed to casts of four and five. “With a bigger cast, we could show up his group numbers like ‘Sunday,’ ‘A Weekend in the Country,’ and ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,’ which of course you can’t really do with the small casts that were in the previous two Sondheim revues,” says actor Gavin Lee, who was also in the West End cast.

Though Peters’s and Salonga’s names are above the title, Old Friends is very much an ensemble piece. “We’re all tag-teaming,” says Lee. “It’s a smorgasbord of Sondheim. You’re getting a bit of everything and everyone in the cast gets to shine. There’s never been any hierarchy. Everyone is there as a big ensemble.”

This is especially evident in group numbers like “Being Alive,” sung in Company by Bobby about accepting the need for someone else. “In our show, we try and make it more celebratory and it’s this beautiful new arrangement,” says Bourne. “I talked to everyone about singing in it as if they were singing it on their own. It’s the whole company, but it’s their personal approach to the number. So, all the gestures they do in it are in the moment, and the whole show becomes a little bit more personal.”

The songs are organized thematically, but without narration or a throughline connecting them, each song must tell its own story and be able to work for both aficionados and people who don’t know the original context. “The beauty of Sondheim is that he doesn’t write two-dimensional characters, and a lot of his songs stand on their own,” says Joanna Riding, another cast member who has come over with the show from London and has a history of performing in Sondheim shows. “They’re so rich, you can mine them and mine them and mine them and still be finding stuff.”

In some cases, the songs are performed as they would be in a production, such as Jeremy Secomb and Salonga singing “A Little Priest” in costume as Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. Other songs take on new meaning. For example, “Could I Leave You?” is performed in Follies by a woman struggling in her marriage to a man. As sung in Old Friends by Lee, it becomes about a gay couple. “It used to annoy me that all the shows were about straight couples and marriage and I thought that’s not representing who he is, but he was a man of his era,” says Bourne. “Most of that West Side Story creative team were struggling with sexuality throughout their lives. And I’m so happy that he could be content with [his sexuality] later on in his life.”

“Everyone Ought to Have a Maid,” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, is also done differently, in this case to make it less sexist for modern audiences. “The song is a brilliant, funny, witty song, but it is basically all these privileged men saying everyone ought to have a maid because if you’re sick of your wife, you can have a little bit of slap and tickle with your maid,” says Lee, who performs the song with Jason Pennycooke and Kyle Selig. “We are enjoying being the maids and hopefully that’s clever and not insulting.”

The women in Old Friends have plenty of crowd-pleasing moments, with songs like “Send in the Clowns,” “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” and “Broadway Baby.” “You truly get the full measure of how well he wrote for women, particularly, and especially the slightly older woman,” says Riding. “The characters are so contradictory and flawed and damaged. Nobody writes better about the human condition than Sondheim.”

Other shows represented include Merrily We Roll Along, West Side Story, and even the lesser-known Bounce (which later became Road Show). Lee says, “It’s every Sondheim fan’s dream that you get to sing every song you’ve listened to a thousand times.”