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Fast approaching the number of musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote is the number of revues written about him. The first, to my knowledge, was a 1973 fund-raiser held on the set of the original production of \u201cA Little Night Music.\u201d<\/a> It featured so many stars, speeches and songs that even truncated, even then, its recording filled two LPs.<\/p>\n I snapped that album up and wore it out. The cover alone<\/a> was fascinating, with the titles of nine of his shows spelled out in intersecting Scrabble tiles. (Something like nine more shows were to come before his death in 2021 \u2014 and one after<\/a>.) Threaded through those tiles like a secret theme was Sondheim\u2019s name itself.<\/p>\n I was younger then, a teenager, but that secret theme became part of my life\u2019s music.<\/p>\n How then to hear a new Sondheim revue with fresh ears and fresh heart? As the latest, \u201cOld Friends,\u201d says right in its name, we are already well acquainted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Whether onstage, online, in cabarets or, like \u201cOld Friends,\u201d on Broadway, all such compendiums play their own game of Sondheim Scrabble. Though there are many hundreds of songs in the catalog, compilers must pick from the same limited subset of favorites, arranging them in various concatenations and outcroppings. Occasionally a 10-point rarity turns up, but most of the choices are deeply familiar to those who have followed the man\u2019s work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cOld Friends,\u201d which opened on Tuesday at Manhattan Theater Club\u2019s Samuel J. Friedman Theater<\/a>, is in that sense a lot like its predecessors. The 41 numbers it features come from the main pool, with an emphasis on songs from \u201cSweeney Todd,\u201d \u201cMerrily We Roll Along,\u201d \u201cCompany,\u201d \u201cFollies\u201d and \u201cInto the Woods.\u201d Most of them were brilliant in their original context; many remain so outside it. Some are sung spectacularly by a bigger-than-usual cast of 17, led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga<\/a>. Others are middling, a few are misfires.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t mean to make light of the greatest-hits format. Even the 10,000th rendition of \u201cSend in the Clowns\u201d (sung devastatingly by Peters) or the 1,000th of \u201cThe Ladies Who Lunch\u201d (sung ferociously by Beth Leavel) can be transporting. And if you think that Salonga\u2019s \u201cEverything\u2019s Coming Up Roses\u201d would be redundant in a season that also features Audra McDonald singing it three blocks away in \u201cGypsy,\u201d<\/a> you\u2019d be wrong. Bringing her own version of frustrated ambition to it, Salonga makes it new.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Well, newish. Even when vocally and emotionally specific, the performances here are often physically generic. Revues, free to reimagine the spatial circumstances of a song, too often resort to the same blank slate of a black stage and a bright spotlight. Though directed by the British choreographer Matthew Bourne \u2014 the show began life as a one-night gala in London \u2014 \u201cOld Friends\u201d has a stodgy quality that I find surprising. A couple of boxy towers, sometimes representing tenements (for \u201cWest Side Story\u201d selections) and sometimes castles (for \u201cInto the Woods\u201d) dominate Matt Kinley\u2019s set design, moving back and forth as if in a very slow chess endgame.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The movement of the performers is often similar, except when it\u2019s hectic. Another clich\u00e9 of the form is the exaggerated bonhomie that is meant to disguise the fact that the performers are not characters with relationships to play. They must apparently pretend to be shocked and delighted by everything their castmates are doing nearby, miming hearty laughter over the slightest high jink. Likewise, so many lyrics are encrusted with needless gesture that they come to resemble illustrated versions of Bible stories for children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That might be fine in a Jerry Herman revue \u2014 not to belittle him, but it\u2019s a different style. Sondheim\u2019s work is more complex, its pastiche of popular musical genres providing cover for its deeply psychological content. Up-tempo numbers like \u201cYou Could Drive a Person Crazy\u201d and \u201cGetting Married Today\u201d (both from \u201cCompany\u201d) are thus at a disadvantage when stripped of their anger. They can be sung with great proficiency, as they are here, but without real urgency they aren\u2019t funny.<\/p>\n Still, two comedy numbers, both outliers, are terrific: \u201cLive Alone and Like It\u201d from the movie \u201cDick Tracy,\u201d crooned jauntily by Jason Pennycooke, and \u201cThe Boy From \u2026\u201d by Sondheim and Mary Rodgers, given a new, nutty take by Kate Jennings Grant.<\/p>\n But in general, \u201cOld Friends\u201d does much better with the explicitly darker numbers, whether offered as uprooted solos like Peters\u2019s, small scenes (the \u201cAgony\u201d duet from \u201cInto the Woods\u201d) or generous sequences (a suite of five songs from \u201cSweeney\u201d). The anthemic \u201cSunday\u201d \u2014 the first act finale of \u201cSunday in the Park With George\u201d \u2014 may be more modestly staged than in full productions, but borrowed as the first act finale here too, it gives the same goose bumps. Helping tremendously are the 14-person orchestra playing arrangements (by Stephen Metcalfe) that, magically goosed by Mick Potter\u2019s sound design, are richer than we have any right to expect.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Which brings us naturally to the show\u2019s producer, Cameron Mackintosh. One of the theater\u2019s few billionaires, he has lavished a lot on what could easily have been a small show with four stools. Peters and Salonga are part of that, of course; you can\u2019t put them in rags. The costume designer Jill Parker\u2019s spangle budget alone would have broken the bank of a typical Manhattan Theater Club presentation.<\/p>\n It is perhaps more salient that Mackintosh and Sondheim were, as the title says, old friends. This seems to have given Mackintosh, who also \u201cdevised\u201d the revue, permission to indulge in a little self-puffery. In an introduction, Peters explains that its songs have mostly been drawn from shows \u201cour producer Cameron Mackintosh put together with Steve.\u201d Not a small amount of the video imagery (projection design by George Reeve) underlines the connection, including a clip of Sondheim (and Andrew Lloyd Webber) singing Mackintosh\u2019s praises<\/a>.<\/p>\n Icky perhaps, but that\u2019s what everyone does. I\u2019m doing it now: standing in front of the portrait of a hero. I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n But also grateful, because I want to tell you that there was a man who found the exact combination of five notes to describe the opportunities of a blank canvas and the specific thumping bass line to signal the unleashing of homicidal glee.<\/p>\n A man who discovered that \u201cbump it\u201d rhymes with \u201ctrumpet,\u201d that \u201cstocks\u201d rhymes with \u201cBraques\u201d and \u201cdollars\u201d with \u201cMahler\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n These gems had been waiting in the 12 tones of the Western scale and the million words of the English language, unobserved, until he came along with his flashlight and pickax. Any opportunity to experience how the feelings he channeled and the connections he made have mined our psyches and reshaped our world is an opportunity even old friends should take.<\/p>\n Old Friends<\/strong>
Through June 15 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; sondheimoldfriends.com<\/a>. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n