Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends
Opening Night: April 8, 2025
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Website: www.manhattantheatreclub.com
Celebrate the life and work of the great Stephen Sondheim, with an irresistible company headlined by none other than Tony Award® winners Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends comes to Broadway from London’s West End, where it earned a bevy of 5-star raves and was hailed by The Times as “unmissable musical theatre.” Joining Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga will be co-stars Jacob Dickey, Kevin Earley, Jasmine Forsberg, Kate Jennings Grant, Bonnie Langford, Beth Leavel, Gavin Lee, Jason Pennycooke, Joanna Riding, Jeremy Secomb, Kyle Selig, Maria Wirries, Daniel Yearwood, Paige Faure, Alexa Lopez, Greg Mills and Peter Neureuther.
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April 8, 2025
These gems had been waiting in the 12 tones of the Western scale and the million words of the English language, unobserved, until [Sondheim] 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.
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April 9, 2025
“Old Friends” boasts a larger cast than previous Sondheim revues, filled with a mélange of theater stalwarts and newcomers, each finding pockets of comedy, passion and showmanship while marching through the songs.
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April 8, 2025
Bernadette Peters – of course! – and Lea Salonga lead a cast of talented singers and hoofers, who make the most of this opportunity to shine.
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April 8, 2025
This is no musical shiva for close friends and family. More than a tribute, it’s a feast — and one of the most heartfelt and joyous shows of the season.
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April 8, 2025
Once you accept the show’s limited ambitions, as I gradually did over the course of this pleasant and jauntily staged musical revue, you can let yourself to have a good time. Sure, Steve himself would doubtless have rolled his eyes at the whole affair—but there’s no denying the production’s considerable nostalgic charm.
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April 8, 2025
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.
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April 8, 2025
It’s a rare and special experience to watch performers of the calibre of Peters and co-stars like Lea Salonga backed by a sensational 14-piece orchestra in an intimate room that seats just 600.
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April 8, 2025
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.
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April 8, 2025
Unlike what Salonga does with a song, other singers in “Old Friends” tend to overact every song. Beth Leavel sings “The Ladies Who Lunch” from what sounds like a cocktail shaker. The only thing that’s more overwrought than her vocals of this “Company” anthem is the dreadful costume (by Jill Parker) that has her wearing a gray fur jacket over a black sequined blouse with rhinestone cuffs. Joanne in “Company” is an East Side matron, she is not a drag queen.
READ THE REVIEWApril 8, 2025
While [Bernadette Peters’] voice has lost some of its rich timbre, her rendition of “Send in the Clowns” is so deeply infused with soul-searching that any vocal imperfections are quickly forgotten as Ms. Peters’s evocation of a love that might have been—could have, should have—burrows into your heart. Equally extraordinary is her performance of another exquisite song of ill-fated yearning, “Losing My Mind.”
READ THE REVIEWApril 8, 2025
Headliners Peters and Salonga are melodious and radiant, coasting on their innate stage presence. Yet I found myself more magnetized by the ensemble that surrounds them, as if (re)discovering stars. Sticking in my memory is Beth Leavel’s heartbreaking “The Ladies Who Lunch” from the musical Company, in which she loads the lyric “clutching a copy of Life” with miles of ache. “Not a Day Goes By” from Merrily We Roll Along stars a delightful group of divas (Peters, Salonga, Joanna Riding, Bonnie Langford, Kat Jennings Grant, Leavel). Another golden highlight is Leavel and Gavin Lee’s fiery chemistry in Company’s “The Little Things You Do Together.” Stephen Mear’s choreography takes care of the comedic timing throughout.
READ THE REVIEWApril 8, 2025
What’s on display is unmitigatedly glorious. In other words, Sondheim as nonpareil influencer may be repeatedly remembered with a breathless retrospective, but as the new extravaganza also demonstrates, his belief in the potential of the musical to break new ground will persist.
READ THE REVIEWApril 8, 2025
The cavalcade of winning numbers is more than infrequently interrupted by items which do not quite add to the evening’s enjoyment, serving to deplete the showmanship of the whole. Less would be more, methinks; in this case, more results in less.
READ THE REVIEWApril 8, 2025
I haven’t talked about showstopping performances. There are a few; Lea Salonga in “Everything is Coming Up Roses” is certainly one; she has a clear belt that can knock you into your seat, but il’s somehow delivered with an edge of sadness and panic that lets us know: This is the character Mama Rose.
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April 8, 2025
Unlike other Sondheim revues that made at least a passing attempt to shape Sondheim’s songs around a concept or narrative frame, “Old Friends” is a two-and-a-half-hour buffet of greatest hits, delivered without context, cohesion, or much reason for being.
READ THE REVIEWApril 8, 2025
There is Bernadette Peters, now 77, performing “Losing My Mind,” while proving that could not be further from the truth. There’s Bonnie Langford, a British familiar face for most of Sondheim’s career, zestfully declaring “I’m Still Here,” a fine thing. There’s Lea Salonga, a star since Mackintosh put her in “Miss Saigon” in 1989, exploring “Somewhere” from “West Side Story.” And Beth Leavel, who clearly has known plenty of ladies who lunch in her long career, taking their ilk down with relish.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 14, 2025
Old Friends isn’t merely a celebration of Sondheim’s life’s work, but also his life — the friendships he forged, including those with this show’s producer and cast members; the love and tenacity he always showed up with; the passion; the frustrations; the heartbreak; and above all, the vulnerability that allowed him to turn his innermost thoughts into musical genius.
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April 8, 2025
With music director Annbritt duChateau conducting an immaculate orchestra, Old Friends is a plushly wrapped gift for Sondheim’s dedicated fans, featuring around 40 songs from his shows. If context is everything, it is also completely absent here; Old Friends is slickly structured as a compendium of numbers for those who know and treasure them.
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