Yet another Stephen Sondheim revue is playing on Broadway. This one is called “Old Friends,” and it opened Tuesday at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre after engagements in London and Los Angeles. This is the sixth Sondheim revue to open on Broadway. In recent decades, legendary composers from George Gershwin to Richard Rodgers have not received this kind of attention.
Hands down, the three best moments in “Old Friends” come when five wonderful singers (Jacob Dickey, Jasmine Forsberg, Kyle Selig, Maria Wirries and Daniel Yearwood) deliver a memorable “Tonight Quintet” from “West Side Story.” The two other great moments belong to Lea Salonga, who brings down the house twice, first with “Somewhere” from “West Side Story” and then “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from “Gypsy.” Salonga presents a great Rose, and what adds to the excitement is how different Rose is from the roles that made Salonga a star: Kim in “Miss Saigon,” Fantine in “Les Miz” and the singing voice of Jasmine in the film “Aladdin.” If there were any justice, Cameron Mackintosh, who “devised” this Sondheim revue, would have instructed Matthew Bourne, who directs, to include “Rose’s Turn” for Salonga to finish off the evening.
Tellingly, the best moments in “Old Friends” are for songs that Sondheim wrote the lyrics but not the music. Those composers are Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne, and along with their contemporaries Richard Rodgers, Frederick Loewe and Frank Loesser, they came out of a German operetta and Italian verismo opera tradition where songs were set pieces that functioned within a plotline but could also be extracted in performance with great success. Opera galas are fueled by these kinds of vocal showpieces.
Sondheim took a more integrated approach to songwriting for the musical theater, and a lot of his best known numbers are a kind of elevated recitative. Sondheim famously didn’t like Verdi, in part, because there’s a lot of om-pah-pah in the great opera composer’s early works. Then again, what great composer ever relied on soft-shoe (the 20th century equivalent of om-pah-pah) as much as Sondheim, who overworked it right up to “Road Show” and “Here We Are,” his final works? “Old Friends” is replete with soft-shoe, unfortunately.
Sondheim did write full-blown arias, and it’s unfortunate that one of his best, the duet “Too Many Mornings” from “Follies,” is not included in this revue.
Others are, and this revue does not do them justice. 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.
In a grotesque bit of role reversal, Gavin Lee presents a mincing rendition of “Could I Leave You?” from “Follies.” Lee helps to present one of the evening’s other worse moments when he (and Dickey and Selig) turn “Everybody Ought to Have Maid” from “A Funny Thing” into a gay embarrassment.
Other numbers are also bizarrely cast for other reasons. When Bonnie Langford, Kate Jennings Grant and Joanna Riding sing “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” I wondered if Bourne had reunited the understudies from the original touring production of “Company.”
When Bernadette Peters joins with Leavel and Riding to play strippers, I half-expected a Medicare card to be one of the gimmicks in, of course, “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from “Gypsy.”
I last saw Peters on stage in the 2011 Broadway revival of “Follies.” She no longer had the vocal chops to deliver “Losing My Mind,” so she cried and sobbed her way through it. (Victoria Clark replaced her when the production played L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre, and it remains the best “Follies” I’ve ever seen.) To sing “Send in the Clowns” in this revue, Peters cried and sobbed her way through it. Later, she cried and sobbed her way through, yes, “Losing My Mind.”
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