Revue de “Old Friends” by Stephen Sondheim: a Broadway festival with 41 songs

Quickly approaching the number of musicals that Stephen Sondheim has written is the number of journals written about him. The first, to my knowledge, was a fundraising from 1973 held on the set of the original production of “A Little Night Music”. He had so many stars, speeches and songs that even truncated, even his recording filled two LPs.

I broke this album and I took it. The cover alone was fascinating, the titles of nine of its programs stated in scrabble tiles which intersect. (Something like nine other shows was to come before his death in 2021 – and an after.) Filled through these tiles as a secret theme was the name of Sondheim himself.

I was younger at the time, a teenager, but this secret theme became part of the music of my life.

How then to hear a new Sondheim review with fresh ears and a fresh heart? As the last, “old friends”, says in his name, we are already well known.

Whether online, online, in cabarets or, like “Old Friends”, in Broadway, all these collection play their own game of Sondheim Scrabble. Although there are several hundred songs in the catalog, compilers must choose from the same limited subset of favorites, organizing them in various concatenations and outcrops. Sometimes a rarity of 10 points arises, but most of the choices are deeply familiar to those who followed man’s work.

“Old Friends”, who opened Tuesday at Samuel J. Friedman Theater of Manhattan Theater Club, is very similar to his predecessors. The 41 figures he presents come from the main swimming pool, emphasizing the songs of “Sweeney Todd”, “Merrily We Roll Long”, “Company”, “Follies” and “Into the Woods”. Most of them were brilliant in their original context; Many remain outside. Some are spectacularly sung by a larger than usual distribution of 17, directed by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Others are intermediate, some are failed.