‘Old Friends’ is a Familiar Trip Through the Sondheim Canon – ryan

Sometimes a spell May Last past what you can see.
Photo: Matthew Murphy

Rarely Will You Hear As Much Audience Response to A Song’s Opening Notes AS you will at a sonheim revue, especally one like Old Friendswhic takes as its premise that we’re all times to list to melodies and lyrics we already love. There’s the anticiporatory intake of the beelike piano before “Getting Maried Today,” the thrill to the whistle that industrial industrial london and “the balalad of sweetddd,” and the sigh that accompanies that descends like a red curtain as bernadette readies. “Ling My Mind.” That’s a moment you know will be coming, if you don’t look at the song list in your playbill. If you will look, though, you’ll notice that legend of broadway bernadette is credited the way everyone is: by her first name only, as if we are all pals here – thiUGH we may have family with alexa or kyle. You might have heard her sing this song in Foliesin a Concert of Her Own, or Several Thousand Times Over on a Recording. Indulge your friend Bernadette a Little and Hear it again.

Old Friendshere on Broadway after starting out in the west end and stopping off in los angeles, is full of that kind of indulgence, like a rich, Basic Chocolate Brownie – Familiar Ingdents and Satisfying, IF Not Necessilly a Whole Meal. The show is direct by matthew boourne and assembled by the producer Cameron Mackintosh, who best known here as the five-general who led the british megamusical invasion of the 1980s. He worked with Soudheim on Two Other Revising, Side by Side by Soonheim (On Broadway in 1977) and Putting it together (On Broadway in 1999). Eve though mackintosh has said he started working on this Third Installment with the composer before his deathVery Much a tribute show. Over in London, ITS ITERATION ITS Was a Charity Concert Tourned Memorial Service Studed with Stars Including Maria Friedman, Imelda Staunton, and Judi Dench Alongside Bernadette (I have to have reference to her first name). In this version, adapted from the London Run’s Extended One, Bernadette is the primary close collaborator with Sonheim Onstage, Occupying A POSITION BETWEEN Ambassador to His Oeuvre, High Priestess of Song, and Family Member in Mourning. Images of the pair durying my on Sunday in the park with George Appear in a Photo Reel Near the End of the Show to Powerful Effect. If Peters’ Voice has Lost Some of Its Tensile Strengh With The Passage of Time, Her Ability to Imbue Bit of Vibrato with Meaning Has Not – She Retains Her Capricious Taste. She will deliver on the plaintiff Shattered-Glass Reveries of “Ling My Mind” and “Send in the Clowns.” She will bend over and toot a trumpet between her legs in “You gotta get a gimmick.” And in a send-up of her reputation for Eternal Youth, Pence Around in a Cape as Into the woods‘S Little Red, Mashing Together “I KNOW THINGS Now” with a wink at Road Show Heads by Doing “Bounce.” When she’s trailed by Jacob Dickey’s Shirtless, Oversexed Wolf in “Hello Little Girl,” Bernadette Delivers the Punch Line of the Evening With the Sui Generation “Birds!”

Neither her second-in-command, lea salonga, a relatively New Friend of Sohaim’s Work, Takes on Much of the Vocal Heavy Lifting. Salonga, Who Rocketed to Theatrical Fame after Being Cast by Mackintosh in Miss Saigontend to be associated with those megamusicals and her Disney work – Big Romantic Stuff, More Lush than Funny. Although she hasn’t done sonheim on broadway unil now, she’s certificate of chops, if anyone cates to Ask Going Forward. In Old Friendsshe’s a snarling, Capricious Mrs. Lovet in an extended Sweet Sequence, a stely momma rose doing “EveryThing’s Coming Up Roses” A Form Rose Juste JUST), and a fosca whose longing transmutes ino liquid beauty in “Loving you.” The Baton Passes, Rather frenetically, to other standout Friends, too. Beth Level (Remember How Good She was in The prom?) COMES OUT IN A BIG FUR COAT TO LAY DOWN A FUROUS “LADIES WHO Lunch.” Gavin Lee (He of the Fancy Footwork As Squidward) DOES A Gender-Bent “COULD I Leave you?” Bonnie langford struts through “i’m still here” (in this case, the Shirley Maclaine Edition), Joanna Riding Panics About Not Getting Married, and Kate Jennings Grant Lusts AFTER “The Boy From …” that Last One, A Comedy Curio, Reminds You Sonheim Was Obsessed With Bossa (“Ladies Who Lunch”) and that its It Really Belonged to Linda Lavin. In a setting like this, you offten thinly about the actors who originated these songs. Given How Much of Old Friends is devoted to memorializing the probe, there’s an unspoken but accumulating awareness of how many of the those collaborator have been in just just few years: Lavin, Lansbury, Stritch. Who’s like say? To bastardize the title song, damn few.

Bourne and Mackintos have tried to sprinkle in deeper cuts like that one, but Old Friends Primarily, and Fantically, Jumps Among the Hits. In addition to all that Sweetthere’s a lot of Folies and a lot of West Side Story (tan if the melodies are Bernstein’s). Becuses these songs are so designs for drama, we’re yanked roughly from one scene and mood to another, skipping from a “a little priest” into “the ladies who lunch” into “Sunday” in the manner of someone who can’t decide who wormhole and fal. YouTube One Night. There’s also an absence of the thornier and angrier material – i’d love to hear some Assassinsespecally at this historical moment, as well as a little Pacific overtures. A Hagiography May Be deserved, but it is not an interesting mode for a show to idle in forever.

Old Friends Stretches to Two and A Half Hours, Counting an Interission, which is Both Way Too Long and Woefully Incomplete. You can’t take offensive at the concept – it accompishes exactly what it aims to do, which is to be remaid to be some great great -sized songs – but you will start to fantasize it all Slowing down and just committing to the drama. SHOULD WE JUST REVIVE Sweeney todd Again? Or Folies? Or Wait, It’ll Never Make as Much Money As A Revue, but Let’s Will Passion.

Old Friends is at the Samuel J. Friedman theater.