https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stephen-sondheim-s-old-friends-review-this-is-unmissable-musical-theatre-rfkbcxdwd
The Times
5 stars out of 5
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends review — this is unmissable musical theatre
Gielgud, W1
Clive Davis
The Times
Theatre
★★★★★
Lightning does indeed strike twice. It’s nearly a year and a half since Cameron Mackintosh presented a VIP-studded, one-night-only tribute to the late Stephen Sondheim at the theatre bearing the composer’s name. Now the show has taken up residence a few doors away on Shaftesbury Avenue with a slightly thinner list of heavyweight names — no Judi Dench, no Damian Lewis, no Imelda Staunton — but no lack of emotional intensity.
The Broadway star Bernadette Peters, who appeared last year, returns to the line-up and, among other things, takes the opportunity to sing Send in the Clowns, the number for ever associated with Dench. Peters is 75 now, though she looks decades younger, and her voice has undeniably lost some of its gloss, yet she brought a haunting air of wistfulness to the song that even Sondheim sceptics have learnt to love. Later she injected the same conversational intimacy into Losing My Mind and went full vaudeville on that blowsy stripper anthem You Gotta Get a Gimmick.
Another evergreen from Gypsy, Everything’s Coming Up Roses, proved ideal material for Peters’s co-star Lea Salonga, veteran of Miss Saigon and Les Miserables. And who would have thought that, a full half-century after Bonnie Langford played Baby June in Gypsy’s love letter to burlesque, she would be snarling her way through that defiant Follies anthem I’m Still Here? She twinkled merrily too as the maid in A Weekend in the Country. Clare Burt’s reading of The Ladies Who Lunch, meanwhile, had the sting of a potent martini.
For this run, the peerless Julia McKenzie gets a co-directing credit alongside Matthew Bourne. Stephen Mear’s choreography is tastefully understated. Extracts from Sweeney Todd and the twisted fairytales of Into the Woods are given a full theatrical flourish, and Bradley Jaden takes the costume honours as a bare-chested, tail-swinging Wolf setting his sights on Peters’s Little Red Riding Hood.
Alfonso Casado Trigo is back on the podium to conduct an immaculate 14-piece orchestra. The video in which Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sondheim poke gentle fun at Mackintosh has been pared back this time but still makes a genial interlude.
Sondheim may have acquired the reputation of being the high priest of well-heeled Manhattan angst, but this show offers a reminder of what fun company he can be too. The irreplaceable Janie Dee reprised the pert bossa nova parody The Boy From . . . , Joanna Riding was memorably flustered on Getting Married Today, and the sight of Damian Humbley, Gavin Lee and Jason Pennycooke upstaging each other with feather dusters on Everybody Ought to Have a Maid was an absolute joy. If you care about musical theatre, you cannot miss this show.