Old Friends

A Sondheim acolyte is as committed as the most devoted Wagnerian.

In the Stalls on Wednesday afternoon for a matinee of Old Friends I mentioned to Charlotte the production of Company with Patti LuPone I saw in December 2018. All the female roles were played by men and vice versa. I saw a LAMDA production of The Taming of the Shrew in 2017 where this device worked but in a musical, numbers written for females shouldn’t be sung by males and vice versa. An American woman in the seat in front begged to differ. She turned round to tell me it had been so good she saw it twice. She turned round again when I said Janie Dee was the stand-out female singer in the cast. I had seen her in an unforgettable Covid production of A Little Night Music at Opera Holland Park in 2020 and again the following year at a PG Wodehouse dinner, where we had a chat and discovered mutual friends. My new friend with the crick in her neck pointed out the star of the show is Bernadette Peters, an actress not familiar to me.

Bernadette Peters is “regarded by many as the foremost interpreter of the works of Stephen Sondheim” (Wikipedia). She has been on the stage since she was nine and does have terrific stage presence. (See her in her prime in the music link below.) Her name was unfamiliar, to me at least, because she is making her West End debut in Old Friends. She has taken her time – she is seventy-five. I now realise it was heresy to put Janie Dee ahead of her. “Sondheim has said of Peters, “Like very few others, she sings and acts at the same time,” he says. “Most performers act and then sing, act and then sing … Bernadette is flawless as far as I’m concerned. I can’t think of anything negative.” “ (Wikipedia, again)

During COVID, Cameron Macintosh in Somerset (UK) and Stephen Sondheim in Connecticut (US) conceived Old Friends; it is a revue (the third) of the greatest numbers in Sondheim’s greatest shows. Thirty-nine numbers performed dazzlingly by a glittering cast that are most unlikely ever to perform together again. Unsurprisingly the Sondheim faithful are out in force and the whole run is sold out. It is a more than considerable understatement to say it’s good (with apologies to Damon Runyon). Bernadette sang Send in The Clowns, Janie clutched a Dry Martini for The Ladies Who Lunch and at the end threw the contents over the front row. Almost every number was a show stopper and the men got their chance with Everybody Ought To Have a Maid and Agony, a duet from Into The Woods.

Madonna’s first ever greatest hits tour opens in London tomorrow. It’s Madonna so she is at the O2 arena, capacity 20,000. I will not be among them although I did once go to a skating party with her daughter. Sorry, an irresistible digression. I am only a postulant at the temple of Sondheim, where Stephen Sondheim’s light blazes with Wagnerian intensity not least in Old Friends and will burn long after Madonna is forgotten.