Welcome back, old friends

All the favourites are back, from Sondheim's songs to a newly inventive Gilbert and Sullivan, Pygmalion and Private Lives with two mature actors

- Michael Billington

IT says a lot about Stephen Sondheim that Old Friends at the Gielgud is the third anthology to be compiled from his musicals. Side by Side by Sondheim was the first and was produced by a young Cameron Mackintosh in 1976. Sir Cameron has devised the new show, which was first staged in May 2022 as a tribute to the composer-lyricist shortly after his death. It proved so popular that it demanded revival and now offers one of the most exhilarating pieces of musical theatre you could hope to find.

Why does it work so well? One reason is that Sondheim never repeats himself: he was, as his biographer David Benedict says in the programme, a radical working in a form routinely seen as reactionary. All his musicals, from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum to Pacific Overtures (which doesn’t actually feature in this new collection), are distinctive in subject matter, style and idiom. His songs often have the quality of a oneact play. The Little Things You Do Together from Company, for instance, wittily encapsulates the qualities, including ‘The concerts you enjoy together/Neighbours you annoy together/Children you destroy together’, that keep marriage intact.

Always praised as a lyricist, Sondheim was also a remarkable composer, which this show underlines: for days afterwards, I found many of his songs had seared themselves into my memory. Individual performances also kept coming back to mind. Bernadette Peters, a long-time Sondheim associate, and Lea Salonga get star-billing: the former offers her own dryly wistful version of Send In The Clowns