This was my Tuesday evening entertainment this week and of course I was going to write about it, given that I bought the tickets the day that they went on sale and have been looking forward to it for months.
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is the West End run of the tribute show that Cameron Mackintosh put on with some of the best known and most loved songs from his long producing relationship with the late musical genius. It’s on a limited run in the West End with headline stars Bernadette Peters (her first ever West End show!!) and Lea Salonga (Princess Jasmine herself) along with support from West End powerhouses like Janie Dee and Joanna Riding.
And I was in musical theatre heaven – I’ve seen Company, Gypsy, Sunday in the Park with George, Follies (three times!), Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along so there were a lot of songs that were familiar to me. I have the Sondheim 80th birthday prom on the Tivo and have watched it more times than I can count, and I’ve watched the various documentaries about his life that have popped up in the last few years. So it was wonderful to get what is essentially a greatest hits concert – and to try and guess who was going to sing what – the programme has a song list but not who is doing which bits. And there are plenty of options for each one – as more than one of the cast have played each role. I was mostly right, but there are a few gender-swapped suprises. And it definitely brought home for me how wonderfully Sondheim wrote songs for older women. It’s not just Send in the Clowns, it’s Losing My Mind, and Everything’s Coming Up Roses, I’m Still Here, The Boy from and Ladies Who Lunch AND MORE. Just wonderful. I’ve been humming the songs for days.
How it will work for you if you don’t know your Sondheim, I’m not sure, so I had a bit of a hunt around to find the trailer for it with the most singing in it (see above!) but I think there are enough songs here that you would know – there’s West Side Story here too and A Little Night Music that you would probably enjoy it – and at least come away wanting to see the full version of some of the shows. I loved it so much I would go back again. And who knows, I might well go back and see it again.
It would be remiss of me to end this post without mentioning the amazingly talented Haydn Gwynne, who died this week and who should have been in this show. She had to withdraw days before previews started for “sudden personal reasons” – which sadly turned out to be a cancer diagnosis. And now, just weeks later she’s gone. I saw her in Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown and The Audience – and I know she would have been fabulous in this – because she was in the original tribute show last year. So leave you with part of her performance of Ladies Who Lunch from that show, which if you’re in the UK you can find on iPlayer to watch again – which we did on Friday night.
See you tomorrow everyone.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
So something similar happened to me way back in 2014
Spring 2014- “Some Enchanted Evening”, which is kind of similar but this time a collection of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs (some were snippets and some the whole song); my 2nd show ushering at