It has been a week of celebration: looking back on the work of people who helped the theatre to look forward. Old friends. It is hard now to imagine the musical landscape without Stephen Sondheim. Without caustic urbanity and interwoven melancholy. Without music that makes your blood rather than your feet dance. Without rhythms that catch the roll of conversation and, so rarely heard so sharply before him, encircling scepticism and the double take. “Isn’t it nice to know a lot! And a little bit… not.”
Cameron Mackintosh discussed the idea of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends with the composer-writer during Covid. After Sondheim’s death two years ago, he devised this tribute, bringing on board Matthew Bourne, Julia McKenzie and Stephen Mear. It is all Sondheim: no story entwining the songs, no narrator. It is in many ways a trad thing: a medley. And it is terrific.
