“Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Reviewing a show six weeks after it’s opened feels a little extraneous. But in this case, so does Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, a new revue honoring(?) the late master of musical theatre that began as a star-studded concert in London, then moved to the West End, then did an out-of-town in Los Angeles, and now comes to Broadway in Sondheim’s hometown. 

Along that path, it built a lot of anticipation, mostly due to casting the legendary Bernadette Peters at its center – and she doesn’t disappoint. As Sondheim’s only actual friend in the cast, the show comes alive when Peters is singing his music. A slideshow of Sondheim’s life appears towards the end and it’s incredibly moving when the 77-year-old icon looks up at a photo of her 36-year-old self embracing the composer. Even if she’s seen it repeatedly for the three years she’s been doing this concert, it’s clear it still hits her hard.

But nobody else in the cast appears in the slideshow. The only other face related to the production is none other than megaproducer Cameron Mackintosh, who appears several times. Peters and co-headliner Lea Salonga even give Mackintosh a shoutout from the stage at the beginning of the show, saying that this revue will focus mainly on the shows Mackintosh debuted in the West End. Coupled with a cast of mostly British talent unrecognizable to American audiences, the transplanted production feels alien when it should feel like it’s come home.

It’s the British musical comedy sensibility of the staging and performances that is most jarring. In New York, Sondheim is revered as a dramatist. His musicals aren’t glitzy, sequined affairs, they’re real pieces of theatre. But Old Friends takes another tack. There is so much mugging, so much googly-eyed emphasis, and so many jazz squares punctuating every beat. The cover of the Playbill has a subtitle that reads: “A Great Big Broadway Show,” quoting a lyric from “Broadway Baby,” but that’s not the kind of musical Sondheim wrote. The whole evening feels so misaligned from what Sondheim loved about musicals and the depth of his dramatic intentions that are suffused in every song.

It’s made shockingly apparent early on when Beth Leavel and Gavin Lee sit down to sing “The Little Things You Do Together” as a duet. Director Matthew Bourne has somehow decided to stage this song as a bickering couple escalating their tensions until deciding to divorce. In the context of Company, it’s the opposite. Joanne sings this song demonstrating how married couples find ways to stay together, to combine their “little kinks” to keep the relationship strong. Even the joke about “getting a divorce together” is later clarified in the show when a couple gets divorced, but stays together because they love each other. It’s a clear misreading of the lyric and a complete misunderstanding of Sondheim’s point.

And that’s just one instance. It happens so frequently over the course of two and a half hours that it’s kind of mind-boggling. Salonga sings Fosca’s paen to obsessive love like she’s writing a Valentine’s Day card. A trio of men sing “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” and somehow make it homophobic? Jason Pennycooke plays the conflicting lyrics in “Buddy’s Blues” as entirely negative when Buddy is literally describing the push and pull he feels within each of his relationships. The company sings “Being Alive” to…its dead composer? The examples go on and on.

In a revue, where there’s nothing to hang the show on but music, and, especially, in this kind of posthumous tribute concert, there should be more attention paid to what the songs are saying. Instead, the whole team – Peters excluded – is content to five-six-seven-eight their way through it. Leaning on comedy instead of drama is fine for other composers, but even when Sondheim is funny, there’s still something going on under the surface. It is worth it, though, for Peters’ remarkable renditions of “Send in the Clowns” and “Losing My Mind”, both songs she’s sung on Broadway before, but here they’re given such moment-specific intention it highlights what the rest of the night is missing.