SONDHEIM'S OLD FRIENDS: A Celebration

[scenicdesign71]

I should have started a thread for this show two years ago, but when someone posted this on Facebook recently I figured better late than never:

Old Friends finished its limited West End run one month ago, but a recording of the original May 2022 tribute concert was released this past December.  A year earlier, on New Year's Eve 2022/3, a video capture of the concert had been broadcast on BBC2.

Hopefully that capture will make it across the pond eventually as a cinecast, streaming or PBS offering.  (For some reason a Broadway transfer, at B'way prices, actually interests me less).

[scenicdesign71]

Coming to the 650-seat Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club, next March after a run at Center Theatre Group's much larger Ahmanson Theatre in L.A.

NYT:  Eureka Day and Sondheim Revue Join Broadway's Next Season

Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga will remain from the London cast; no other casting has been announced yet.

[scenicdesign71]

I had just watched this version, by comparison with which Ms. Gwynne's rendition looks even better, though the latter would probably have impressed me anyway.  I'm guessing Beth Leavel might perform this song when Sondheim's Old Friends arrives on Broadway next month?

And while "Ladies Who Lunch"s are on my mind (and in my YouTube feed), our own Divine Mrs. M gives a sterling account, upbeat (for the occasion, presumably?) until it's not, and brilliantly effective.  I'd have assumed this song was pretty well locked into its original tone of desublimated rage, but Donna's easygoing compassion is sneakily persuasive — again, all the more so in its context, but I dearly wish I'd also seen her perform the song in Company, for comparison (and because I'm sure she was spectacular).  "Approachable" isn't a quality I'd necessarily have thought to associate with Joanne, but it's a fascinating idea: what if her bitchiness is customarily leavened by such a warm twinkle that all she really has to do, to freeze our blood during this song, is to stop smiling?

Plenty of performers have dropped their smile for the final verse, perhaps instinctually — Gwynne, above, provides a deft example.  But often, their smiles until then have been so steely, practiced or brittle that their eventual fading (from exhaustion, it can seem) is hardly a surprise.  In less-expert hands, it can even feel clumsily overdetermined: "I've been singing about myself in the third person this whole time, but just in case anyone hadn't figured that out by now, I'm gonna drop even the pretense of being funny and get right down to the nub of my own self-hatred — check out my haunted gaze into the middle-distance, see what I'm doing here?"  Donna, by comparison, manages to downplay the acid so convincingly that, when her easy smile does finally evaporate, the tonal shift is subtle yet seismic — and, crucially, it feels spontaneous.

[DiveMilw]

Until this time watching Donna, I never thought Joanne might be drunk as she sings this.  I'm not sure why it never occurred to me.  It explains some of the mood swings and the repetition of "Rise" at the end of the song.  Maybe I've never seen played drunk.  Usually, Joanne is very reserved and although she drinks throughout the show she usually is shown to be a master at holding her liquor and keeping herself under control.  So much to ponder....

[scenicdesign71]

Even more than the "rise"s (but there, too, for sure), I've always assumed the "IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'll drink to that" was attributable more to drunkenness than to any other single factor — or, perhaps more accurately: I assumed that was the point at which, if it hasn't already, Joanne's inebriation becomes as impossible to ignore as her bile.  (Donna's rendition, in remaining so apparently free of the latter for so long, recalibrates this in an intriguing way).

I've seen more- and less-drunk renditions, but from Stritch onward I've always seen alcohol as a significant ingredient in the song.  Even in the most "high-functioning" interpretation, something about the scotch-and-stingers references suggests someone whose drinking is not just notional and maybe not quite as controlled as she wants us to think — someone who's more-or-less-visibly under the influence as she's making those references, and knows her audience is aware of it, but thinks she's staying a step ahead of us by naming it as just another aspect of her self-contempt.  While I'm not partial to renditions where she seems really sloppy hammered, I do think it makes sense to let her intoxication play some perceptible role in this glimpse into Joanne's psyche; if you go back and re-watch Stritch, say, or LuPone, with that idea in mind, you'll see it.

I think her blood-alcohol level may be a factor in Joanne's propositioning Bobby/Bobbie.  And her drinking may also have something to do with Larry's claim that she's like an entirely different person when they're alone together.  I myself am a strictly-social drinker who's notably un-social in general, which is to say that I drink very rarely, a tiny handful of times a year at most, and then rarely to the point of getting drunk, let alone sloppy.  I wonder if perhaps Joanne (unlike, say, Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, who one feels probably drinks a lot even when there aren't guests over) drinks, like me, mostly on social occasions — but, unlike me, has a life in which such occasions figure all too frequently for such "social drunkenness" to not pose a potential problem sooner or later.

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