Putting It Together, Again: Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Old Friends’ Bernadette Peters and Cameron Mackintosh on Joining Matthew Bourne for a New L.A./Broadway Revue

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Everything’s coming up you-know-what if you’re a Sondheim fan on either coast this season. “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” the third revue to be built around the great composer’s songbook — and the first such newly conceived production in more than 30 years — is headed to Broadway in March, with an ensemble cast led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga.

But before it heads east, a four-week preview run in L.A. officially kicks off tonight at the Ahmanson, where director Matthew Bourne and producer Cameron Mackintosh are working on getting the large ensemble to really feel like the old pals of the title.

If the roses bloom, it should be a heaven of a sendoff for Sondheim, who died at age 91 in September 2021. He passed about a year after pitching the idea of a revue that would complete a trilogy started with “Side by Side by Sondheim” in the ‘70s and “Putting It Together” in the ‘90s, incorporating material from the entirety of what many consider modern musical theater’s most brilliant career.

L.A. is getting “Old Friends” before Broadway, but it’s not first. The show already recently completed an initial run on London’s West End with some, not all, of the same cast, and met with rave reviews. “I was so thrilled how much the audience loved it and by the end of the show were so moved,” says Peters, who has starred in six Sondheim productions prior to this. “You look out in the audience and it’s people from walks of life who all appreciate how Steve wrote about different aspects of the human condition — the passion of it, the yearning of it, the dramatic part of it, the funny part of it. … He wrote with such depth that each song is like a little story that holds up.