What's to discuss, old friends? Here's to us!

There are few words I can use to express how superb Tuesday night's gala Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends - a Celebration truly was. Gobsmacking! Awesome! Stunning! - even these don't do it justice.

I mean - at what other occasion were we ever likely to see Dame Judi Dench, Julia McKenzie, Dame Siân Phillips, Petula Clark, Michael Ball, Damien Lewis, Imelda Staunton, Maria Friedman, Bernadette Peters, Jenna Russell, Rosalie Craig, Julian Ovenden, Janie Dee, Rob Brydon, Haydn Gwynne, Bonnie Langford, Daniel Evans, Michael Xavier, Charlie Stemp, Gary Wilmot, Clive Rowe, Anna-Jane Casey, Josefina Gabrielle, Jon Robyns, Helena Bonham-Carter and so many more top-class performers gathered on stage in the same show at the same time?!

Sondheim was adored by the theatrical community (understandably), and the love expressed by every performer, as his extensive back-catalogue was comprehensively explored, flowed from the stage. [Yes, I know we were actually only watching it on a screen, but that screen was so huge, the quality so immaculate, and in the glittering surroundings of the Art Deco Prince Edward Theatre, disbelief was well-and-truly suspended!]

Produced (and hosted) by Sir Cameron Mackintosh, with Maria Friedman directing alongside Matthew Bourne and choreographer Stephen Mear, we had a little bit of everything - and more - here. The evening opened with a heartfelt introduction from Sir Cameron, followed swiftly by the remarkable Daniel Evans with Sunday in the Park With George, before a "national treasure" took to the stage, to thunderous applause - arch-Sondheimite Julia McKenzie, making her first stage appearance in 24 years, aged 81, with the opening bars of Side By Side (joined in turn by Ashley Campbell, Rosalie Craig, Josefina Gabrielle, Amy Griffiths, Bradley Jaden and Jenna Russell). Rather than do it myself, I'll leave it to the amazingly comprehensive Theatremonkey to list the rest in his/her own estimable manner:

[carting Sir Cameron off the stage]

...[next was] Comedy Tonight with Clive Rowe, Gary Wilmot, the West End All Stars (the evening's hugely talented ensemble) and one Rob Brydon, who went on to admit that with Haydn Gwynne The Little Things You Do Together make marriage a joy. The real joy being Gwynne’s vocal and Brydon’s running joke about being too short for his stool.

Classic Sondheim ladies’ trio You Could Drive a Person Crazy had Anna-Jane Casey, Janie Dee and Josefina Gabrielle in a hilariously well-choreographed sequence and stunning outfits.

The mood changed a little as Clive Rowe gave a heart-wrenching Live Alone and Like It before Michael Ball segued into Loving You from Passion and produced perfect stillness.

Holly-Anne Hull channelled her inner “Vicar of Dibley” (incidentally, Dawn French was in the audience) to marry reluctant Anna-Jane Casey to Jon Robyns, Casey managing with ease the amazingly fast patter of Getting Married Today.

As the wedding guests pulled out lanterns, the West End All Stars took us Into The Woods, Julian Ovenden and Michael D. Xavier sharing their Agony over life and ladies, as Red Riding Hood lurked.

Throwing back her hood, the show stopped for the first time as the audience acknowledged Bernadette Peters, as she herself acknowledged I Know Things Now. Damian Lewis did too - Hello Little Girl made even more lascivious by his wolf ears and delightful tail.

Peters then pulled a diamond with Children Will Listen...

Out of the woods, time for A Weekend in the Country led off by maid Desmonda Cathabel ... She more than held her own as Janie Dee, Rob Houchen, Holly-Anne Hull, Julian Ovenden, Michael D. Xavier and the West End All Stars plotted a strategy to bring down their hostess with fun in the process.

Then a definitive moment. Dame Judi Dench. Send In The Clowns. Show stopped; standing ovation, which would have gone on longer had there not been so much more to get through. Nothing more to add.

Lightening or darkening the tone, depending on your taste for slick melodrama, good use was made of the Les Misérables slums, re-purposed as Fleet Street for a visit to Sweeney Todd. Michael Ball and a gaggle of West End All Stars townsfolk gave us the background The Ballad of Sweeney Todd before Maria Friedman told of Mrs Lovett’s catering woes in The Worst Pies in London (spit into her apron, dear, wise advice).

My Friends suggested how Mr Ball might take revenge, Pretty Women was Jeremy Secomb’s last duet before Maria Friedman suggested a cunning plan to recycle him and Mr Ball finally got it, and A Little Priest found the sweetest spot of humour as well as satire as only Sondheim can do.

Sticking firmly to the liquid, Haydn Gwynne came up from the stalls to celebrate The Ladies Who Lunch in style before Daniel Evans, Bernadette Peters and the West End All Stars brought a harmonious curtain down on the first half with a heartfelt Sunday.

Such was the atmosphere, it was only by taking the auditorium lights down to half that the audience were persuaded to re-take their seats instead of enthusing in the aisle and let the second half begin with the Entr’acte Overture from Merrily We Roll Along.

And roll in they did, the New York street gangs, to give us a quintet from West Side Story. Shan Ako, Christine Allado, Lous Gaunt, Rob Houchen and students from the Royal Academy Musical Theatre Company and Mountview – both schools should probably consult police immediately to deal with the issue before the rabble get out of hand.

Speaking of rabble, the hotly contested Broadway Baby went from the Hey, Mr Producer! routine of Gary Wilmot as frustrated audition pianist dealing with Julia McKenzie to a battle for supremacy between Rosalie Craig, Maria Friedman, Josefina Gabrielle, Amy Griffiths, Haydn Gwynne, Bonnie Langford, Bernadette Peters, Jenna Russell and Helena Bonham Carter - the last swooping in at the last minute to take it. Standing ovation as the final tableau, what else could we do?

With all those ladies around, Roman sexism arrived as Rob Brydon, Damien Lewis and Julian Ovenden agreed that Everybody Ought to Have a Maid - and Sian Phillips set them right.

Burlesque reminded us that You Gotta Get A Gimmick and Anna-Jane Casey, Bernadette Peters and Bonnie Langford had theirs – Langford’s eye-watering end to the song [the splits] drawing more gasps than even Casey’s electric dress or Peters' trumpet.

...from Follies, Waiting For The Girls Upstairs was given proper nostalgia by Ashley Campbell, Rob Houchen and Bradley Jaden, Charlie Stemp summing it up: "Weren’t we chuckle-heads then?"

The Girl arrived - Petula Clark with I’m Still Here. One of the very best versions of the song ... a true theatre survivor giving us autobiography and growing through adversity to end on a note of total victory, and another standing ovation until she left the stage.

Michael Ball then asked Could I Leave You? and had the audience stunned into silence with his final answer to us, guess... he certainly had us doing so.

One-man Vaudevillian Gary Wilmot gave us Buddy’s Blues complete with counterpoint from a dim but devoted lover, well, until the next man produced furs. Another show-stopper in an evening full of them.

Against a beach back-projection, The Boy From.... by Janie Dee demonstrated Sondheim’s flair for pastiche, even of popular music.

The tone turned black as Bernadette Peters revealed she was Losing My Mind. Another perfection, another standing ovation continued until the lady had entered the wings.

Just when the evening couldn’t yield any more wonders, Imelda Staunton appeared, with her career high Everything’s Coming Up Roses, and the audience came to its collective feet once more.

A reminder of the Andrew Lloyd-Webber / Stephen Sondheim duet from Hey, Mr Producer provided a video breathing space and a little fond chuckling.

Not A Day Goes By when we who love musical theatre don’t miss Stephen Sondheim. To a backdrop of changing projected photographs of his life and career, Julia McKenzie, Michael Ball, Rosalie Craig, Maria Friedman, Bernadette Peters, Jenna Russell and the West End All Stars gathered beneath the screen to celebrate, remember and mark.

Michael Ball, Rob Brydon, Rosalie Craig, Haydn Gwynne, Bradley Jaden, Bonnie Langford, Julian Ovenden, Jon Robyns, Jenna Russell, Jeremy Secomb, Michael D. Xavier and the West End All Stars then reminded us of the importance of Being Alive to bring the full company and Sir Cameron Mackintosh onto the stage for Old Friends and Side By Side.

The final closure came from the young, as a truly stunning troupe of new West End performers of the future filled the side aisles in front of the proscenium, spilling up and onto the stage either side of the rest of the cast to deliver a pure gold Our Time.

Phew!

There were just so many highlights for us, including: Michael Ball's version of Could I Leave You? with a gay nod and a wink in its gender-bending that echoed the much earlier [and at the time - 1976 - even more shocking] rendition by David Kernan [in the original Side By Side by Sondheim, which also starred the aforementioned Miss McKenzie]; Dame Sian's mischievous wink; Our Pet singing a song that might have been made for her now she is 89; the brilliantly "Stritch-esque" Ladies Who Lunch in which Miss Gwynne showed [the overrated, in our opinion] Patti Lupone how this song should be done, Dame Judi's gut-wrenching-yet-perfect vocals; and (of course) the simply faboo Ms Peters. Truth be told, it's hard to pick, really.

Have I mentioned - we enjoyed it?

Old Friends - Stephen Sondheim: a celebration gala concert finale

It was one of the very best things I have ever seen on stage in my life!

But I've done that already, or didn't you know, love?

"It’s jaw-droppingly great." - Paul Taylor, The Independent

"This isn’t just triumphant, it’s transcendent." - Tim Bano, The Stage

"Unmissable, really." - Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

Hils (who masterminded the trip), History Boy, Madam Arcati and I ventured [for the very first time, incidentally] to the concrete bunker that is The Olivier at the National Theatre [an unforgiving maze of levels, stairs and walkways that could confuse even the most intrepid Victorian explorer] on Monday for the hugely-anticipated new production of Stephen Sondheim's glitziest musical, Follies. In the expert directorial hands of the NT's Associate Dominic Cooke - who has eschewed more modern revisions of the show in favour of its original version - it was probably the most overwhelming thing we've seen all year!

Follies, with its central abiding theme of a reunion of now-elderly former showgirls, has assumed somewhat of a reputation over the years as a "vehicle" for real-life faded beauties to partake in the line-up and shimmy their way back into the limelight for perhaps a last encore. Indeed, the roster of "chorines" who have appeared in the show since its inception in 1971 is impressive, and includes such luminaries as Yvonne De Carlo, Barbara Cook, Carol Burnett, Elaine Stritch, Bernadette Peters, Hildegarde, Lee Remick, Patty Duke, Virginia Mayo, Ann Miller, Dame Diana Rigg, Polly Bergen, Vikki Carr, Donna McKechnie, Shani Wallis, Eartha Kitt, Maxene Andrews, Dolores Gray, Kaye Ballard, Stella Stevens, Juliet Prowse, Dorothy Lamour, Jo Anne Worley, Millicent Martin, Marni Nixon, Régine, Elaine Paige, Adele Anderson and even Yma Sumac.

Indeed, we went to see a glittering one-off "in concert" production at the Royal Albert Hall (by Strictly Come Dancing's Craig Revell-Horwood) that featured a cast of mega-camp proportions, with Stephanie Powers, Anita Dobson, Betty Buckley, Lorna Luft, Anita Harris, Ruthie Henshall and Christine Baranski back in 2015.



This full-fledged, two-and-a-quarter-hours-without-an-interval version was something more than all that, however. The fabled tale of the gathering of "Mr Weissman's Follies" girls amongst the ruins of the about-to-be-demolished theatre in which they all had their finest hours is, of course, an excuse for all of them to get their glad-rags out and perform their own solo pieces for the last time - but here, the slow-moving, monochrome "ghosts" of their former selves in full feathered and sequinned (and magnificent) regalia were not so much the foil for the dance routines, but, quite scarily, the spectres of a collective death: of their dreams, their ambitions, and the lost hopes of their youth.



The archetypal "mutton dressed as lamb" Solange LaFitte (Geraldine Fitzgerald) flirted and winked through her naughty memories in Ah, Paris!, yet her only accompanying dancers were (sexy) ghosts. Frail old Emily and Theodore Whitman (Norma Attallah and Billy Boyle) soft-shoe shuffled through what was, in their day, a top-class dance number Rain On The Roof, but among the rubble theirs was a poignant attempt at joy. And, with the show-stopper to beat all show-stoppers, Carlotta Campion (an utterly convincing and superb Tracie Bennett) belted out - to a long-dead audience on an empty stage - her defiant I'm Still Here; as her own "ghost" sat, forlorn, on a demolished section of wall. Even the opening parade of Those Beautiful Girls was done down a rusty fire escape, the sweeping staircase of old having been already presumably bulldozed... Most chilling of all - and the point at which even a hard-bitten bitch such as I, dear reader, cried - was when the utterly sublime Heidi Schiller (Josephine Barstow) performed her mournful operatic duet with her glamorous, young, former self (Alison Langer) on One More Kiss. We can see ourselves in these chorus girls, after all - and recall our own "glamorous and desirable moments". Long gone.



Thankfully, a little light relief was at hand courtesy of the brassy Hattie Walker (Di Botcher) - now larger than life and hardly a hoofer - who bucked the trend with her obviously tongue-in-cheek Broadway Baby, and the superbly-choreographed Who's That Woman, in which Stella Deems (Dawn Hope) led the assembled girls in a riotous ensemble routine that ended with present-day and past versions linking arms with themselves in full chorus-line fashion, and raised the roof.

Throughout the mêlée of set-pieces, of course, is woven the main story: the embittered and entangled lives and relationships of Sally Durant (Imelda Staunton), Buddy Plummer (Peter Forbes), Phyllis Rogers (Janie Dee) and Benjamin Stone (Philip Quast). Ostensibly secure, comfortably-off and settled, it soon becomes evident that they are anything but...



With the tableau of the quartet's younger selves interjecting across, around and through the stilted conversations, Ben set the scene with his own song of regret The Road You Didn't Take, and the brittle and neurotic Sally maintained a pretence that she and Buddy are happy and secure (In Buddy's Eyes). When the two started dancing together, these lies came to the surface as it became evident that the pair had never, even after three decades, got over the fact that young Ben left young Sally and married young Phyllis instead. Their tearful and beautifully sung duet Too Many Mornings encapsulated this longed-for passion.

But it was all very, very long ago; and despite Sally's obsessive belief that the long-dead relationship might be rekindled, no-one - not the errant Buddy (grasping at affairs as his almost-escape-route from the desperation of his marriage, as outlined in the barn-storming The Right Girl), nor the troubled Ben himself - wanted to "rock the boat" that much. Phyllis came closest. Beautifully bored, elegantly unsatisfied, she ripped the façade behind which Ben hides himself to shreds with her utterly magnificent Could I Leave You?. We were completely bowled over by Janie Dee's performance.



As the cries of anguish rang out over this bitter reunion bash, so the irony of the "young 'uns" number You're Gonna Love Tomorrow sent even more shivers down the spine than usual - as the foursome (Fred Haig as Buddy, Alex Young as Sally, Adam Rhys-Charles as Ben and the superb Zizi Strallen as Phyllis) flirted and cavorted with hardly a care in the world, on their way to wedded (ahem) bliss.

Then the curtains rose on the dream-like Loveland set, and each of the main leads was introduced by a chorus girl to perform their own final "Folly" (variety show style). Buddy's The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues, a pastiche in the chirpy style of Al Jolson or Jimmy Durante, exposed his inability to decide between the disastrous Sally and his long-distance and naive mistress Margie. He was completely upstaged, however, when Phyllis and her young self va-va-voomed their way through The Story of Lucy and Jessie.

Of course, neither character's routine could ever compare with the show's most climactic tour-de-force number Losing My Mind - and in the hands (and with the tonsils) of Miss Staunton, "Sally's Folly" was a bitter, desperate, angry, bewildered, gut-wrenching cry for help from a character who was so far removed from reality that she can no longer function. Not so much a show-tune as a cataclysm...

Even her performance couldn't reach the polished heights of Mr Quast and his awe-inspiring voice (throughout the show). He is one of the very best in the business. His portrayal of "Ben's Folly" was on another level altogether however, as his "rictus grin" as the leading man in the song-and-dance number Live, Laugh, Love crumbled away in a sea of broken, lonely sobs that had me completely frozen in my seat. Utter genius.

Unlike previous adaptations of the book by James Goldman, this Follies has no happy, neat nor tidy ending. Phyllis, of course, gets the final line. As she picks Ben up to take him home he says: You're quite something, aren't you?" - to which she replies with "Bet your ass!"

Follies trailer

I am overjoyed we got to see this Sondheim masterpiece before its final curtain on 3rd January. I have rarely felt so exhausted and thrilled by a production. It was an incomparably great experience!

Follies at the NT

More Follies.