Sondheim Revue Old Friends, Starring Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, to Open on Broadway

The Sondheim revue Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends, starring Tony winners Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, is coming to Broadway as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s 2024-25 season. MTC’s season will also include the Broadway premiere of the vaccination-debate comedy Eureka Day. Eureka Day will begin performances at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on November 25; Old Friends will begin performances at the same theater on March 25, 2025.

Old Friends, which recently completed a 16-week run in London's West End, is a tribute to the composer Stephen Sondheim, directed by Matthew Bourne (who also lends musical staging) with Julia McKenzie. The piece is devised by Cameron Mackintosh with choreography by Stephen Mear. Prior to the Broadway opening, the show will have a run at Center Theatre Group’s Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. More performers are to be announced.

“Old Friends was Steve's idea, born during lockdown,” said the producer Cameron Mackintosh, “when he suggested it was time (and we had plenty of it!) we put together a third revue of his work … Audiences are in for a joyous and unforgettable evening featuring some of the greatest songs ever written for the musical theater in ‘a great big Broadway show’—just as Steve wanted.”

Eureka Day, by playwright Jonathan Spector, is a comic exploration of the divisive politics of a mumps outbreak. First staged in Berkeley, California in 2018, it opened off-Broadway in 2019 and was staged in London in 2022, in a production starring Helen Hunt. Anna D. Shapiro will direct on Broadway. 

Off-Broadway, MTC will also produce the world premiere of Vladimir, written by Erika Sheffer and directed by Daniel Sullivan. The play is set in Moscow where an independent journalist covering Putin’s first term struggles to maintain sanity and hope in increasingly hostile circumstances. Previews begin September 24 at New York City Center - Stage I.