A Conversation with Paige Faure

on Old Friends, as it heads for LA and Broadway

It was such a pleasure to speak to Paige Faure during rehearsals for Sondheim’s Old Friends, which opens in LA this February and on Broadway in March. We spoke about the thrills of this production, and the rich and varied responsibilities of dance captains and standbys. Our conversation begins below:

It’s so good to meet you! We’re speaking in early January 2025. I’d love to know what’s happening in the world of Old Friends rehearsals right now.

This has been a wonderful week, especially for me as a standby. Because Old Friends happened on the West End, and we’ve got this 75% new cast for the US, this week has been all about getting new cast members up to speed. All of us standbys have gotten to be who we might be at any and all points, which has been marvelous. We’ve all entered into this process with a very keen awareness of how important it all feels, and the expectation of it all.

We very quickly learned in this process that there’s no room for timidity. Even though timidity is a word in A Funny Thing Happened, there isn’t actually room for that—it really has to be bang on right from the start. We’ve staged the first couple of numbers, we’ve hit the music of most everything—and most importantly, we’ve dug into the text and the musicality of it all, leaving nothing to spare. There’s no room for doing anything less than the ink that’s on the page.

It’s been a beautiful reminder that every time you’re in a Sondheim, everything was written for a reason—and we respect that reason, and we work within that reason. Every comma, exclamation point, period, certain notes being different every single time, has depth and meaning behind it. Getting to really dig into that in a real way, with plenty of time, has been a gift.

How much did you know about the shape of the show at the point at which you got involved? Had you seen the original gala performance?

As soon as it came up as an audition for me, I did as much of a dive as one can do on it. It just revealed itself to be a dream to get to play all of these roles, even if just for a moment, all in one place. It can be very rare in musical theatre as a whole that all these expectations are met. With this, you go in thinking it’s going to be one way, and then it really is that way. That’s been the gift of what’s been revealed in this process so far: it really is a night in which you get to live all of your musical theatre dreams.

In reality, I’m probably a few more years away from doing a full Mrs. Lovett somewhere, but I get to do it now. And I’ve done “The Ladies Who Lunch” in symphonic concert situations, so now getting to really hit it and dive into the character of it is really special. It makes me excited for the coming years of my career, getting to lean into these roles in this way before hopefully doing them in full fruition at some point, too.

From your perspective as a member of this brilliant ensemble, how do you go about navigating your own unique (and changeable) route through the show?

For me there’s been a kind of seesaw effect. I was a part of the Company revival that was just on, the gender-flipped one. I was a standby there as well and covered five different roles. Those were roles that had one through-line throughout the night, and it felt like a ginormous responsibility. Every person had their own matrix flow that they had to go through. At the end of going on for one of those roles, there was cohesion to it and a flow, and your contribution was so tight and so detail-oriented that it felt more difficult in some ways because of the nature of that particular production.

With Old Friends, not only am I standing by for everyone, but I’m also the dance captain, so I’m seeing my job as knowing two-plus hours of material as a whole. There are these pop-out moments and features, and one doesn’t necessarily relate to the other. The overarching feeling is that we’re giving a night of entertainment for the pure joy of his words and music, and the joy of those moments that we all crave and look forward to. Even though I’m technically covering more people and have more responsibility to the production as a whole, there is this sense of really just leaning into the love of the pieces, and knowing that each piece can stand alone as its own little world.

It’s almost like a solar system—it’s like a Sondheim universe, and Company is a moon, and Follies is Jupiter, and we all get to revolve around the sun that is Sondheim. In that way, for me at least, it’s very freeing. We’ve been told to really lean into ourselves as individuals, as opposed to trying to fill a very specific track. We are being dressed and addressed as ourselves within these roles, and that’s quite sweet as an actor.

I love that. And of course it means that if someone saw Old Friends when it was in London, they will in many ways see a quite different show in LA or on Broadway, by virtue of what each particular cast member brings to these numbers.

Right, exactly. Any person that goes on for “The Boy From…” is going to be totally different—it’s very exciting in that way. It kind of reminds me of when I was in college, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was on Broadway. It was right next to Wicked, and whenever a friend would come to visit I’d go, “Let’s do the Wicked lottery and the Spelling Bee lottery, and we’ll see which one we can get $20 tickets to.” I never won Wicked, but I always won Spelling Bee, so I saw Spelling Bee so many times—but I never minded because I got to see so many different people do it. They were the same way in that production—they were so championing of the actor being their own specific version of those characters.

And I think that’s so much of what you want in live theatre—because if we just see carbon cut-out Mrs. Lovetts, then we know what to expect. I’m very excited to witness Lea [Salonga]’s version in real life and see what flavor that is, to see how it differs from what Sutton [Foster] or Annaleigh [Ashford] just did on Broadway.

And you personally are preparing a lot of particularly iconic numbers, which you must have specific performances of etched in your mind. Is there something actually quite freeing about having such a variety of numbers to work on all at once? i.e. you’re not thinking, oh, I’m stepping into this one iconic role?

I think there’s something very freeing about the fact that there’s not this single arc of me, say, playing the Witch in front of Bernadette. That would be a little too much for my heart. Yet we get to touch on it and feel it, and remind ourselves of those iconic moments that for so many of us are why we got into musical theatre. I remember watching Into the Woods, that PBS taping of it, in one of my middle school friends’ basements, and just playing it on a loop.

To even begin to touch in on that with the people that knew Stephen and respected him so fully and wholeheartedly is very special. I’m just so grateful to Cameron Mackintosh for thinking to put all of this together in the first place.

You mentioned the PBS Into the Woods recording there—I’d love to know more about your own route into Sondheim.

Sondheim really crept up on me. I remember watching that Into the Woods PBS recording, and I think the thing that really struck me about that was the text. I started off very much as a dancer, on the ballerina track. I really thought I was going to be at American Ballet Theater—and then slowly but surely, especially in middle school, I discovered musical theater as an art form. The aspect of ballet that I always loved was the storytelling aspect, so threading that in was very simple. Now I had a very specific, deep story to tell. A lot of the first part of my career was very dance-heavy—the Chorus Line of it all—but I’ve so often been an ensemble cover because I very much trained as an actor as soon as I could. I knew that that was the way to make all of it live: the dance, the music, all of it.

Every time I’ve encountered Sondheim’s work, I feel like I can just breathe deeper because there’s no piecing together puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit, no struggling to find the way that it’s going to live most clearly. It’s all just there. So for me, as a dialogue-driven dancer, it made sense from the get-go, and I’m so glad that over the last few years we’ve caught up with each other.

I love that. Dance captain is one of those roles that many of us might see in playbills and programmes a lot, and yet we might have only a partial sense of what it involves. How do you think about that particular role and its responsibilities in a show like this?

To me, it’s about respect for the product you’ve created, and maintaining the integrity of what you’ve created. That is a dance captain’s job. There’s a lot of mediation that comes with that between the actors and the creative team, but it’s all about honoring what was made with great intention. I don’t dance captain a lot because it is a lot of responsibility, and I have an almost-12-year-old son, but with Old Friends it was hard to resist—because of the aforementioned marriage of it being so dialogue-driven and so character-driven.

This is not a show where the dancers go in one room and the actors go in the other room, and then we just kind of piece it all together. It’s all intertwined throughout. It is a privilege, particularly with this show, to honor the spirit of the piece in this way and to help maintain that. Especially because we have so many different tracks and so many different covers that may or may not go on at any given time, it feels like a very deep responsibility to the piece as a whole.

Is there one number or moment that you are particularly excited to see come together as rehearsals continue?

It may sound cheesy, but I don’t know that there is a particular number. I think it is the magic of the flow of this night—it’s really the whole two hours of it. That said, “Gotta Get a Gimmick” is really fun, but I think for me it’s more about the overall flow of the evening. One thing we were actually talking about today was “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs,” which is actually one of the few moments of unbridled optimism in the show—even though when you dig in on the actual lyrics of it, there is a lot of very worldly, wise, deep commentary on even that optimism itself.

But we transition right from “The Girls Upstairs” into “I’m Still Here,” and there’s something so fun about that ride and that transition. We go from these people feeling bright and light and youthful, and then hearing Bonnie [Langford] especially coming out and just nailing that number. It makes you sit back in your seat and go “Oh, yes.” You get to ride this fascinating roller coaster through the night. As cheesy as it might sound, the ride of it all is what I think is going to be the most exciting for me. I have the utmost respect and kudos to our creative team. Old Friends really feels like a celebration, and I’m so delighted to be a part of it.

For more information about Sondheim’s Old Friends, and to buy tickets, simply click here.