Putting It Together is not a new musical, more an aside to Side by Side with Sondheim: a second compilation package of the composer's greatest hits, mostly drawn from the second half of his career. While this essentially plotless trawl is hardly as substantial as the individual works it plunders, it makes a fitting vehicle to wrap up the Library Theatre's 50th birthday celebrations.
The Library has presented no fewer than 11 Sondheim productions in the past 20 years - including the European premieres of Pacific Overtures and Merrily We Roll Along - most of them directed, as here, by Roger Haines. Such is their renown that the composer himself has been known to book tickets under a pseudonym and slip in unobserved.
Many Broadway revue shows can feel fragmentary and unsatisfying, but Sondheim is such a master at packing the trajectory of a lifetime's experience into a 32-bar showtune that many of them stand proud of any interconnecting narrative - indeed he was the first to prove, in his 1970 masterpiece Company, that a Broadway musical could function without any conventional storyline at all.
Sondheim's range is vast, but as this particular selection underlines, there is nothing he does better than the poisonous backchat of waspish, upper-class New Yorkers with too much time on their hands. Among the many highlights are the sourly ironic Ladies Who Lunch and Marry Me a Little from Company, and a superb duet from Follies, performed by Angela Richards and James Smillie as a couple so bored with each other they can scarcely be bothered to sing in pitch.
Jonathan Gill's sterling musical direction offers a fine opportunity to savour the relentless experimentation of Sondheim's scoring - a uniquely accessible assimilation of commercial showtunes and the American avant-garde, in which lush, Broadway harmonies enjoy an unexpectedly successful relationship with serialist tone-clusters and minimalist riffs.
And this is before one even mentions the metrical virtuosity of the lyrics. "Please don't fart/ There's very little air and this is art" trills Paul Baker in his mincingly aggressive instructions to the audience: a pert command willingly obeyed.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0161-236 7110.
