Sondheim’s ‘Company’ @ Winspear Opera House (ATTPAC)
Photos by Murphy Made
—Wayne Lee Gay
More than half a century after its premiere on Broadway, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company continues to glow. Sondheim's music and lyrics are fresh as ever, as is his scathing—but somehow optimistic—evisceration of modern marriage and relationships. The national touring production currently playing at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas (and scheduled to move to Fort Worth's Bass Performance Hall next week) casts a new and revelatory light on this landmark of American musical theater.
Born into a society still reeling from the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the original 1970 Company depicts Bobby, a single guy in New York City, facing his thirty-fifth birthday, surrounded by a bevy of well-meaning friends determined to bring his bachelorhood to an end. The current touring version, a bright, clever reworking by director Marianne Elliott and producer Chris Harper for a 2018 London production (with Sondheim’s enthusiastic approval), turns Bobby into Bobbie, an equally sexually active and perplexed single female in contemporary NYC. Like Bobby, Bobbie faces the approach of middle age, while feeling pressure to form a permanent relationship.
The concept works beautifully: it's amazing the extent to which the issues that faced Yuppies in the 1970s now resonate for today's aging millennials. Gentle tweaking of the text allows land lines to become cell phones (and "text" substitutes nicely for "call"). Bobby's girlfriends are reconfigured as Bobbie's boyfriends—and the wedding scene of a pair of Bobby's friends becomes a same-sex marriage for two of Bobbie's friends.
Intriguingly, a large part of the genius of Company comes from the absence of a clear linear plot line—a shocking move for 1970 that gives the whole show a dreamlike, mildly surrealist quality. This in turn leaves the audience to wonder—in a good way—how much of this is supposed to be reality, and how much is on the inside of Bobby/Bobbie's head.
Sondheim supported this plotless plot with some of the best music ever composed for Broadway. Impressive counterpoint, subtle self-reference, and harmonic slight-of-hand pull the listener forward before he or she realizes what has happened. Company is one of a number of masterpieces that entitle Sondheim to be called America's Rossini: though he might not quite be America's Shakespeare, his lyrics can jolt us in the funny bone before suddenly hitting right at the heart.
And this score is packed with wonderful songs: "Another Hundred People" encapsulates the bustle and fragile joy of modern urban life, while "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" pops and bounces infectiously. "Side by Side," basically a joyful celebration of friendship, in this production turns into an almost nightmarish drunken birthday party number.
Britney Coleman stars as Bobbie, bringing traditional belting power to her two big act-closing anthems; she meanwhile convincingly navigates the good girl-bad girl ambivalence of the role. Matt Rodin pretty well steals Act I as the reluctant bridegroom Jamie in the wedding scene (in this version a gay wedding), with Elysia Jordan supporting as an ever more drunken wedding angel-ish character (a wedding singer in the original version). Sondheim originally created a dumb blonde role named April as one of Bobby's one-night flings. Here April becomes Andy, a brainless (and gorgeous) stud stripped to his briefs and played with delightful deadpan by Jacob Dickey.
And then there’s Joanne—the cynical, rich, alcoholic, and oft-divorced character who was Sondheim's gift to dusky-voiced, slightly mature (or able-to-play-mature) divas. Judy McLane’s Joanne gets the whole show rolling with "The Little Things You do Together," deliciously and knowingly stretching the sigh that closes each verse.
McLane also takes on "The Ladies Who Lunch," the one song in the show that's become a bit anachronistic through the decades: real life ladies who lunch have become an extinct species in the last fifty years. But it's too good a song to cut, and McLane makes it live as a paean to bored, hollow affluence. It also serves as a perfect setup for Bobbie, tying the plotless plot together with an affirmation of the joy and pain and sheer rightness of "Being Alive."
Bunny Christie's sliding, box-like sets (one step above minimalist) literally and effectively frame Sondheim's vignettes, and the costuming (also Christie’s) perfectly and assertively describes each character. Special effects, heavy on neon, are clever and imaginative without being overblown (this is Company, not Wicked), while Liam Steel's choreography is simple and likewise character-driven and effective. Charlie Alterman conducts the appropriately chamber-sized, mostly acoustic orchestra. The result is a thought-povoking, intelligent, and unfailingly entertaining version of a masterpiece of American musical theater.
WHEN AND WHERE: September 26-29 at Winspear Opera House, Dallas; October 1-6 at Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth
WEB: attpac.org in Dallas; basshall.com in Fort Worth
