Theater Review: Sondheim’s ‘Company,’ Presented by Barrington Stage Co., MA

In the last week of August, I drove up to the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts for a short vacation. In the prior couple of times I’ve visited that cultural mecca, in the 1990s and the oughts, I made it a point to attend plays. Two of the principal venues I attended then, the Williamstown Theater Festival and the Berkshire Theater Festival, had, in this past visit, either just finished for the year or were now on a reduced performance schedule. But I did notice one performance space I’d never seen before, as well as a musical I have never tired of either seeing or listening to.

That musical is Company, the first of three musical-theater masterpieces by lyricist-composer Stephen Sondheim and producer-director Harold Prince that dazzled Broadway in the early 1970s. In this and the subsequent Follies and A Little Night Music, they simultaneously summed up, challenged and advanced this traditional form with an urban sensibility and an ambivalent attitude toward life. After exposure to Sondheim in the early 1980s, through the soundtrack for Merrily We Roll Along, I saw Company twice in its entirety: in a 1995 Roundabout Theatre production starring Boyd Gaines, and a John Doyle-directed 2007 version in which cast members not only sang and danced but played their own instruments. (I discussed the last thrilling production here.)

Sondheim’s masterpiece is not without its challenges, chiefly derived from the book by playwright-actor George Furth. In the original 1970 production, it must have appeared as the most “now” of musicals, with subjects very much on everyone’s minds: flight attendants (or, in the parlance of the day, “stewardesses”), religious intermarriage, “friendly” divorces, and most of all, a new sexual freedom. With the shock of that faded, the laughs don’t come as easily and the plot can feel dated.

Barrington Stage Co., in its Boyd-Quinson Mainstage in downtown Pittsfield, Mass. has dealt with the conundrum with a simple but tight focus: stress Sondheim’s songs—which, one after another, have becomes staples of cabarets all across the country—and cast actors who can sing them superbly. And so, while this version of this classic doesn’t stand apart from the prior ones discussed above, it doesn’t take a back seat to any of them.

The musical has been well-served by director Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of the Barrington Stage Co. Under her aegis—starting over 20 years ago, when the organization mounted productions in a Sheffield, Mass., high school--the company has become known for incubating new and old musicals that were successfully transferred to Broadway, including The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and On the Town. Clearly, she knows how to make a production’s strengths more prominent and blur the rough edges of its flaws.

With costume designer Sara Jean Tosetti, Boyd suggested an early Seventies ambiance rather than overwhelming audiences with it by having secondary characters dress in bright but not garish floral patterns. Meanwhile, the separation of the musical’s main character, Bobby, from “all those good and crazy people, my friends”—the married couples who try to end his bachelor status—was expressed by apparel that would not be out of place in 2017. It's almost as if he stands outside their time as well as their marital mores.

One element of Company’s worldview remains as intact today as in 1970: its breathless urban sensibility (performed most memorably in “Another Hundred People”). Scenic designer Kristen Robinson conveyed that most succinctly with a multi-tiered stage design that emphasized the characters’ vertical urban dwellings.

By and large, the actresses here have more opportunities to emote than their male counterparts. But in the lovely “Sorry-Grateful,” which sets the stage for the show’s ambivalence,  James Ludwig, Peter Rearddon  , and particularly Lawrence Street wring every note of emotion from a precise catalogue of the losses and compensations involved in a committed marriage.  Elaine Stritch’s prototypical performance as the middle-aged, liquored-up Joanne in the 1970 show is hard to erase from the memory of anyone who attended that show or listened to the soundtrack, but Ellen Harvey offers her own highly individual and effective take on the bilious “Ladies Who Lunch.” And Lauren Marcus hilariously depicts the rampaging anxiety of a bride on the brink of the wedding ceremony—and a massive nervous breakdown—with “Not Getting Married Today.”

But the magnetic focus of the production was Aaron Tveit, who caught the essence of Bobby on his 35^th birthday, when this urbane, charming but distant commitment-phobe begins to undergo a painful reexamination of his life. He stumbles around, grasping for love, even wishing for the impossible: blending the characters of different women into one ideal mate. He makes understandable Bobby's eventual turn in delivering the climactic song, “Being Alive,” with resolute passion.

The closing date for Barrington Stage’s Company is this Sunday. I am glad I had the chance to see it while it was still around, and if I get up to the Berkshires again any time soon, I’ll have to see what Boyd and her creative team come up with next. With three performing arts venues and an administrative building, it's become a center of culture in Pittsfield that was nowhere near as prominent when I first started going up to the Berkshires over two decades ago.It will be interesting to see if they can maintain the same level of consistency and vitality that they have with Company.