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.

Bawdy Broadway Baby: An Elaine Stritch Appreciation

Around 20 years ago, I was attending a book appearance and signing by Elaine Steinbeck at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. All was going swimmingly, as the widow of John Steinbeck, with easy humor rolling from her southern accent, effortlessly demonstrated why the Nobel laureate had fallen in love with her more than four decades before.

Then a man in the audience, remarking on her active social life, began a question: “As one of the ladies who lunch…”

I groaned as soon as I heard that last phrase. He might have meant it innocently.

But Ms. Steinbeck, a onetime actress, was, I was sure, intimately familiar with what the phrase had come to mean after its use as the title of one of Stephen Sondheim’s songs in his 1970 musical Company: a clique of middle-aged women with plenty of money and time on their hands with nothing better to do than hurl zingers in between downing vodka stingers.

Sure enough, Ms. Steinbeck took umbrage at the thought of membership in such a group. If her questioner wasn’t properly abashed after her response, he had no emotional intelligence whatsoever.

Now, if another Elaine—Elaine Stritch, who passed away at age 89 this past Thursday—had heard the question, the fellow would have been lucky to make it out of the auditorium alive. 

“Stritchie,” as she was nicknamed, had already spent two decades in the theater when she entered Broadway legend as Joanne in Sondheim’s epochal show. She poured a lifetime of acid wit and one too many mornings of hung-over self-loathing into her much-married, seen-it-all, caustic character. 

When she commanded, at the end of the song, “Everybody rise,” everybody obeyed—then stopped the show with thunderous applause.

In the more than 40 years since that performance, countless actresses have played Joanne. But Stritch had long ago set the prototype for the character.

Stritch was a character in her own right, an actress who brought her own fire and mordant humor to every role she played. It’s easy to think that channeling that swagger came naturally.

Just how much it cost her was suggested by D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on the recording of the original-cast album of Company. At the end of a marathon recording session, she continually, inexplicably muffed her interpretation of the song. 

Sondheim, Stritch, and record producer Thomas Z. Shepard could barely repress their exhaustion, stress, annoyance and embarrassment until Shepard told the actress to go home, sleep, and come back when she was rested. 

Stritch did so, a day or two later, though not without stopping for drinks to fortify her. This time, she nailed it.

That scene revealed everything you could ever want to know about how even a talented, accomplished theater professional could be so insecure as to verge on total ineffectuality. 

As a teenager, Stritch discovered the magical and dangerous impact of alcohol on her personality: Nobody need ever know that she was, at heart, shy and nervous.

As an adult, Stritch found alcohol a help for coping with anxiety about performing. She quit in the mid-1970s after the onset of diabetes. 

But, as she prepared to retire from the stage in her late eighties, the old insecurities returned, and for awhile—until health complications set in again—she permitted herself a glass or two of alcohol.

By that time, of course, she had become an icon of the stage, particularly in works by Sondheim—not just Company, but, the mid-1980s Follies in Concert (where, even in an all-star cast, she brought the house down with “Broadway Baby") and A Little Night Music. 

And her Tony-winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2002),  reviewed the events and personalities in her life, including an improbable convent education (though not so improbable when one recalls she was the niece of a Roman Catholic cardinal), the men she got (Ben Gazzara, Gig Young, husband John Bay), and the men who got away (JFK, Marlon Brando, and her closeted Farewell to Arms co-star, Rock Hudson).

The closing years of her career spread her fame beyond the bright lights of Broadway, with appearances over several seasons as Colleen Donaghy, the tough handful of a mother to Alec Baldwin’s network exec on the sitcom 30 Rock. That was not her first foray into TV work, though. 

Before that, she had appeared in the TV movie version of Steel Magnolias (as tart-tongued Ouiser Boudreaux, of course), The Ellen Burstyn Show, Two’s Company (a British comedy series with Stritch as a bestselling American author who deals with a wry butler), and The Trials of O’Brien (with the actress playing secretary to Peter’s Falk’s Columbo prototype, a rumpled defense attorney). 

I saw an episode of the latter at New York’s Paley Center for Media, and on YouTube there’s an entire episode of the early Sixties sitcom adaptation of the old Broadway hit My Sister Eileen, with Stritch as the appropriately cast witty writer Ruth Sherwood.

“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” Bette Davis observed in her declining years. Stritch, a kindred spirit, would no doubt agree.

Reviews of her last cabaret shows at the Café Carlyle read like obituaries, trying to pay appropriate tribute to a New York institution while gingerly acknowledging that she forgot lyrics, stepped on punchlines, and turned on audience members when they laughed at times she deemed inappropriate. (See, for instance, this New Yorker blog post from a year ago by Sarah Larson.)

The same reviews indicate that audiences overlooked those last flawed shows. 

Fans preferred to remember and celebrate the brassy, whiskey-voiced blonde in long white man’s dress shirt, black vest, and black tights who had made a personal anthem of survival of another Follies standard, “I’m Still Here.”

Now—sadly—she isn’t anymore.

This Day in Theater History (Sondheim’s “Company,” 1st Concept Musical, Opens)

April 26, 1970—On the short list of productions that changed Broadway, the first non-linear, concept musical, Company, premiered at the Alvin Theater. It was the first of five collaborations in the 1970s between composer Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince that tested audience tastes and stretched the boundaries of musical theater.

In Company, I would argue, Sondheim began to use his musical “voice” with self-confidence and mastery. It was easy to miss in his early work, which was overshadowed by senior songwriting partners Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Richard Rodgers, or by crushing failure. (See my post on the cult favorite Anyone Can Whistle.)

But now, critics and audiences became fully aware of his technical and emotional range—especially seen through lyrics suffused with intelligence, wit and ambivalence about modern life and relationships. “I prefer neurotic people,” he told Newsweek in 1973. “I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.”

The marriages in this ensemble piece are, more often than not, emotionally brittle, taking their cue from the city’s nervous energy. You can see it in a song like “Another Hundred People,” and especially in “Not Getting Married Today,” a vocally taxing tune whose breakneck speed conveys its main character, a bride having a nervous breakdown just before the ceremony.

Let’s stop for a second. Even as I write about Sondheim’s “self-confidence,” I can’t help but think how much Company, like other great shows, came together almost as a happy accident.

Start with this: It wasn’t supposed to be a musical in the first place.

Actor George Furth (best remembered for his priceless small scenes as the diehard railway employee Woodcock in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) had written a series of one-act plays, meant to be performed with one actor taking on the lead role in each. When asked what he thought of the idea, Prince said it would work better as a musical.

Then, think of the Man Who Would Be Bobby, the 35-year-old bachelor protagonist who resists his married friends’ urging to commit himself to a relationship. Critics have long noted that Bobby is a rather enigmatic figure. That might be at least partly because his identity has shifted with and been reshaped by the three actors originally associated with the role:

* Furth and Sondheim began to invent scenes and emotional textures for Bobby with the thought that Anthony Perkins would play the part. But Perkins went on to direct a different project.

* Dean Jones was then cast as Bobby. Those who have bought the original-cast album know that he possessed a strong voice. Unfortunately, the musical’s uncertainty concerning marriage hit too close to home for Jones, who was going through a painful divorce at the time. Prince agreed to let him out of his contract if Jones could make it a couple of weeks past the premiere.

* Jones’ replacement, Larry Kert, the original Tony in West Side Story, was so good in his role—and the circumstances surrounding Jones’ departure so unusual—that the Tony nominating committee were persuaded to nominate him for the Tony.