| COMPANY Last Night (Long and Possible Spoilers) | |
| Last Edit: sergius 05:53 pm EST 01/29/22 | |
| Posted by: sergius 05:46 pm EST 01/29/22 | |
|
|
|
| As it was in London, baffling. And not expressly because of the gender reversal. It’s the many clumsy and incoherent directorial choices that confound here. COMPANY, of course, is epochal, one of the great examples of twentieth century musical theatre art and a signal achievement in the expansion of the form. It’s with COMPANY that Sondheim, abetted by Firth’s still hugely perceptive and funny book, finds in romantic ambivalence his great theme. The regular and necessary negotiation of the tension between yearning for connection and fearing its constraints is COMPANY’s lodestar. Because it is so assiduously written, most of Sondheim’s work doesn’t need much elaboration. Marianne Elliott apparently thinks otherwise and so we have a glut of inexplicable embellishments that impede both Sondheim’s acuity and his vast sympathy. To wit: “The Little Things You Do Together” is wrested from Joanne midway through so that the other couples can share in the commentary and dance about to no end. It’s a good thing Patti Lupone is expectably peerless because she must also later compete with a group of club goers who unaccountably and distractingly shift in the background during the stanza breaks of “The Ladies who Lunch.” “Another Hundred People,” which, like the rest of the physical production, doesn’t remotely evoke New York, hurtles the ensemble amidst the oversized, portable titular letters. “Side by Side by Side” is relentlessly busy and doesn’t build sufficiently. Despite COMPANY’s great novelty, it’s a traditional Act Two opening number; here it just falls flat. “Tick Tock” is, start to finish, a manic muddle; it’s entirely unclear what, precisely—precisely being the operative word—the point is. As mystifying as these choices are—and there are others—there is the even greater problem of Katrina Lenk’s Bobbi. Lenk is an accomplished actor and she has a kind of preternatural poise, a distance, that is, in some ways, right for the character. But beneath Bobbi’s seeming—and defensive—reserve, there is a flood of feeling which Lenk just cannot reach. She admirably interprets her three big songs—“Someone is Waiting,” “Marry Me a Little” and “Being Alive”—but she cannot nearly sing them. And these songs represent a range of feeling—longing, dread—that must be sung. They require a tonal expansiveness that she just doesn’t have. And so the show, which should tremble with feeling at the end, just sort of sighs out only to make room for a final, tacky comic bit. It’s a major disappointment. These things said, every book scene is splendidly played with endless, dazzling invention by everyone. In particular, “Not Getting Married,” the song and the scene it’s in, is gorgeously delirious and inadvertently suggests that, Sondheim’s apparent unwillingness aside, a gay male version of COMPANY might be interesting, too. In terms of the gender reversal, I expect this version may play better for you if you have no familiarity with the original production. What I noticed particularly was how the gender changes, some of which seemed arbitrary, pressed Sondheim to write new lyrics that were always passable, sometimes implausible—“fella”?—and never better than what he originally wrote. Also, the relationships here between the husbands and Bobbi were far less interesting that those between the wives and Bobby. All said, and despite my many misgivings about this production, COMPANY is a thrilling example of what musical theatre is—was?—and what it can be. Fifty two years on, it remains a staggering achievement. (Sidebar: The show was stopped last night for about 15 minutes due to a set malfunction just before the Joanne/Bobbi scene. Two actors from the ensemble came out front and sang a couple of silly songs, apropos of nothing, about hot dogs. Lupone, who was heard at one point yelling “Raise the f*****g curtain!,” then came out front to let the audience know what was happening and to remind us all that “theatre is an accident waiting to happen.” Given the proceedings onstage, this had, for me anyway, some subtext.) |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | Theatre-related books for kids - showtunetrivia 09:33 pm EST 02/01/22 |
| Next: | re: COMPANY Last Night (Long and Possible Spoilers) - AlanScott 05:55 pm EST 01/31/22 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.042388 seconds.