Company Man
"I'm not going to let [the audience] off the hook by saying this is about people who lived 35 years ago," says director John Doyle of his amazing and thoroughly contemporary Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's musical Company.
Doyle's version, with actors singing and playing instruments amid a sparse stage dominated by a single column, a piano, and several plastic cubes, feels like a bittersweet sequel to the musical's 1970 debut. Plus ça change, etc. While it's now far less unusual for a person to be single on his or her 35th birthday, the bachelor known as Bobby (Raúl Esparza) still epitomizes all the skittishness, fear, and stubbornness that often characterize the emotionally untethered. "You impersonate a person/ Better than any zombie should," a berating female trio squawk. Not that his married friends suffer any less loneliness or loathing in their own lives. As Joanne (Barbara Walsh) sings of married life in "The Little Things You Do Together," just one of the musical's many uncomfortably perfect dissections, it's "The concerts you enjoy together/ Neighbors you annoy together/ Children you destroy together/That keep marriage intact."
The new Company cast album, however, is a far perkier souvenir than the original, which featured Jonathan Tunick's lavish arrangements. The fact that each of the play's 13 cast members acts, sings, dances and plays up to three instruments (adequately) makes Doyle's spectacle a minor miracle of skill, logistics, and nerve. He may have applied the same economic strategy to his 2004 revival of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, but Company, with its endless epiphanies of ambivalence, feels richer, riskier, and a lot more fun.