Another hundred people just got off of the plane, and they all rushed from Heathrow Airport to the Gielgud Theatre, to catch Marianne Elliott’s smashing West End revival of Company.
That’s not a joke, or at least not just one; on a recent Monday evening, the stalls were filled with visiting Americans. (“Oh, look, it’s United 14 from Newark,” said the recognizable stage and screen actor to my left.) And for good reason: There were only days left in its extended London run, which ended this weekend. The show is widely rumored to be coming to New York next fall, but there’s been no news on that front since a breathless Michael Riedel column back in November.
Let’s hope it does, because Elliott’s is a remarkable take on a remarkable show.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★★ review of Follies here.]
Company is Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 examination of Manhattan singledom and couplehood. It centers on Bobby, a charming but somewhat unknowable bachelor, and it surrounds him with several couples—those good and crazy people, his married friends—celebrating his 35th birthday. The question at hand is why he remains single, and whether marriage is worth it. By the end of the musical, in “Being Alive,” he decides that it is.
The signal fact of Elliott’s interpretation is that Bobby is now Bobbie, a woman. This is not a fully gender-swapped production, or a gender-bending one, as some have said; Bobbie, like Bobby, is heterosexual, and Bobby’s three girlfriends have become Bobbie’s three boyfriends. Everyone else stays the same, except that one of the heretofore heterosexual couple friends is now two men. (Two other couples are now interracial.) Overall, this Company is, if anything, less sexually fluid than earlier productions: When a male married friend hits on Bobbie, it’s now a little bit creepy instead of a little bit experimental, and now Joanne, just prior to toasting women who enjoy a midday meal, no longer suggests that she and Bobby “make it” but instead offers up her offstage husband for the same.
The action is brought to the present day, and this alone might have required that Bobbie be female. It’s difficult to imagine any concern about a single 35-year-old man in 2019, and while a single woman isn’t deeply remarkable today, either, and though children are never mentioned, there are biological reasons why the uncoupled passage of time matters more to a Bobbie than a Bobby. At the same time, there’s something much more more familiar, and in its own way maddening, about a group of friends haranguing a seemingly quite happy woman about her singlehood. Men are left alone.
In any case, the best reason for the reversal is this particular Bobbie, Rosalie Craig. She hasn’t yet appeared on New York stages, but she is a force of nature. She’s a powerful singer, and funny; she has the bearing of a star. The most recent New York Bobby was Raúl Esparza, in 2006, and he is a relentlessly compelling actor; Craig’s performance is so powerful, and so entirely different, that poor, handsome Raúl never crosses your mind.
Indeed, what’s most remarkable here is how different this production is from that previous one, in ways having nothing to do with its star’s gender. That New York revival was a John Doyle staging, and in his signature form: The players toted instruments, the setting was minimal. That one, though, even its stripped-down version, retained the feeling of a cocktail party: The musical opens with the gang surprising Bobby on his 35th, and then proceeds through vignettes of their interactions with him that, in Doyle’s staging, felt like stories shared and thoughts bared during the course of the party. (Bobby was always carrying a rocks glass.)
Here, instead, it feels as though everything is happening inside Bobbie’s head, like we’re following her thoughts as she ruminates on her singlehood. The play opens with Bobbie arriving home from her birthday party, toting big “3” and “5” balloons, exhausted. She listens to messages on her iPhone. Then her friends start wandering in down the aisles, call her name, entering her subconscious.
That’s the tone throughout, a fractured retelling conveying a confused mind. Bobbie isn’t just removed from her friends emotionally; she’s often lighted differently. Lead-ins to many of the songs, which in our heads we hear interpolated into the song, part of that ongoing cocktail party in previous production, here play as distinct, separate book scenes before the song starts—more fracturing. Each time we return to the birthday party, it’s not simply later in the festivities; it’s a different version of the party. By the end, after “Being Alive,” it’s not clear that the party has happened at all.
The set, by Bunny Christie, also separates the moments. Bobbie’s apartments, and her friends, are in modular, neon-outlined cubes, dragged back and forth across the stage and briefly connected to one another but mostly separate. (More fracturing.) Liam Steel’s choreography aims for a kind of New Yorky sexiness envisioned by a non-New Yorker. “Another Hundred People” is backed by dancers in athleisure on subway cars, writhing and coupling in ways that MTA announcement regularly tell me a crowded subway car is not an excuse for.
There is certainly a non-New Yorker’s-take-on-New York thing going on at points. Some players’ accents travel the Eastern seaboard, then pop across the pond, in the course of a number. Two of Bobbie’s three boyfriends seem obviously gay, but I suppose they’re just European. Even the poster art places the Chrysler Building somewhere alongside Times Square. (In “Side By Side By Side,” incidentally, Bobbie now reminds one of his friends of that skyscraper, rather than the traditional Seagram Building. One supposes that’s a translation for London, or for 2019, but so it loses the point that Bobbie/y is seen as being as coldly sleek as the Mies van der Rohe masterpiece.) All this no doubt will be fixed for a Broadway transfer.
Other modernizing translations abound. In “Another Hundred People”: “I’ll text you in the morning, or I’ll call you to explain.” (It makes sense as a modern sentence, but it substitutes interpersonal engagement for delegating the explanation to the answering service.) In “The Little Things You Do Together,” it’s jujitsu rather than karate. (Trendier?) The ditzy flight attendant’s apartment on West End Avenue is no longer “great, big” (because rent control is nearly dead). The ladies who lunch now clutch a copy of Time. (RIP, Life.)
“Ladies Who Lunch,” in fact, feels the most outdated number in the show, what with its Optical Art and vodka stingers. But that’s no matter at all: It’s sung by Patti LuPone, who essentially plays Joanne as Patti: a tough, sharp broad who says what she thinks. And it’s a perfect pairing.
Throughout, indeed, and especially here, the show sounds simply fantastic. The orchestra looms above the set throughout, dressed in black and covered in haze, a lush sound coming from a supper-club band. They’re playing what appear to be new orchestrations by David Cullen, a Brit notable for his work with Andrew Lloyd Webber.
LuPone’s singing is a highlight of the evening, but then so are most of the big numbers. Gavin Spokes, as Harry, a bickering husband, delivers a beautiful “Sorry-Grateful.” Richard Fleeshman, Matthew Seadon-Young, and George Bladgen, as the three boyfriends, Andy, Theo, and PJ, provide a charming and very funny “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” Jonathan Bailey, as Jamie (you traditionally know her as Amy) sings an impressive but broadly over-the-top “Not Getting Married Today,” but in service of a wonderfully over-the-top production number.
But that mania is part of what makes this Company so compelling. It all seems just a little bit unhinged (indeed, some parts, like “Side By Side By Side” more than just a bit). It’s all a manifestation of Bobbie’s mind, racing, worried, and neurotic (to use a term that would have been updated for this version). It’s an electric, original way of looking at the material, which of course is what Elliott does: Think of her Angels in America, her Curious Incident, even her War Horse (that the last worked onstage was a directorial triumph in transcending a silly, children’s-book script).
I can’t wait for it—and Craig—to come to town: We’re ready.
Company opened October 16, 2018, at the Gielgud Theatre (London) and ran through March 30, 2019. Information: companymusical.co.uk
