Company Broadway Reviews

Naturally, there have been a few other character gender swaps as well: The aforementioned eligible bachelors our hero is juggling now sing 'You Could Drive a Person Crazy'; it may no longer be an Andrews Sisters-style number, but the three-part harmonies are as groovy as ever. Amy-the reluctant bride who sings 'Getting Married Today'-has become Jamie the reluctant groom; Matt Doyle's take on the warp-speed, tongue-twisting tune is simply marvelous. And Bobbie's impulse proposal to Jamie ('Marry me! And everybody'll leave us alone!') is just as ridiculous as Bobby's impulse proposal to Amy always was. 'It's just that you have to want to marry somebody, not just somebody,' Jamie explains gently, leading to Bobbie's Act 1-ending 'Marry Me A Little'-the stop on the road on the way to the show-ending 'Being Alive.' Even though she proclaims 'I'm ready now,' she's clearly not: 'Love me just enough./ Warm and sweet and easy,/ Just the simple stuff,' she coos. Lenk-a Tony winner for The Band's Visit-really gets to show her range as an actress in Company.

No other show understands the callused skin that hardened, cynical New Yorkers develop to make it through another miserable day quite like 'Company' does. Sondheim's musical, splendidly directed by Marianne Elliott, is a paean to NYC about the pains of living in NYC. Eight million people and somehow you're still single and in your 30s. Constantly surrounded by wackos and dullards. Friends hightail it at random, unable to deal with the stress. Apartments are small. The subway is unavoidable. Why pay for therapy when you could go to 'Company'?

No other show understands the callused skin that hardened, cynical New Yorkers develop to make it through another miserable day quite like 'Company' does. Sondheim's musical, splendidly directed by Marianne Elliott, is a paean to NYC about the pains of living in NYC. Eight million people and somehow you're still single and in your 30s. Constantly surrounded by wackos and dullards. Friends hightail it at random, unable to deal with the stress. Apartments are small. The subway is unavoidable. Why pay for therapy when you could go to 'Company'?

For the single women attending this show, it's impossible not to feel something deeply for this story. I am just like Bobbie, single by choice and moving into my 34th year of living. The pressures of life and family to marry for love, or company, exist. Any time you turn on ABC on a Tuesday evening for an episode of The Bachelorette or log onto any popular dating app you can catch a woman approaching her 30s trying to beat marriage clock she built for herself. This vibrant reinvention is welcome and authentic, but Bobbie needs stronger conviction to make us truly care.

Director Marianne Elliott puts the fun and the sex back into Stephen Sondheim's 'Company.' This is the production, first staged in London, where the lead character Bobby is now Bobbie. The switch from male to female works, but more important is the light, sexy touch of Elliott's direction and how it frees the musical from the year of its world premiere, 1970. This very rousing and arousing 'Company' revival opened Thursday at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

The production, directed by Marianne Elliott - or rather thoroughly reimagined by Marianne Elliott - scrubs away the date-stamps on this 1970 musical, with a book by George Furth, so thoroughly that the show seems as if it was written yesterday. While maintaining the original's eternally relevant themes, of emotional uncertainty and the risks and rewards of the married state, the production refreshes them for a new century and a society that has changed radically in the past 50 years.

Magnetic and devastatingly droll in The Band's Visit, Lenk plays the part of the charismatic chameleon compellingly, holding her own coyly, wryly, boisterously with each of the zany couples with which she spends her time. But she doesn't let her guard down enough in the moments in between for a more transparent, fully sympathetic Bobbie to come through. That's in large part because she sings most of Sondheim's soliloquies for Bobbie with an overt crooniness and rather affected vowels that give the sense that the character is still performing for us even when she's alone; the songs also tend to sit too high in her voice to allow much warmth to enter in. Only in 'Being Alive,' the show's final number, does Lenk offer a shivering, small-scale intimacy, as if she's learning the words for the first time. It's too little, too late, though, to buy that this is the Bobbie who we've been wanting to get to know all along.

The production, an import from England directed by Marianne Elliott, cannot be called definitive. Its most attention-getting feature is the switching of the genders of several of the characters, which at its best feels like an interesting thought experiment about the difference in our attitudes towards men and women. Even when the gender switching feels less than completely thought out, the musical proves to be sturdy enough to allow for such noodling around without undermining the essence of the show. It helps that this 'Company' also showcases a company of some of the finest actors on Broadway, and several must-see performances - Patti LuPone, yes of course, but also Christopher Fitzgerald and Matt Doyle.

A miscast Bobbie aside, there is very little to complain about in this excellent production of one of Sondheim's most dynamic works, created at a time when the writer-composer was transitioning from the Golden Age that raised him into the postmodern theatre he helped create. The gender swap is ingeniously, thoughtfully implemented and, after a year in isolation, the story's ruminations on the necessity for aloneness, and the importance of connection hit harder than ever. I'll drink to that.

'Company's other commitment-phobe, Amy, has been reborn as Jamie, a man, still terrified to marry the adoring Paul, played by the adorable Etai Benson. After managing to calm Matt Doyle's adroitly hysterical Jamie, Bobbie sings 'Marry Me A Little,' one of numerous Sondheim fan favorites cut from productions of his shows through the years. 'Keep a tender distance/So we'll both be free...I'm ready,' she announces. She isn't, quite yet, but she's getting there, just as Bobby was, and Elliott and her own company trace that journey with a mix of intuition, invention and heart worthy of its creators.

It's new. And truth be told, I was never less than riveted - if usually in the way Bobby is, eyeballing messy marriages. Nor is the chance to hear the great score live with a 14-piece orchestra to be taken lightly; is there a more exciting opening number than the title song? So I guess I'm sorry-grateful. Sorry for not liking this version of 'Company' better - and grateful to Sondheim for providing the chance to find out.

The modern setting and gender switches help; with a woman as Bobbie, and the sexes of several couples swapped around, the text plays out in exciting new ways. (The sequence for the instrumental 'Tick Tock,' for instance, now evokes the notion of a biological clock.) The comedy of the modernized book scenes is squeezed to the hilt by a cast that includes musical-theater überdiva Patti LuPone, harnessing her imperious earthiness to outstanding effect, and Broadway pros like Jennifer Simard-who can make any line a laugh line-Nikki Renée Daniels and the Christophers Sieber and Fitzgerald. The show's surreal aspects are realized in designer Bunny Christie's fantastical urban set: a constantly shifting wow of claustrophobic frame-lit boxes, monochromatic interiors, elevators going up and down, Alice in Wonderland-style shifts of scale.

The highs are so high in director Marianne Elliott's gender-reversed 'Company' that a Sondheim freak like me can live with aspects that don't quite hit those lofty heights. We'll get to those, but first, let's dwell for a spell on the joys of a Broadway revival that had its official opening Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre - pleasures that make this production a moving, and deeply funny, living memorial to the late Stephen Sondheim.

Half a century has passed since Stephen Sondheim and George Furth first dazzled Broadway with 'Company,' their tartly astute 1970 musical about a single Manhattanite dogged by coupled friends to meet a mate. But director Marianne Elliott's sensational new revival strikes like a lightning bolt, surging with fresh electricity and burnishing its creators' legacy with an irresistible sheen.

If there's a better, more vital way to honor the late, incomparable Stephen Sondheim than Marianne Elliott's superb production of Company, Broadway hasn't invented it. This gorgeous revival of the Sondheim-George Furth masterwork at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, is, from across-the-board excellent performances and thoughtful revisions to the visual delight of a lovely and ingeniously clever set design, a gift both to and from the genius we lost last month.

Should directors flip gender on other Sondheim classics? I don't know how much we'd gain from a Ms. Sweeney Todd or a male-model Dot. In Company, human properties of trust, love, and loneliness are transitive across male, female, straight, and gay lines. One thing I am certain of: Company is the most sophisticated fun I've had in a theater in ages. It's sexy, hilarious, and hits home in a way that's honest and shockingly resonant. Sondheim fanatics already know what a genius score it is, an explosion of wit and insight and addictive melodies. I can't wait to go again and tear up as Lenk bares her soul in 'Being Alive' or the phenomenal ensemble slays the house in the maniacal razzle-dazzle of 'Side By Side by Side.' The great man passed away two weeks ago; there is no more fitting tribute than a breakthrough work given a whole new life.

The production (which is a bit overlong, at just under three hours) contains superb staging, visual design (including oversized party balloons, an 'Alice in Wonderland' motif, and even a rainfall effect), music direction, and casting - with one notable exception in its leading lady, Tony winner Katrina Lenk ('The Band's Visit'), who is plainly miscast as Bobbie, lacking both the vocal chops and emotional vulnerability for the role.

As talented as Lenk is, however, to this longtime fan of Company she seems jarringly wrong for Bobbie, regardless of the character's gender. A darkening touch of cynicism can work with this recessive protagonist, as Raul Esparza showed in the terrific 2006 Broadway revival. But Bobby/Bobbie's yearning has to be apparent, too, and Lenk makes her inaccessible. Without the sense of an ache inside for something more emotionally satisfying - a quality by all accounts not missing from London lead Rosalie Craig's performance - the internal conflict that drives the show has a fuel shortage. Lenk mostly seems aloof, casting a quizzical, sometimes bemused eye over her married friends while remaining too opaque about Bobbie's own needs.

Which brings us to LuPone. Her visceral, showstopping, rendition of 'The Ladies Who Lunch,' performed as her character, Joanne, sits perched in a grinding nightclub, is simply extraordinary, filled with angst, hope, cynicism, possibility, vulnerability and all of the qualities you typically and traditionally look for in 'Company.' Unlike Lenk, who is perfectly charming and perfectly consistent throughout the entire production, LuPone's Joanne actually changes over the course of the number, journeying toward some kind of love (or at least human communion) as people typically do in musicals.