Review: Chilly, clever production reimagines 'Company' in unsettling ways
The revival of the 1970 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical runs through Sunday at the Belk Theater.
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on November 22, 2023. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here.
Sondheim's mastery remains intact, if little else does, in national tour at Belk Theater
Britney Coleman (center) plays Bobbie, a single 35-year-old living in New York whose friends are all married, in the touring production of “Company” at the Belk Theater through Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Blumenthal Performing Arts)
by Lawrence Toppman
The curtain rises on a woman who enters a tiny kitchen, literally a room inside a box, on her 35th birthday. She drinks, something she will do to excess throughout the play. Figures emerge, murmuring like worried ghosts, from the mists outside her barren abode.
Later, under the pretext of concern for the still-single Bobbie, these friends will show up as her chattering advisors, nagging consciences, even spastic puppets who wear odd party hats — possibly dunce caps, possibly suggesting pawns in a chess game — who flail around the stage so threateningly that she crawls under a table to hide.
No wonder Bobbie, the protagonist of “Company,” remains commitment-phobic. The five manic couples who hover around her suggest the kind of commitment that leads to an asylum.
Director Marianne Elliott won a Tony for her reimagining of the 1970 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, now at Belk Theater in the Broadway Lights season. The gender change for the hero(ine) got the most attention, as did the updating of casting for the supporting couples, who now include a gay marriage and mixed-race pairings. (A really daring change would have been a lesbian girlfriend for Bobbie, but she’s still pursued by three guys.)
Yet the real change has been one of tone. Most of the performances have been slightly exaggerated, and scenes once played for pathos — for instance, the departure of the flight attendant after a one-night stand with Bobbie — turn into buffoonery, as two of her male pals give romantic advice while the flight attendant performs oral sex on her.
Such quick empty flings or might-have-been pairings with unavailable guys lead nowhere, bringing up the question: If marriage is so unattractive, despite the final assertion that it isn’t by the suddenly amicable couples, and serial dating doesn’t work, where can Bobbie find fulfillment? We can’t guess. Furth gives her no character outside of romantic or sexual yearnings. We know nothing about her background, her work, her passions; she doesn’t even have a last name.
Bunny Christie also won a Tony for her sets, a complex series of moving chambers that usually seem to imprison inhabitants. (They broke down twice on opening night, once for so long that cast members came out for an impromptu Q-and-A.) The gray, white and black sets and costumes hint at the drab lives of the other couples; only Bobbie (bubbly Britney Coleman) gets a red dress to show she’s still vibrant and hasn’t yet turned into a bore-fully wedded wife.
I expected the gender change to introduce a biological clock: A 35-year-old unmarried woman faces a deadline if she wants children, though a 35-year-old man does not. I suppose the occasional ticking noise in the background may have been a reference to that, and Bobbie has a farcical nightmare about pregnancy that remained unclear to me.
Because the 1970 lyrics are intact, some of Sondheim’s songs align oddly with the updated book. The inebriated Joanne (wry Judy McLane, who’s first-rate) talks about classes in optical art and a fashionable attachment to Mahler in “The Ladies Who Lunch,” which sounds dated in the era of cellphones and texting. But the surefire songs still tell: Matt Rodin is hysterically funny as Jamie in the patter song “Getting Married Today,” and Coleman’s final “Being Alive” resonates emotionally, even when delivered more as an anthem than an introspective plea.
Sondheim comes off best in this revival. “Company” kicked off the longest consecutive run of top-flight musicals any composer ever had: He followed it with “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd” while adding lyrics for the revamped “Candide.”
You hear his soon-to-be-trademarks here: witty internal rhyming, melodic simplicity alternating with polyphonic textures, whimsical pastiches (the boy-group trio “You Could Drive a Person Crazy”), constantly shifting rhythms that never seem clumsy (“Another Hundred People”). He had left conventional shows behind after “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1962 and begun to flex his musical muscles. This “Company” shows, as any configuration of it would, why he became the important and imitated Broadway composer of the next 50 years.
If you’re going: “Company” runs through Sunday at Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St. Tickets cost $35 to $114. Get them at carolinatix.org or call 704-372-1000.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Ledger.
Related Ledger article:
“From Charlotte’s youth orchestra to the world’s biggest stages” (an article published in Monday’s Ledger about a violinist in the pit of “Company.”)
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