LOS
ANGELES TIMES
May
21, 2004
THEATER
REVIEW
Social anachronisms don't
carry the play into the present day, but the music and the wit transcend
chronology.
By Rob Kendt
You've
come a long way, Bobby-baby.
The
1970 premiere of "Company" represented a full-scale assault on two
venerable American institutions, marriage and the musical theatre--a hardly
coincidental pairing, since the conventional musical-comedy plot has always
been essentially an elaborate ritual designed to unite boy and girl. With
"Company," librettist George Furth and composer/lyricist Stephen
Sondheim dropped not only the curtain clinch but the very crutch of a plot
altogether.
The
show is now nearly as old as its central figure, and from Massachusetts to
"Urinetown," neither marriage nor the musical is what it was.
Singlehood
has changed its stripes, too: Today a tasteful, urbane, persistently eligible
35-year-old male wouldn't be an emotional cripple, pitied and envied by his
married friends, as is Bobby. He'd be a jet-setting metrosexual who'd give the
"Queer Eye" crew a run for its money.
Director
David Lee's bright, uneven new staging for Reprise! Broadway's Best in Concert
plays the show straight, as if it's still headline news rather than a bona fide
period piece. It uses updates from Sam Mendes' 1995 London production, also
employed by Scott Ellis for the Broadway revival of the same year, which
incorporate such modern marvels as answering machines messages and cordless phones
but retain dialogue about swingers versus "squares."
That
may be why the unabashedly groovy approach of last year's excellent production
at L.A.'s 99-seat Knightsbridge Theatre, complete with bell bottoms and puka
shells, somehow made "Company" seem newer, and fresher, than this
half-update.
Lee's
version does have the considerable asset of music director Gerald Sternbach's
tight, snappy onstage orchestra knocking Sondheim's score out of the park.
And Lee has an ensemble, artfully cast by Bruce H.
Newberg, to step up with a series of generous star turns and occasionally
function as a real company, giving the show's frequent grouped scenes an
engaging pseudo-amateur abandon in Kay Cole's goofy choreography.
Still,
this feels less like a true revival, in the sense of bringing new life to a
classic, than a reasonably noteworthy rendition.
Glossing
the show's age is not the only slightly off-key choice that brings this
"Company" short of triumph. As the indecisive protagonist Bobby,
whose single status both annoys and animates his married friends, the handsome,
supple-voiced Christopher Sieber gives a particularly dark, despairing reading.
This
is partly a danger that comes with the territory--the role contains more than
its share of show-stopping soliloquoys and interior monologues--and partly a
case of overselling Bobby's denial.
Sieber
doesn't sketch a carefree bachelor who gradually wakes up to the emptiness of
his life as a perpetual third wheel; he's feeling it from the word go, as his
gaggle of friends and lovers assemble to beseech en masse, "Bobby, come on
over for dinner," and to remind him, "We loooooooove you." Sieber never
quite looks like he returns the sentiment.
The
show's second-act opener, the ironically showbizzy "Side by Side by
Side," essentially repeats this image of mass, hectoring codependence but
with an inspired difference: Bobby's taken a drug, so that his friends'
escalating entreaties take the shape of a kind of vaudeville nightmare.
It's
this sunny phantasm that conveys the show's signature brand of brittle fun most
convincingly, with Cole's choreography hitting the right mix of soft-shoe sheen
and talent-show moxie. And it's Sieber's most relaxed, amused and therefore
dashing moment.
The
actors are mostly great where it counts. As Amy, the reluctant bride whose
breathless patter song "Getting Married Today" is one of the
theater's great mad scenes, Jean Louisa Kelly nails the character's neurotic
flicker.
Judith
Light makes a light meal of the acerbic New York broad Joanne before sinking
her teeth into a ferocious rendition of the bitter cocktail "The Ladies
Who Lunch."
The
show's other bravura moment is its antic ode to big-city transience,
"Another Hundred People," which Deborah Gibson lends a commandingly
brassy sound. And Sieber gives the finale, the soaring quasi-affirmation
"Being Alive," the dramatic arc his overall performance misses.
The
show does have another big solo, often wisely cut but unfortunately restored
here: the erotic "Tick-Tock" dance, for which the gamely flailing
Cady Huffman lacks only a pole.
Amy
Pietz sweetly underplays the ditzy stewardess April; Sharon Lawrence and Scott
Waara make a recognizably competitive couple; Josh Radnor is affecting as Amy's
fiance, Paul; Richard Kline makes a droll foil for Joanne's acidic barbs, and
Anastasia Barzee has a lovely coloratura.
But
the actor who gives the show its most authentic moments is chubby, impassive
Kevin Chamberlin, as a husband who tries to explain to Bobby his married
contentment. "Marriage gives youƒ what?" he says, staring off into
space. Chamberlin gives that pause an eloquent blankness.
He's
also the character who must call his wife a "square," which not even
Chamberlin can sell. It's not that the insights of "Company" into the
fraught fragility of human relationships aren't universal, even timeless; it's
just that putting a slightly dated show in ill-fitting contemporary drag only
distracts us from those insights.
As
a chance to hear one of the theatre's most accomplished scores, peppered with
some of its more incisively witty writing, this "Company" makes fine
company for the evening. We'll leave it to another revival to know us too well
and ruin our sleep.
"Company," Reprise! Broadway's Best in Concert
at the UCLA Freud Playhouse, UCLA. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 &
8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 & 7 p.m. Ends June 6. $55-65. (310) 825-2101. Running
time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.