“Company”: New York Bonus

I am going to make a confession right now and I hope that I don’t get shamed out of being a card-carrying member of “theatre is my life” …I have not always loved Stephen Sondheim.  Now, I know to the normal, non-obsessed human, that isn’t really a big deal.  In fact, for real life regular people, the name might not even ring a bell.  However, for the people who are as firmly entrenched in the world of the stage as I, not loving the musical god that is Sondheim, is sacrilege.  Sondheim has written some of the most famous, complex, memorable shows of the last sixty years.  But all that being said, in my early years of living in my world, I did not fully appreciate the intricacies and dissonance of his melodies.  It took me until I was a senior in high school, and we did, “Into the Woods”.   That was all it took.  Playing the Baker’s Wife opened my eyes to the brilliance of his works.  Ever since then, I have consumed the works with absolute voracity.  This is why the second show I had on my list was such an exciting one.  It was the brand-new production of “Company”.

Company, for those who are not familiar with the show, is centered around Bobby, a single man, on the eve of his 35th birthday.  He is surrounded by couples and his relationship with each is told in vignette scenes.  The pervading theme of the show is marriage, those in it and those not and are we ever truly ready.  It was written in the early 1970’s and there are parts of it that scream with the datedness of it all.  I have seen several productions of it done as written, and it always felt that it simply could not be updated.  They all had to wrangle with the misogyny of the piece, and it made it feel so distant and unapproachable.  Until now.  Before the pandemic hit, there were rumors of the very successful and exciting British reimagining of “Company” coming to Broadway.  This time around, I was super excited, they had made a change that I was itching to see.  In this new production, they have changed the role of Bobby, the single man, to Bobbie, a 35-year-old, single woman.  And this was turning the classic show on its head. For the better.

Needless to say, I was beyond excited as I sat down in the tight little theatre to begin this experience.  With the first notes of the show, I knew this was going to be a special one.  And it was.  It was theatre gold.  Re-centering the show around a single woman who wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be married but also wasn’t quite sure she didn’t want to be married was so, so successful.  We live in a society that despite all its forward motion and breaking of the glass ceiling, still looks at woman who has reached a certain age without marriage or children as missing something.  As not being complete without those very traditional steps in life.   Changing Bobbie’s gender makes it all the more sad and conflicted.  No longer is it a story about a man waffling back and forth because he might be lonely.  Now it is about a person who is not only feeling pressure from the world around her but also from her own biology.  As a woman makes her way through her 30’s, her fertility begins to decline rapidly so, whether we like it or not, the time in which women can still reproduce is a closing window.  The complexities of taking those steps in a woman’s life are not small.  Especially when one is not sure what they really want.

And not only does the gender reversal of the central character work with great gusto but also the resulting supporting character’s changes we equally as exciting and successful.  In the original script, Bobby has three girlfriends, illustrating his reluctance to settle down.  In this new show, Bobbie now has three boyfriends.  They are not carbon copies of the original girlfriends, but they all lend to the ones that came before and none more so than April turned Andy.  April is a ditzy and dumb stewardess that the male Bobby enjoys in her less than bright mental capacity.  It was such a cliché trope for the seventies.  So tired and sexist.  Seeing this poor woman on stage having to play that and being the brunt of all jokes made Bobby even less appealing.  But in becoming Andy, the role was transformed.  Now you have this big, beautiful man who has lines telling Bobbie how boring he is and it all feels so much lighter.  His scenes and song now sparkle with humor and the opportunity for the man to play a character that is softer and sillier and so much more relatable to reality.  And Bobbie’s relations to him makes her character feel even more earnest.  And makes her plight even more piqued.  Instead of a man sleeping around, she is a woman looking for the right person, willing to try relationships with those others might overlook.

It's not only in the changing of the boyfriends that dull the sharp edge of datedness and sexism. One of the most famous and challenging songs in the show is “Not Getting Married Today”.  It is such a prime example of the complexity and cleverness that Sondheim music is famous for.  It is a patter song to the best of its definition.  A patter song, for those who don’t know, is a song that is generally “spoken” in song with not many note variations however the tempo is usually fast, and the song will have many words.   These songs end up having a very distinctive “patter” sound.  “I’m Not Getting Married Today” singer Amy has been changed to Jaime in a male/male relationship and the actor I saw in the role, Matt Doyle absolutely killed the song and role. The women in this show have a tendency to be played as 70’s stereotypes and Amy was no different.  She ends up being neurotic and flighty which plays poorly for a woman but making it a gay man somehow made the characterization less offensive and just plain funny.  This may have just been the skills of the actors that I have seen playing Amy and Jaime, but I found Matt Doyle’s portrayal so endearing and successful it really nailed that change in for me.

The other small change that was made in one of the vignettes of Bobbie and her married friends.  The couple, David and Jenny, and Bobbie spend the scene smoking pot and getting progressively higher.  In the original, through the scene Jenny protests the efficacy of the pot, claiming she is not affected while showing the most obvious signs to being totally high.  Bobbie and David watch Jenny’s antics and David ends up being not a small amount patronizing and condescending about her.  It always rubbed me the wrong way.  The scene was extremely unpalatable for me.  However, in this reimagining, the partner who was more significantly under the influence was David.  His hijinks found the humor in the scene and allowed it to live there as opposed to making it about how pathetic David found Jenny in the original scene.  It lifted the mood of the scene in a way I feel it should have always been.

Obviously, I found this rewrite of “Company” very successful.  The changing of the genders, across the board, made the show so much more relatable and sympathetic for me.  Honestly, I feel like this is the way the musical should have always been written.  It is so interesting how much a product of it’s time and yet with just a few tweaks it becomes modern and totally topical.  Makes me appreciate the genius of Sondheim even more.  What he has written is so well crafted that it can stand up to the test of time with only one change.  It went from a totally relatable piece when it was written to feeling completely modern and true now, decades later.  I am so appreciative of that. And I posit that it could have gone even further by maintaining one of the girlfriends instead of making them all boyfriends…but that’s another discussion that I’m sure very few people are wanting to dive into.  Another time, my friends.

*All production photos from “Company”s Facebook page.