The New York in Company is a place full of frenetic, disaffected, neurotic and funny people. The Company, as presented in the revival playing at the Ehtel Barrymore on Broadway, takes the disconnectedness and makes it even more distant.
Rarely do the characters – the single Robert on his 35th birthday, the five married couples who form his stable of friends and the three single women who Bobby is dating – look at each other. Instead, they stand on the handsome set (who wouldn’t want a Manhattan apartment with a Steinway grand piano, parquet floors and a bar), and play their parts almost always looking at the audience. Each character is in his or her own world, no matter who is actually with them at the time.
Robert is the show’s center, the main character who is a player in every scene. Yet he’s the character with the least definition, an observer who doesn’t seem to much of a point of view except to have a good time. It’s only at the end does he begin to take form, that he starts to show the audience (and himself) what he truly wants.
Raul Esparza, a true musical theater star who combines impish charm with a bravado voice, has little to do throughout the show except gaze at the audience and jump up on a block or the piano or a Greek column that rises from the center of the stage. There has to be more going on in his head, yet it doesn’t come out too often. This has more to do with Sondheim’s writing than Esparza’s performance.
When Esparza sings Bobby’s final song, “Being Alive,” you feel his breakdown and you believe he has had the equivalent of a therapy breakthrough. That number alone might earn him a Tony nomination.
As for the other standouts, look to the women. Sondheim wrote all the wives as more interesting than their husbands. They are mother figures, confidantes and sex objects – sometimes all at the same time for Robert. The men are more like a Greek chorus, looking at Robert with wistful envy and imparting contradictory advice to him to both stay single and settle down.
Barbara Walsh, as Joanne, owns the stage with her long, graceful yet dominant strides. When she finished the last bars of Ladies Who Lunch with her repeated command to “Rise,” the audience was so awed, it didn’t make a sound. No applause. Respect.
Heather Laws, as the wedding-phobic Amy, twists her tongue around the rapid-fire meltdown that is “Getting Married Today.” And when Marta sings about the throngs that inhabit Manhattan with “Another Hundred People,” Angel Desai conveys an optimism that I wasn’t expecting but was happy to see.
One last point – presented last here because with a John Doyle show, it’s often the first thing that gets mentioned – the trick of having everyone on stage also play the musical instruments doesn’t quite work. The first time I saw a Doyle show, the revival of Sweeney Todd for which he won a directing Tony, the conceit was brilliant … it made sense that these people trapped in the mind of a mental patient would have the magic to let them perform music. But here it came across as more of a gimmick and only a small number of times – like when Robert, who hasn’t really played anything during the entire show, sits at the piano to play “Being Alive” – does it become powerful.
Catch Company at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 47th Street. If you're lucky, you'll get to see my friend David Garry, making his Broadway debut.
