Company

[scenicdesign71]

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/PHOTO-Get-A-First-Look-At-The-Broadway-Cast-Of-COMPANY-20200108

[scenicdesign71]

From BroadwayCon 2020:

[scenicdesign71]

B'way's new Harry (Christopher Sieber) and Sarah (Jennifer Simard) on marital jujitsu, literal and figurative, in this week's New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/old-married-not-to-each-other-costars-try-jujitsu

[scenicdesign71]

Company's producers have opened a web store where you can buy show merch while waiting for the show to return sometime in the indefinite future.

And I somehow missed this ad last October, or at least failed to post it here.  It includes publicity footage of Ms. Lenk as Bobbie (shot before the B'way production began rehearsal, but in what appears to be full costume, hair and makeup), intercut with clips from the West End production; snippets of that production winning Best Musical Revival and Best Supporting Actress (LuPone) at last year's Olivier awards; and soundbites from SJS, Ms. Elliott, and designer Bunny Christie (whose set also won an Olivier):

[scenicdesign71]

D.A. Pennebaker's 1970 doc Original Cast Album: Company has been streaming on the Criterion Channel for the past month or so, but I'm excited for it to be released on Blu Ray hopefully sooner than later.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-unstrung-power-of-elaine-stritch-in-original-cast-album-company

[scenicdesign71]

This is a month old, though still not quite as out-of-date as it ought to be in a year -- or a world -- that wasn't quite so jaw-droppingly awful.

But late or not, it clearly needs to be on this forum, and this thread is as good a place as any (with apologies if it's already been posted on some other thread previously):

[scenicdesign71]

The show is officially scheduled to resume on B'way Dec. 20, with an official opening night of January 9, 2022:

https://deadline.com/2021/05/company-broadway-return-reopening-december-katrina-lenk-patti-lupone-confirmed-1234753024/



Ed.: As of July 6, these dates have been moved up about a month: previewing November 15, opening December 9:

https://deadline.com/2021/07/company-broadway-reopening-early-return-cast-announced-1234786777/

[scenicdesign71]

D.A. Pennebaker's 1970 doc Original Cast Album: Company has been streaming on the Criterion Channel for the past month or so, but I'm excited for it to be released on Blu Ray hopefully sooner than later.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-unstrung-power-of-elaine-stritch-in-original-cast-album-company

Finally...

https://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/news/criterion-collection-to-release-cast-album-company_92272.html

[DiveMilw]

SET LIST
"Company"
"Someone is Waiting"
"Another Hundred People"
"You Could Drive A Person Crazy"

CAST
Katrina Lenk
Matt Doyle
Christopher Fitzgerald
Christopher Sieber
Jennifer Simard
Terence Archie
Etai Benson
Bobby Conte
Nikki Renée Daniels
Claybourne Elder
Greg Hildreth
Anisha Nagarajan
Manu Narayan
Rashidra Scott

BAND
Joel Fram: music direction
Paul Staroba: piano
Michael Blanco: bass
Rich Rosenzweig: drums

[scenicdesign71]

Happy for the cast (and for Mr. S.)!, but glad I wasn't there the other night (I'm going in January); eight standing ovations frankly sounds like a whole additional show of its own -- which might be wildly gratifying and make for a memorable evening, but I'd still rather be watching the show onstage.

[scenicdesign71]

Surprise -- the NYT's Jesse Green is decidedly not a fan of the new production:

In A Gender-Flipped Revival, 'Company' Loves Misery

In the New Yorker, contrariwise, Alexandra Schwartz joins many others in singing its praises:  Two Musicals on the Perils of Aging

Either way, I look forward to seeing Company in about three weeks.
(Also Kimberly Akimbo -- which everyone is raving about, Green included, and which I'm seeing next week).

[scenicdesign71]

I still haven't yet seen Company (next Wednesday in theory, Omicron permitting), so I can't yet say whether or not I agree with yesterday's NYT essay in which Jesse Green reiterates his complaint that Bunny Christie's set tells Bobbie's story better than Elliott or Lenk do.  But his analysis of the role of design on Broadway is, if not wildly original, at least astutely expressed (though also, alas, rather oversimplified; I wish the piece was longer, as it's a much more complicated subject than he has the column space to address more than glancingly).

I also haven't seen Six, but I have to wonder whether his use of it here -- as an example of a design whose contributions to the storytelling are more "proportional" -- isn't a bit of calculated provocation.  When your ambitions, and indeed your story, are as exceedingly slender and uncomplicated as Marlow and Moss's seem to be, the sweet spot between "hyperdesign" and its anemic opposite becomes a much easier, lower-stakes, and correspondingly less impressive, target to hit.

Speaking of that opposite (according to Green, at least), I did see Kimberly Akimbo last week, and I'm not sure I agree with his criticism of David Zinn's "simple" (it actually looked pretty pricey to me) but clever set.  It may be that some other director, perhaps Fun Home's Sam Gold, could have done more with this material; but I came away with the impression that David Lindsay-Abaire's book, spread thin among proliferating subplots, is actually more undernourished than you might guess from admiring reviews like Green's.  There's family-friendly quirkiness and uplift aplenty -- the whole thing read to me like a middling Netflix comedy -- but I don't really think Zinn can be faulted for failing to supply an illusion of depth that's missing from the script.  (That said, I am curious to read Lindsay-Abaire's original play; and if a cast album of Tesori's score is released -- and/or if the show transfers to Broadway, as seems likely -- I'll be more than happy to give it another chance).

[scenicdesign71]

I just saw Company with my mom tonight (both of us triple-vaxed and N-95'd), and I'm delighted to disagree with almost all of Mr. Green's complaints.  About the set specifically, I have to say that, after the stripped-down miniaturizations that have comprised almost every major NYC Sondheim revival for the past decade and a half, it's pretty thrilling to see a Company -- of all things! -- that tickles the eye and the brain in equal measure: this is an expansive, elegant, dazzlingly inventive staging (if this qualifies as hyperdesign, then I'm all for it), with a 14-piece orchestra and a delightful cast.  I wouldn't disagree with Time Out's Adam Feldman, who confesses that Company has never been his personal favorite among SJS's works, but was won over by this production to the point of pronouncing it "the most satisfying Broadway revival of a Sondheim show in history" (emphasis mine).

Also, the house seemed pretty packed -- especially for a Wednesday night, and almost shockingly for a Wed. night in the middle of the Omicron super-surge that has closed many shows at least temporarily (and some permanently).  Hopefully Company will be able to dodge the bug and run for awhile; it certainly deserves to, and I'd very much like to see it again.  Elliott and Christie's stagecraft is so smart -- and so bountiful -- that a single viewing, even from center-orchestra seats, wasn't sufficient for me to work out the details of just how it was all accomplished.  (Literal stage magic: no fewer than two illusionists are credited in the program).

[scenicdesign71]

The new documentary Keeping Company With Sondheim, coming to PBS in May, "explores [the show's] legacy" and "offers an inside look at Tony-winning director Marianne Elliott's creative process of bringing the reimagined, gender-swapped production to Broadway during the COVID-19 pandemic":

https://playbill.com/article/keeping-company-with-sondheim-exploring-stephen-sondheim-and-george-furths-company-will-debut-on-pbs-in-may

[scenicdesign71]

A friend who saw Company yesterday texted me excitedly during intermission, and as we were chatting it occurred to me that, for all its scale and spectacle, one of the things that excites me most about Christie's design is its efficiency.

I remembered pausing on the way out of the theatre, when I was there two weeks ago, to look at the set under worklight (on two-show days especially, it's not uncommon for crews to start resetting things while the audience is still vacating the auditorium).  During the performance I had marveled more than once at the sheer size and quantity of scenery, wondering where they were fitting everything backstage.  But under worklight it struck me that, while there is indeed a whole lot of stuff, Christie's stage-filling compositions actually break down into a sleek and versatile collection of modular units (only two of them really large -- and even those, less so than they appear from out front and under light) being imaginatively reconfigured and re-dressed throughout the evening.

It reminded me of John Napier's original Les Misérables design, in the broad sense that its satisfactions were derived not so much from pure spectacle as from the extreme (and extremely clever) compression of an entire microcosmic world into a machine that was, at root, as elegantly simple as it was fantastically effective.  Unlike Les Mis -- whose basic components were on display from the moment the curtain rose, occasionally doing unexpected tricks but with almost nothing added to or subtracted from the unit set over the course of the evening --  Christie's Company design has a magic-box element of constant surprise and revelation.  It takes a while, but only adds to the delight, to realize that her box of tricks actually consists of a limited number of pieces being re-used with shrewd variations.  Neil Austin's lighting design, balancing neon clarity and inky blackness, is crucial to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't strategy by which the show moves.  And the gorgeously controlled color palette -- hot-red Bobbie moving through a world of silver-grey cubicles -- is deployed with such dazzling intelligence, culminating in the brilliant "Tick Tock," that it becomes hard to imagine Company any other way.

I've never designed the show before (only assisted a friend -- in fact, Dan, the one who texted me yesterday -- on a regional production some 15 years ago).  But if I had, I'd be green with envy.  And if I ever do, I'll be sorely challenged to get this one out of my head: it's as unforgettable, in its way, as Boris Aronson's epochal original design, which is the highest praise imaginable in this context.  Between the two -- Aronson's forbiddingly deconstructed glass and steel high-rise, and Christie's trippy urban travelogue -- I'm damned if I can think of a world for Company that they haven't, between them, already brilliantly realized.