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In Comes Company
The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park continues its Marx Theatre season with one of the boldest productions in the theatre’s 46-year-history, a new take on Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Tony Award-winning musical Company. Directed by John Doyle, fresh on the heels of his triumphant Broadway opening of Sweeney Todd, Company will employ that show’s technique of using actors as the orchestra of musicians when it begins public previews at the Playhouse on March 14 and continues through April 14. Company is a revolutionary, unconventional look at love and commitment in a complex modern world. The show is an honest, clever and sophisticated portrayal of five married couples as seen through the eyes of their mutual friend Robert, a bachelor. The story takes place on the occasion of Robert’s birthday as he’s about to walk in on a surprise party thrown by his closest friends. Through a series of vignettes, the audience meets them as Robert weighs the pros and cons of wedded life, comparing the good and bad aspects of their marriages with three of his own less than perfect partnerships. Company is an incisive and touching tale that explores not only fear and longing but also the simple joys of being alive. In 1970, it was the new team of composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and director/producer Harold Prince who transformed the very definition of musical theatre with their landmark production of Company. The show introduced the idea of the concept musical.
Company originated as a series of 11 one-act plays written by George Furth, an actor who had been featured in supporting roles in numerous films and who was a friend of Stephen Sondheim. Furth had penned the plays as a vehicle for actress Kim Stanley, who was to have starred in all of them. But as rehearsals approached, the show’s producer experienced problems raising the money necessary to fund the production, and Furth turned to his friend for advice. At the time, Sondheim was struggling with a show of his own: a murder mystery called The Girls Upstairs. (It ultimately would lose the murder element and gain a new title, Follies.) Furth’s writing appealed to Sondheim, who, in turn, recommended that Furth seek the advice of his own longtime friend Hal Prince, to whom he handed over the script. Prince was skeptical that the piece could work as Furth envisioned it. But he saw in the stories the possibility of something else — a new musical centering on the theme of marriage, a subject he had been considering for some time. Sondheim agreed to work in earnest on the new project if Prince would agree to follow it by working with him on The Girls Upstairs. The bargain was made, and Company became the first Sondheim show directed by Prince. A key challenge in converting Furth’s plays was the fact that the pieces lacked an obvious common thread. A couple of them were specifically about marriage, and those became the initial basis of the book with several others then added. All of the pieces featured a couple and a third character who acted as a kind of observer. For Company, these observers were merged into the single character of Robert, who served as a tour guide for the audience through the world of modern matrimony. A second challenge lay in the style of Furth’s writing, which did not lend itself easily to the idea of characters breaking into song. Sondheim began writing songs that existed outside of the conventional confines, using other characters to provide observations on the action or offer insight about marriage in general. The result was a show with a nonlinear (almost circular) structure, in which the story was told through a series of episodes rather than within a strictly narrative plot structure. When Company opened in New York at the Alvin Theatre on April 26, 1970, it was met with decidedly positive notices. Sondheim’s music and lyrics were praised, along with the honest and fresh approach with which the show examined relationships. “So brilliant it passes over one like a shock wave,” said the Daily News. “A landmark,” raved both Time and Newsweek. In The New Yorker, Brendan Gill described the show as “an original piece of work, and one, moreover, that joyously breaks new ground. Mr. Sondheim’s deservedly celebrated talents are at their wryest, driest, highest pitch of tunefulness and wit.” Company earned for Sondheim, long considered one of Broadway’s finest and most inventive lyricists, his first recognition as a serious composer. The show was honored with the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical as well as six Tony Awards, including those for music and lyrics (Sondheim’s first), book, scenic design, director and best musical. Fast forward to 2005. The partnership between the Cincinnati Playhouse and director John Doyle to re-examine Company began in January of that year, when Producing Artistic Director Edward Stern traveled to London to see Doyle’s production of Sweeney Todd. At the time, while many producers were courting the director to bring that inventive revival to New York, Stern instead asked Doyle about another opportunity. According to Stern, “The fortunate thing for me was that no one was really talking to John about what he wanted to do next. And so I asked him, and he said Company. And that was precisely the show I was hoping we would be able to do, because I thought that its urban landscape and contemporary setting would lend itself easily to the actors playing the music.” Doyle had pioneered musical theatre through actor-musicianship in the United Kingdom. A former artistic director of four prestigious regional theatres there and director of more than 200 professional productions, Doyle has, for the last 10 years, been an associate director of Watermill Theatre. His work has won three Regional Theatre Awards for Best Production of a Musical, as well as four further nominations in the same category (most recently for his acclaimed revival of Mack and Mabel.) Doyle’s London production of Sweeney Todd was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award and an Evening Standard Award and won the Whatsonstage Award for Best Musical Revival. When Sweeney premiered in New York last November, it was again to critical acclaim. The New York Times described the production as “one helluva show,” and The Wall Street Journal called it “a staging of the utmost force and originality, an event theatergoers will be talking about for years to come.” According to Variety, Sweeney is “the freshest, most beguiling act to hit Broadway in quite some time,” adding that “much of what makes this Sweeney so singular is the production’s fusion of narrative, music and performance into a formula that foregrounds each aspect while organically uniting them.” It is this same technique that Doyle will apply to the Playhouse’s production of Company. Rather than the spectacle associated by many with today’s Broadway musical, Doyle’s approach focuses instead on imagination, and doesn’t let audience members off the hook from their roles of connecting and engaging with the story. Doyle insists he’s not interested in gimmicks or in telling audiences how to think or feel about a production. Rather he’s concerned simply in telling a story, and collaborating with others who enjoy finding new ways to do that. For the Playhouse, Company is the ultimate celebration of a long-established commitment to sharing the genius of Stephen Sondheim with Cincinnati audiences. “We’ve been so connected to Sondheim’s work, now producing six of his plays during my 14-year tenure,” says Stern. “This is really the pinnacle of that association. In the same way that Stephen Sondheim redefined American musicals, John Doyle seems to be redefining, in his own way, the staging of musical theatre. To see John’s musical technique fulfilled with another Sondheim piece is thrilling. We’re excited to play a role in furthering John’s vision and furthering this collaboration between two great artists. “Cincinnati is a musical town, and it will be thrilling for our audiences to see musical theatre fashioned in a way no one ever thought of before,” says Stern. “It’s great for Cincinnati and exciting for Sondheim fans everywhere.” |
