“Company,” Stephen Sondheim’s gimlet ode to the eternal fear of shrivelling up and dying alone—that is, of being thirty-five and single—is now itself fifty-one: a brassy older broad, two generations removed from the people it describes so brutally and so well. Three years before it premièred, in 1970, Benjamin Braddock sprang Elaine Robinson from her wedding ceremony with the urgency of a fireman rescuing a baby from a burning building, only to ride into their joint future with a look of numb horror on his face. That was commitment in the age of sexual revolution—the end of joy, the ruin of youth, the kiss of death. “Company” took that queasy closing shot of “The Graduate” as its starting point. “It’s things like using force together / shouting till you’re hoarse together / getting a divorce together / that make perfect relationships,” the show’s couples sing. They’re like prisoners arguing against their own parole. Sure, they could choose to be free. But why?
Have the marital pressures that the show examines changed in half a century? Utterly—women have allegedly been liberated; the end of men has been heralded by pundits far and wide—and, somehow, not at all. Maybe it depends whom you ask. In Marianne Elliott’s bristling, buoyant revival (at the Bernard B. Jacobs)—which was supposed to open in March, 2020, on Sondheim’s ninetieth birthday, and now, in a bittersweet trick of timing, comes to us just after his death—Bobby, the musical’s avowed bachelor, has become Bobbie (Katrina Lenk), a post-feminist, post-“Sex and the City” singleton in present-day New York, who is pursued not by a trio of marriage-hungry gals but by three eligible gents who think she’s crazy not to settle down. Her friends, all of them long ago partnered, heartily agree. Even the set (designed, with flair, by Bunny Christie, who is also responsible for the costumes) seems to conspire against her. The show opens on Bobbie’s thirty-fifth birthday—closer to her eightieth, if we’re counting in ovary years—and it won’t let her forget it. A block of brownstones are all nightmarishly numbered 35, and the same digits appear in a Jasper Johns pastiche hanging on a living-room wall. Spot a clock onstage and you can bet that its hands will be pointing to five minutes past three. It’s the middle of the afternoon, but for Bobbie the hour is growing late.
Bobbie would like to celebrate her dubious milestone quietly, alone in her apartment with a bottle of Maker’s Mark. Her married friends have other ideas. No sooner has she come through the door than the many-happy-returns voice mails begin to flood in, followed by the friends themselves, who cram, clown-car style, into Bobbie’s tiny foyer. In the theatrical equivalent of a zoom shot, the apartment, framed in white neon, glides toward us, yielding a glimpse of Bobbie, wry, skeptical, and more than a little alarmed. There will be a surprise party later, but this overstuffed scene is happening inside her overstuffed mind, where the cacophony of well-wishes threatens to drown out any she might have for herself.
Sondheim, as the moving outpouring of homages occasioned by his death attests, has become such a monumental figure that it can be easy to overlook how truly weird his work often is. The first big revolution in American musicals arrived in the middle of the last century, when the revue style perfected by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and the Gershwins gave way to the Rodgers and Hammerstein model, shows with scores that expressed emotion and songs that deepened character and progressed the plot. Sondheim, Hammerstein’s protégé, elevated that tradition to unforeseen heights, but he also liked to toy with it. “Company,” which was based on a series of one-act plays by George Furth, who wrote the book, dispenses with dramatic arc in favor of stand-alone vignettes, clustered around one of Sondheim’s favorite themes: growing up.
In the course of the musical’s two and a half hours, Bobbie, who is seen by her cohort as a kind of willful kid, visits with her various friends and lovers, and what she observes does not tempt her matrimonial appetite. Harry (Christopher Sieber) and Sarah (Jennifer Simard) sublimate their simmering aggression in bouts of jujitsu; Susan (Rashidra Scott) and Peter (Greg Hildreth), a picture-perfect couple, are getting a divorce. David (Christopher Fitzgerald) claims to dote on his wife, Jenny (Nikki Renée Daniels), but can’t stop ogling Bobbie; Paul (Etai Benson) is devoted to his fiancé, Jamie (Matt Doyle, who coasts through the terrifyingly tricky “Getting Married Today”), and Jamie repays him by calling off their wedding. As for the single men, forget it. P.J. (Bobby Conte) is a loony toon with an Illuminati tattoo and faux-spiritual pretensions; sensitive Theo (Manu Narayan) just got engaged to someone else. Then, there’s Andy (Claybourne Elder), a flight attendant whose godly body comes tragically attached to an empty head. “You’re not dumb, Andy,” Bobbie reassures him, to which he replies, “To me, I am.” The logic is bulletproof.
All this could, as the show puts it, drive a person crazy, and it does. Bobbie, in Elliott’s production, is an Alice trapped in a surreal New York Wonderland. She slithers down a manhole, and comes home to discover that her apartment has shrunk to the size of a doll house. After she goes to bed with Andy, a vision of their possible domestic future together flashes, literally, before her eyes. The stage fills with substitute Bobbies: Bobbie pregnant, Bobbie with a baby on her chest, Bobbie wiping up the piss that splatters around the toilet every time Andy takes a leak. It’s funny, it’s true, and it’s petrifying.
Change is a risk. So is not changing. Thanks to the gender switch, when Joanne (Patti LuPone), Bobbie’s salty, seen-it-all older friend, raises her vodka Stinger to “the girls who just watch,” in “The Ladies Who Lunch,” she’s no longer talking only to herself but to Bobbie, too, warning of what might happen if she stays on life’s sidelines. Joanne’s marriage—her third—to the adoring, and usefully rich, Larry (Terence Archie), is the most complex coupling in the show. She distrusts Larry’s love for her, because trust is what gets you hurt; there’s a soft heart beneath that carapace of knowingness. Over the years, LuPone has concocted a signature, bouncy version of Joanne’s ferocious song, maybe to distinguish hers from that of Elaine Stritch, who originated the song and made it a classic; LuPone’s pronunciation of the words “ladies,” “caftan,” “sitting”—her pronunciation of any word, really—is, like sunrise at the Grand Canyon, a phenomenon that should be experienced in person at least once in this life.
If there’s a weak link here, it’s Lenk. She certainly looks the part of Bobbie, slinky and seductive in blood red, and she acts it, too, with sharp comic timing and ironic emotional armor to spare. What she can’t totally do is sing it. Lenk seems to push her voice, straining where she should soar. There’s nothing wrong with a little roughness; it can even be good to have some sand in the oyster. But Lenk gives the impression of holding herself apart from the music. Bobbie gets one chance to cut through the detachment that she has so carefully cultivated, and it is one of the greatest moments in musical theatre, or, you might argue—if you are feeling especially grateful to Sondheim in this newly Sondheimless world—in music or in theatre: the song “Being Alive,” a five-minute journey from cynicism to hope. The song’s aesthetic and emotional beauty lies in its steady build. But Lenk chops each verse up into short, disconnected phrases, and her tendency to break into her speaking voice brings to mind the devastating moment, in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary about the making of the original “Company” cast album, when the studio engineer asks a vocally exhausted Stritch to “sing” her next take. Perhaps to compensate, Elliott has Lenk overact the scene to the point of pantomime, kneeling prayerfully, at the song’s climax, to signal that she’s ready to make her wish for human connection come true. If she could forget all that jazz and trust the music, the feelings would follow. They always do.
Another big birthday is at the heart of “Kimberly Akimbo,” a new musical (directed by Jessica Stone, at the Atlantic Theatre Company) composed by Jeanine Tesori and based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, who wrote the book and the lyrics. Kimberly Levaco, the show’s protagonist, is about to turn sixteen, but the occasion is far from sweet. She suffers from a rare genetic disorder that turns her into a kind of reverse Benjamin Button, aging at warp speed. While her peers are hitting puberty, Kimberly (played by the sixty-two-year-old Victoria Clark, with shy adolescent charm) has already gone through menopause. Worse, the statistics suggest that the coming year may be her last.
Yet this grim premise yields something refreshingly off-kilter, with more than a dash of Roald Dahl, who, like Sondheim, tended to dress optimism in a cynic’s clothing. Kimberly has a deadbeat drunk for a dad (Steven Boyer) and a chirpy narcissist for a mom (Alli Mauzey). Her aunt Debra (a bawdy Bonnie Milligan) is appropriately affectionate, but also, alas, a crook whose latest scheme involves roping Kimberly and a gang of her fellow New Jersey high schoolers into committing mail fraud. (Rarely has such loving artistic attention been paid to Bergen County.) And, as in a Dahl story, it’s the kids who have moral sense and sympathy. Seth (Justin Cooley), a tuba-playing nerd, isn’t afraid to march to his own beat, and he sees, in Kimberly, someone whom he might march with. Life may be long, or vanishingly short. Whatever the case, this tender show tells us, it’s worth finding good company on the way. ♦
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