Sondheim Sensibility: Harsh Truth About Life By STEPHEN HOLDEN

April 30, 2010
Sondheim Sensibility: Harsh Truth About Life By STEPHEN HOLDEN

A wonderful, little-known song that leaps out of the biographical revue “Sondheim on Sondheim” is a taunting show tune, “Now You Know,” from the 1981 musical “Merrily We Roll Along.” One of that revue’s six numbers from “Merrily,” it encapsulates Stephen Sondheim’s skeptical worldview as tartly as anything the composer has written.

“I mean, big surprise: people love you and tell you lies/Bricks can fall out of clear blue skies,” Leslie Kritzer sings with chipper, smart-aleck zest. Her character from “Merrily,” Mary Flynn, is a tough cookie and best friend of the embattled songwriting team at the show’s center.

“It’s called flowers wilt/It’s called apples rot,/It’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot,” she continues.

Even God, who is seldom glimpsed in the Sondheim universe, makes a fleeting appearance, only to be dismissed as a disappointment who “doesn’t answer prayers a lot.”

That song’s solution to despair is to grit your teeth and soldier on: “It’s called count to 10/It’s called burn your bridges, start again.” The only palliative to the bitterness of experience is a therapeutic imperative: “Now you grow.”

“Now You Know” is a high point of “Sondheim on Sondheim,” the biographical anthology of his songs, conceived and directed by James Lapine for the Roundabout Theater Company at Studio 54. The show, which also stars Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams, Tom Wopat, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey and Matthew Scott, blends performances of Sondheim songs, famous and obscure, with interview footage in which the composer, who recently turned 80, discusses his life and creative process.

Mr. Sondheim may be the last great songwriter, in a lineage that runs from Jerome Kern through the Gershwins to Leonard Bernstein, who pushed the Broadway musical from a brash, vaudevillian entertainment into a loftier realm. But of all of them, Mr. Sondheim went the furthest in deconstructing and reinventing a populist art form as a highbrow version of itself.

Mr. Sondheim’s music examines the entire pre-1960s tradition, from Gilbert and Sullivan and Viennese operetta, through the Gershwins’ satires, Cole Porter’s burlesque musicals and beyond. The pastiche songs of “Follies,” particularly, recycle the styles of classic show tunes, matching or outdoing their antecedents in quality while subverting their escapism. His competitive relationship with the past, a kind of serial patricide, culminated with the “murder” of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II.

In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.

Hammerstein’s lyrics are synonymous with America’s post-World War II “Father Knows Best” ethos of moral rectitude, in which confident breadwinners and their perfect little wives are busy multiplying and building a safe new world of peace and freedom. The basic building block of this sanctuary of hope and optimism is a happily married couple who fall in love at first sight and march blissfully, hand-in-hand, into the sunset.

The climactic song in Mr. Sondheim’s “Company,” “Being Alive,” magnificently sung by Mr. Lewis in this revue, replaces the anticipation of happily ever after voiced in the Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad “Some Enchanted Evening” with fear and trembling. Instead of a cozy, familial bond, intimacy with another person is portrayed as a terrifying prospect that involves:

Someone to need you too much,

Someone to know you too well,

Someone to pull you up short

And put you through hell.

For all his songs’ universality, the Sondheim philosophy is specific and exclusive. Directed toward his own class — an urbane, well-educated, culturally cosmopolitan gentry — his lyrics define what might be called the Manhattan sensibility: humanist, proudly intellectual, psychologically sophisticated, hyper-articulate, liberal, Jewish and disenchanted. The closest Mr. Sondheim has come to being multicultural was in the 1976 musical “Pacific Overtures.” Set in 19th-century Japan, the musical has songs that propose an intriguing East-West hybrid, part Broadway and part Asian.

The Sondheim cynicism didn’t come out of the blue. Expressions of wised-up disillusion, like “Now You Know,” have Broadway ancestors in the lyrics of E. Y. Harburg, Ira Gershwin and even George M. Cohan. But it was Mr. Sondheim’s 1970 show, “Company,” that codified the Manhattan sensibility — a radically unsentimental, emotionally realistic honesty that found its pop-record equivalents in Paul Simon in New York, and in Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman on the West Coast.

The origins of that attitude included confessional poetry and the rise of psychoanalysis as a kind of alternative religion, both of which provided Mr. Sondheim with the self-scrutinizing language to put in the mouths of his introspective characters. Simultaneously, the moon-June-spoon ideal of eternal romantic love began its steady decline as the principal subject of popular songs.

Advancing technology also played a major role in the transition from optimism to ambivalence. The birth-control pill, which helped propel the second wave of feminism, and rock ’n’ roll’s hedonistic ethic and amplification both undermined Hammerstein’s patriarchal sentimentality and toughened the sound of pop. At the same time, the mystique of psychoanalysis superseded the more simplistic self-help doctrine of “The Power of Positive Thinking” as the culture’s spiritual panacea. If you could reach deep enough into your repressed memories, it was argued, you could exorcize your demons.

In his relentless demolition operation, Mr. Sondheim ultimately embraced the Manhattan sensibility’s demonic extreme — murderous, misanthropic rage — with “Sweeney Todd” (1979). But where do you go once you’ve had your anti-hero proclaim, “We all deserve to die!”

After “Merrily,” a summing up of his generation’s growing pains, told in reverse, Mr. Sondheim’s search for meaning and connection to the future began in earnest with “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984) and continued with “Into the Woods” (1987). Both exalted the creation of “children and art” as a refutation of the nihilism of “Sweeney Todd” and as a self-conscious, morally high-minded investment in humanity.

Grudgingly and on his own terms Mr. Sondheim even affirmed Hammerstein’s belief in true love with “Passion” (1994). But as usual with him, there was a catch: the love being conjured might also be described as pathologically obsessed.

The one human connection Mr. Sondheim has always celebrated unambiguously and without strain is friendship. Its most eloquent expression is found in another song from “Merrily,” “Old Friends”:

Time goes by

Everything else keeps changing

You and I

We get continued next week.

The relaxed, swinging tune that evokes a cocktail singalong has the same bittersweet ache as the lyrics that culminate with a toast: “Here’s to us! Who’s like us? Damn few!” This is intimacy without fear.

In most cases, however, the relationship of music and lyrics in Mr. Sondheim’s songs expresses a core ambivalence. As his words explore the complicated, often harsh truths about life and relationships, his swelling ballads convey an unalloyed romantic yearning in the harmonic language of Puccini.

With the Freudian mystique of the 1960s and ’70s on the wane, and the language of psychotherapy reduced to the banal pop scripture of reality television, the Age of Sondheim may be fading. An emerging technological view of humanity and its discontents that largely bypasses the post-Freudian model proposes an unsettling new ideal of the human being as a perfectible machine that through cloning is theoretically immortal.

Antidepressants and performance-enhancing drugs, from steroids to mental stimulants to Viagra, are modifying human behavior. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery and gender re-assignment are undermining the traditional idea of the individual as a being with a singular identity and destiny. Hand-held devices have turned us into robotic mobile power stations continually transmitting and receiving information in computer language that has seeped into pop songs.

These developments are profoundly antithetical to the dream of sadly civilized enlightenment evoked by Mr. Sondheim’s songs. In this emerging world, the truth of existence is rooted more in quantifiable physical reality than in ideas and emotions. Musically it is embodied in hard digital beats and in performances staged as competitive sports events.

As we lunge into the 21st century, there is no next Stephen Sondheim waiting to step into the master’s shoes and perpetuate the tradition that he carried to its pinnacle. There is only new and different in a largely unimaginable future in which we are simultaneously more and less human than in the pre-digital age. Like it or not, and however we do it, now we grow.

“Sondheim on Sondheim” continues through June 13 at Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, Manhattan; (212) 719-1300, roundabouttheater.org/index.html

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 4, 2010

A music column on Saturday about Stephen Sondheim and the “Sondheim on Sondheim” revue, at Studio 54, misstated part of a lyric from the song “Old Friends.” It is “You and I/We get continued next week,” not “You and I/We can continue next week.”

Tony Nominations 2008

Nominations for the 2008 American Theatre Wing's Tony Awards®
Presented by The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing
Best Play
August: Osage County
Author: Tracy Letts
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jean Doumanian, Steve Traxler, Jerry Frankel, Ostar Productions, Jennifer Manocherian, The Weinstein Company, Debra Black/Daryl Roth, Ronald & Marc Frankel/Barbara Freitag, Rick Steiner/Staton Bell Group, The Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Rock 'n' Roll
Author: Tom Stoppard
Producers: Bob Boyett & Sonia Friedman Productions, Ostar Productions, Roger Berlind, Tulchin/Bartner, Douglas G. Smith, Dancap Productions, Jam Theatricals, The Weinstein Company, Lincoln Center Theater, The Royal Court Theatre London
The Seafarer
Author: Conor McPherson
Producers: Ostar Productions, Bob Boyett, Roy Furman, Lawrence Horowitz, Jam Theatricals, Bill Rollnick/Nancy Ellison Rollnick, James D'Orta, Thomas S. Murphy, Ralph Guild/Jon Avnet, Philip Geier/Keough Partners, Eric Falkenstein/Max OnStage, The National Theatre of Great Britain
The 39 Steps
Author: Patrick Barlow
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Harriet Newman Leve/Ron Nicynski, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Manocherian Golden Prods., Olympus Theatricals/Douglas Denoff, Marek J. Cantor/Pat Addiss, Huntington Theatre Company/Nicholas Martin/Michael Maso, Edward Snape for Fiery Angel Ltd.
Best Musical
Cry-Baby
Producer: Adam Epstein, Allan S. Gordon, Élan V. McAllister, Brian Grazer, James P. MacGilvray, Universal Pictures Stage Productions, Anne Caruso, Adam S. Gordon, Latitude Link, The Pelican Group, Philip Morgaman, Andrew Farber/Richard Mishaan
In The Heights
Producers: Kevin McCollum, Jeffrey Seller, Jill Furman, Sander Jacobs, Goodman/Grossman, Peter Fine, Everett/Skipper
Passing Strange
Producers: The Shubert Organization, Elizabeth Ireland McCann LLC, Bill Kenwright, Chase Mishkin, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Broadway Across America, Emily Fisher Landau, Peter May, Boyett Ostar, Larry Hirschhorn, Janet Pailet/Steve Klein, Elie Hirschfeld/Jed Bernstein, Spring Sirkin/Ruth Hendel, Vasi Laurence/Pat Flicker Addiss, Wendy Federman/Jackie Barlia Florin, Joey Parnes, The Public Theater, The Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Xanadu
Producers: Robert Ahrens, Dan Vickery, Tara Smith/B. Swibel, Sarah Murchison/Dale Smith
Best Book of a Musical
Cry-Baby
Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan
In The Heights
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Passing Strange
Stew
Xanadu
Douglas Carter Beane
Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre
Cry-Baby
Music & Lyrics: David Javerbaum & Adam Schlesinger
In The Heights
Music & Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda
The Little Mermaid
Music: Alan Menken
Lyrics: Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater
Passing Strange
Music: Stew and Heidi Rodewald
Lyrics: Stew
Best Revival of a Play
Boeing-Boeing
Producers: Sonia Friedman Productions, Bob Boyett, Act Productions, Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert G. Bartner, The Weinstein Company, Susan Gallin/Mary Lu Roffe, Broadway Across America, Tulchin/Jenkins/DSM, The Araca Group
The Homecoming
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Ergo Entertainment, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Michael Gardner, Herbert Goldsmith Productions, Terry E. Schnuck, Harold Thau, Michael Filerman/Lynne Peyser, Ronald Frankel/David Jaroslawicz, Love Bunny Entertainment
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy
Macbeth
Producers: Duncan C. Weldon & Paul Elliott, Jeffrey Archer, Bill Ballard, Terri & Timothy Childs, Rodger Hess, David Mirvish, Adriana Mnuchin, Emanuel Azenberg, BAM, The Chichester Festival Theatre
Best Revival of a Musical
Grease
Producers: Paul Nicholas and David Ian, Nederlander Presentations Inc., Terry Allen Kramer, Robert Stigwood
Gypsy
Producers: Roger Berlind, The Routh-Frankel-Baruch-Viertel Group, Roy Furman, Debra Black, Ted Hartley, Roger Horchow, David Ian, Scott Rudin, Jack Viertel
Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Producers: Lincoln Center Theater, André Bishop, Bernard Gersten, Bob Boyett
Sunday in the Park with George
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Debra Black, Jam Theatricals, Stephanie P. McClelland, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Barbara Manocherian/Jennifer Manocherian, Ostar Productions, The Menier Chocolate Factory/David Babani
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play
Ben Daniels, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Laurence Fishburne, Thurgood
Mark Rylance, Boeing-Boeing
Rufus Sewell, Rock 'n' Roll
Patrick Stewart, Macbeth
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play
Eve Best, The Homecoming
Deanna Dunagan, August: Osage County
Kate Fleetwood, Macbeth
S. Epatha Merkerson, Come Back, Little Sheba
Amy Morton, August: Osage County
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical
Daniel Evans, Sunday in the Park with George
Lin-Manuel Miranda, In The Heights
Stew, Passing Strange
Paulo Szot, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Tom Wopat, A Catered Affair
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical
Kerry Butler, Xanadu
Patti LuPone, Gypsy
Kelli O'Hara, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Faith Prince, A Catered Affair
Jenna Russell, Sunday in the Park with George
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play
Bobby Cannavale, Mauritius
Raúl Esparza, The Homecoming
Conleth Hill, The Seafarer
Jim Norton, The Seafarer
David Pittu, Is He Dead?
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play
Sinead Cusack, Rock 'n' Roll
Mary McCormack, Boeing-Boeing
Laurie Metcalf, November
Martha Plimpton, Top Girls
Rondi Reed, August: Osage County
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical
Daniel Breaker, Passing Strange
Danny Burstein, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Robin De Jesús, In The Heights
Christopher Fitzgerald, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Boyd Gaines, Gypsy
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical
de'Adre Aziza, Passing Strange
Laura Benanti, Gypsy
Andrea Martin, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Olga Merediz, In The Heights
Loretta Ables Sayre, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Scenic Design of a Play
Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps
Scott Pask, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Todd Rosenthal, August: Osage County
Anthony Ward, Macbeth
Best Scenic Design of a Musical
David Farley and Timothy Bird & The Knifedge Creative Network, Sunday in the Park with George
Anna Louizos, In The Heights
Robin Wagner, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Michael Yeargan, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Costume Design of a Play
Gregory Gale, Cyrano de Bergerac
Rob Howell, Boeing-Boeing
Katrina Lindsay, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps
Best Costume Design of a Musical
David Farley, Sunday in the Park with George
Martin Pakledinaz, Gypsy
Paul Tazewell, In The Heights
Catherine Zuber, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Lighting Design of a Play
Kevin Adams, The 39 Steps
Howard Harrison, Macbeth
Donald Holder, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Ann G. Wrightson, August: Osage County
Best Lighting Design of a Musical
Ken Billington, Sunday in the Park with George
Howell Binkley, In The Heights
Donald Holder, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Natasha Katz, The Little Mermaid
Best Sound Design of a Play
Simon Baker, Boeing-Boeing
Adam Cork, Macbeth
Ian Dickinson, Rock 'n' Roll
Mic Pool, The 39 Steps
Best Sound Design of a Musical
Acme Sound Partners, In The Heights
Sebastian Frost, Sunday in the Park with George
Scott Lehrer, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Moses Schreier, Gypsy
Best Direction of a Play
Maria Aitken, The 39 Steps
Conor McPherson, The Seafarer
Anna D. Shapiro, August: Osage County
Matthew Warchus, Boeing-Boeing
Best Direction of a Musical
Sam Buntrock, Sunday in the Park with George
Thomas Kail, In The Heights
Arthur Laurents, Gypsy
Bartlett Sher, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Choreography
Rob Ashford, Cry-Baby
Andy Blankenbuehler, In The Heights
Christopher Gattelli, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Knechtges, Xanadu
Best Orchestrations
Jason Carr, Sunday in the Park with George
Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman, In The Heights
Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange
Jonathan Tunick, A Catered Affair
* * *
Regional Theatre Tony Award
Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Special Tony Award
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981), in recognition of his historic contribution to American musical theatre in the field of orchestrations, as represented on Broadway this season by Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre
Stephen Sondheim
* * *
Tony Nominations by Production
In The Heights - 13
Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific - 11
Sunday in the Park with George - 9
August: Osage County - 7
Gypsy - 7
Passing Strange - 7
Boeing-Boeing - 6
Macbeth - 6
The 39 Steps - 6
Les Liaisons Dangereuses - 5
Cry-Baby - 4
Rock 'n' Roll - 4
The Seafarer - 4
Xanadu - 4
A Catered Affair - 3
The Homecoming - 3
The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein - 3
The Little Mermaid - 2
Come Back, Little Sheba - 1
Cyrano de Bergerac - 1
Grease - 1
Is He Dead? - 1
Mauritius - 1
November - 1
Thurgood - 1
Top Girls - 1
www.TonyAwards.com

Ben Brantley's Review of Company/ Saw it on Great Performances last night on PBS

November 30, 2006
THEATER REVIEW 'COMPANY'
A Revival Whose Surface of Tundra Conceals a Volcano
By BEN BRANTLEY
Fire flickers, dangerous and beckoning, beneath the frost of John Doyle’s elegant, unexpectedly stirring revival of “Company,” which opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. This visually severe, aurally lush reinvention of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s era-defining musical of marriage and its discontents from 1970 is the chicest-looking production on Broadway.
One glance at the symmetry, the starkness, the midnight-black palette that dominates the stage, and you feel like putting on a sweater. It’s surely no coincidence that the clear modules that serve as furniture resemble ice cubes. What could be more appropriate for a musical with a passive, willfully unengaged leading man (wearing black Armani, natch), who is almost never seen without a defensive drink in his hand?
But if Bobby the bachelor, embodied with riveting understatement by Raúl Esparza, at first comes across as a man of ice, it becomes apparent that he is in a steady state of thaw. Given the subliminal intensity that hums through Mr. Esparza’s deadpan presence, you sense that flood warnings should probably be posted.
Mr. Doyle is the inspired British director who last year gave New York the most unsettling, emotionally concentrated production on record of another Sondheim musical, the macabre “Sweeney Todd.” In that show, for which Mr. Doyle won a Tony Award, the cast members doubled as musicians, a device repeated in this “Company.”
This “I-am-my-own-orchestra” approach probably shouldn’t be used ad infinitum. Mr. Doyle applied the same stratagem to Jerry Herman’s “Mack and Mabel” in London last summer to underwhelming effect.
But there’s something about Mr. Sondheim that allows Mr. Doyle to find a new clarity of feeling through melding musicians and performers. It is, after all, the person who controls the music in a Sondheim production — in which there is usually a sophistication gap between the songs and the relatively pedestrian book — who has the best chance of finding the show’s elusive but resonantly human heart.
Mr. Doyle’s “Company,” first staged at the Cincinnati Playhouse earlier this year, isn’t the unconditional triumph that his “Sweeney Todd” was, partly because the show itself is less of a fully integrated piece and partly because much of the acting is weaker. Only a few of the 14 ensemble members — playing the couples who are permanent fixtures in Bobby’s life and his strictly temporary girlfriends — seem at ease dispensing Mr. Furth’s brittle, uptown, shrink-shrunk dialogue.
But they all blossom as musicians and singers of wit and substance. As soloists they’re more than adequate, but it’s their work as a team that sounds new depths in “Company” in ways that get under your skin without your knowing it.
Mr. Doyle and his invaluable music supervisor and orchestrator, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, have shaped “Company” into a sort of oratorio for the church of the lonely. The choral passage that opens the show — a litany of variations on Robert (a k a “Bobby, baby”), the name of the central character, about to celebrate his 35th birthday — is performed in near darkness a cappella, sounding like liturgical chant.
The effect is not flippant. The voices — belonging to “those good and crazy people, my married friends”— seem to echo through Bobby’s head like elements of some beautiful but arcane ritual that he can observe only from a distance. Watching is what Bobby does. His outsider’s status is confirmed with pointed eloquence when it registers that Bobby is the only person onstage who isn’t playing an instrument.
The production gets astonishingly diverse theme- and character-defining mileage out of this discrepancy. Bobby’s failure to pick up an instrument and join the band becomes a natural-born metaphor for his refusal to engage with others. Yes, he sings soulfully. But as the other cast members circle the lone Mr. Esparza, playing their instruments, it is clear they possess talents for connecting that Bobby lacks, fears and longs for.
Watching the couples carp and bicker in black-out vignettes — practicing karate, experimenting with pot, visiting a discothèque — you may wonder why Bobby would ever be envious of them (which has always been a problem with “Company”). It’s when they make music together that you understand.
Mr. Doyle’s staging repeatedly and ingeniously echoes this isolating difference. Mr. Esparza is often found climbing onto the top of a Steinway or one of those transparent cubes as others crowd him. Sometimes he stands at a skeptical, uneasy remove as different groups serenade him: the married men with the haunting “Sorry-Grateful”; three girlfriends, all playing saxophones as if they were assault weapons, in a scintillating version of “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.”
The seamlessness of these motifs lends a fresh coherence to “Company,” which was originally structured as a cabaret of urban neurosis. Stand-alone crowd pleasers like “Getting Married Today” (performed by a too-grounded-seeming Heather Laws as the skittish Amy) and “Another Hundred People” (warmly sung by Angel Desai) now blend into a general musical fabric of anxiety in search of reassurance.
Even the fabled character number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” sung by the worldly, much-married Joanne (a fierce Barbara Walsh), feels less like a show-stopping appendage than it usually does. Instead, building to a climactic repeated note that suggests what Edvard Munch’s silent scream might sound like, it becomes the perfect preface to Bobby’s breakthrough breakdown at the end of the show.
If Ms. Walsh doesn’t erase the memory of Elaine Stritch, who created (and will probably always own) the part, she handles her vodka-stinger-flavored dialogue with a vintage Manhattan suaveness, which is more than can be said for many of the others.
Bruce Sabath, though, is touching and credible as Joanne’s patient husband. And Elizabeth Stanley is absolutely delicious as April, the ditzy airline stewardess, who sings “Barcelona” (the best one-night-stand song in musicals).
The sense that ambivalence and confusion are not unique to Bobby is enhanced by the cold, austere glitter of David Gallo’s set and Thomas C. Hase’s superb lighting. But it’s Mr. Esparza who is the top expert on ambivalence here, giving “Company” the most compelling center it has probably ever had. In previous productions, Bobby has registered principally as a wistful window onto other lives.
But Mr. Esparza is anything but a cipher. Though his Bobby can seem as laconic and drolly unresponsive as Bob Newhart, you are always aware that this is a man in pain. As anyone who saw him in “Cabaret” or “The Normal Heart” knows, Mr. Esparza is generally a pyrotechnic actor, sending sparks and smoke all over the place.
In keeping the lid on such volcanic energy, he makes Bobby’s climactic explosion inevitable. Though he sings beautifully throughout — in ways that define his character’s solipsism — he brings transporting ecstasy to the agony of the concluding number, in which Bobby finally joins the band of human life.
For much of Mr. Sondheim’s career, directors have approached his work as if “keep your distance” were woven into the copyright. More recently, a new generation of artists have heard an altogether different directive: “Come closer.” Mr. Doyle and Mr. Esparza make it clear that there are infinite rewards to be had in accepting that challenge.
COMPANY
A Musical Comedy
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by George Furth; directed by John Doyle; musical staging by Mr. Doyle; musical supervision and orchestrations by Mary-Mitchell Campbell; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Ann Hould-Ward; lighting by Thomas C. Hase; sound by Andrew Keister; hair and wig design by David Lawrence; make-up design by Angelina Avallone; associate director, Adam John Hunter; production stage manager, Gary Mickelson; resident music supervisor, Lynne Shankel; general manager, Richard Frankel Productions and Jo Porter; production manager, Juniper Street Productions, Inc. Presented by Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, Tom Viertel, Steven Baruch, Ambassador Theater Group, Tulchin/Bartner Productions, Darren Bagert and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.
WITH: Raúl Esparza (Robert), Keith Buterbaugh (Harry), Matt Castle (Peter), Robert Cunningham (Paul), Angel Desai (Marta), Kelly Jeanne Grant (Kathy), Kristin Huffman (Sarah), Amy Justman (Susan), Heather Laws (Amy), Leenya Rideout (Jenny), Fred Rose (David), Bruce Sabath (Larry), Elizabeth Stanley (April) and Barbara Walsh (Joanne).
Home
World
U.S.
N.Y. / Region
Business
Technology
Science
Health
Sports
Opinion
Arts
Style
Travel
Jobs
Real Estate
Automobiles
Back to Top Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy
Search
Corrections
RSS
First Look
Help
Contact Us
Work for Us
Site Map
')
//-->
=0)document.write(unescape('%3C')+'\!-'+'-')
//-->

Sweeney Todd The Tim Burton Film at AMC Northpark