Company: Sorry-Grateful

Like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Bernstein, Comden and Green's On The Town, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's 1970 musical comedy Company is a work that vividly captures the feel of New York in the era of its creation.  With a recurring musical theme set to the electronic demands of phone rings, door chimes and persistent busy signals (Does anyone still get a busy signal?) and its scenes that temper weary cynicism with wide-eyed optimism (Wait – I think I meant that in reverse), Company is set in a New York where those of a certain age are caught in the cusp between The Cocktail Set and The Now Generation, trying to be a part of what's happening while safely snuggled in a steady job and a committed relationship.  With the sexual revolution pumping away at full blast and free love splattered on every magazine cover (well, maybe not Reader's Digest) Company was a musical depicting 1970's characters asking a 1970's audience if marriage is really the best choice for everyone…  or anyone.  Its wit is sharp, its lyrics incisive and its music ferociously insistent when not rapturously melodic.  Company is such a well-written show that, with the help Raul Esparza's spot on starring performance, it can still pack a wallop despite director John Doyle's interpretation that regularly threatens to suck the life out of it.

Last season's Doyle-directed Sweeney Todd, New York's first look at his concept of staging revivals with the actors playing musical instruments in place of a traditional orchestra and frequently speaking lines out to the audience instead of to each other, seemed to divide musical theatre lovers fairly evenly between those who approved and those who hated it.  I was on the pro side for that one, feeling that a presentational, larger than life musical like Sweeney Todd was a good fit for his abstract vision.  But Company, in musical theatre terms, is a more realistic piece.  It's certainly a more subtly human one.

The evening follows a series of vignettes and songs centered around 35-year-old bachelor Bobby (Esparza), the five married couples he calls his friends and the three women he's currently dating.  (For a bachelor, his world seems oddly void of single male friends.)  As an audience, we never learn anything of Bobby's everyday life; his work, his interests, his upbringing – that's not what Company is about.  All we know is that, as far as any of his friends know, he's straight and has never been in a committed relationship.  The married guys envy him, the married women (s)mother him and the women he dates can't figure him out.  He's what I believe they call on Match.com a guy who isn't emotionally available.

Doyle's choice to make Bobby the only character who doesn't play an instrument seems, in theory, promising for this musical where his friends all want him, for his own good, to find a wife and join their orchestral society.  But in the end we lose too much.  Mary-Mitchell Campbell's new orchestrations fail to come up with sounds as character and place enhancing as Jonathan Tunick's originals.  There is no choreography in this revival, which screws the audience out of seeing one of musical theatre's most breathtaking moments, a dance solo – originally performed by Donna McKechnie – performed while Bobby is in bed with a one night stand, which physically interprets the difference between having sex and making love.  Ensemble numbers, especially Act II's opening "Side by Side by Side" are sluggish with the cast marching around with their instruments.  The Andrews Sister's parody, "You Can Drive a Person Crazy", loses its vocal spark with the trio blaring out its "do-do-do-do" measures on saxophones.

The cast is capable but, with exceptions, rather uninteresting.  As nervous bride Amy, Heather Laws races through her patter song "Getting Married Today" like it's an Olympic event, but fails to connect with any of the lyric's humor.  Similarly, Angel Desai shows impressive pipes but little storytelling capability in "Another Hundred People," a song that perfectly defines the devastating tempo of Gotham.

On the plus side, Barbara Walsh's Joanne is appropriately wry, tough and jaded.  There are no surprises in her interpretation or unique moments in her delivery of "The Ladies Who Lunch," but it's a solid, professional turn.  Elizabeth Stanley's serious-minded April plays her laughs well and is nicely vulnerable in "Barcelona," a musical scene-song that unflinchingly reveals the discomfort of the morning after when the probability of another night is doubtful.

Of all the actors regularly gracing the Broadway stage these days I can't think of one more equipped for playing Bobby than Raul Esparza, and despite so many wrong turns in this production you can always look toward him for something positively fascinating.  Actively observing those who are observing him, his Bobby's placid exterior hides enough bottled up emotional baggage to fill a season-long run of Hamlet.  His singing is excellent, his lyric phrasing even better and his slow volcanic buildup leads into a "Being Alive" that's tickles-on-the-back-of-your-neck good.

But despite David Gallo's set dominated by an enormous Corinthian column growing out of a radiator (I did like his numerous clear Plexiglas cubes resembling ice), Ann Hould-Ward's uniformly black costumes that rarely flatter the actors and the grab bag assortment of baffling moments (I'll reluctantly accept the fully clothed sex scene and the karate match staged with the combatants on opposite ends of the stage, but for the love of Richard Rodgers why is Marta dressed completely in black during the scene where she says how someday she'd like to dress completely in black?) Company survives.  The material's not indestructible but Raul Esparza's beautifully textured performance will force you to care.

Photos by Paul Kolnik:  Top:  Raul Esparza

Center:  Elizabeth Stanley, Kelly Jeanne Grant, Angel Desai, and Raul Esparza

Bottom:  The Company