On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage A LANDMARK AND A MISSED MARK BY STEFAN KANFER Twenty-five years ago a very different kind of musical opened on Broadway. The show offered neither plot, nor chorus line, nor any major...
...Freshly revivedby the Roundabout Theater group at the Criterion Center Stage Right, Company is, once again, a series of concentric circles around the protagonist, Robert (Boyd Gaines...
...Aggressions come to light, and they are nowhere near as pretty as her wardrobe...
...Personally, I'm sorry-grateful...
...For all of the work's willful perversity and bitchiness, there is a good deal here of value...
...And York presents an anthology of gestures and nasalities, suggesting every player of blonde bimbos who preceded her from Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday to Faith Prince in Guys and Dolls...
...To which I reply, Rhymes so damned atrocious/Tend to make me nocious...
...Amy (Veanne Cox) and Paul (Danny Burstein) have been living together for years...
...it is the fulcrum of his life...
...As she rapidly becomes the rage of tout Paris, Victor/Victoria finds herself increasingly attracted to King (Michael Nouri...
...Edwards has made his reputation in the cinema (good in The Pink Panther, ghastly in S.OB...
...Company also shows its age in a pot-smoking sketch with Jenny (Diana Cano-va) and David (John Hillner...
...The ineptitude of the show is neatly encapsulated by York ("Paris gets me sexy/ In the solar plexy...
...George Furth's sketchy book did not help...
...Whenever the writer/director wants us to concentrate on a piece of dialogue or some physical business, all surrounding movement stops...
...the lithe young redhead is 75 per cent legs and all talent...
...William Ivey Long's costumes contribute their own saline comments, and the extraordinary orchestrations are by Jonathan Tunick, the finest arranger of musicals in New York and, possibly, the world...
...Robin Wagner's evocative set is wasted, and so is the lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer...
...At 60 the star can move, kick and belt out a song with performers 40 years her junior, and I'm sure she has not lost her way with a comic line—if only there were one to recite...
...Surrounding this quadrangle are the requisite night club owners, apache dancers, thugs, street singers, waiters and chambermaids, all of whom clutter up the stage without adding anything besides their voices, chanting one forgettable number after another...
...I didn't like the show...
...Meantime, "Toddy" (Tony Roberts) has become smitten with the selfsame gentleman...
...Something else seems to be at work here, something personal and, for all the cleverness, as brittle as the people it mocks...
...Some of the rhymes shimmer with good humor...
...In this version, Debra Monk gives an effective but weightier interpretation in every sense of the word...
...Or listen closely to the number that became a cabaret classic, "The Ladies Who Lunch...
...To add to the travail King is traveling with his extremelyjealous mistress, Norma Cassidy (Rachel York...
...Roberts, an experienced trouper who has frequently played straight man to Woody Allen, is professional without ever rising to risibility...
...after some compliments about the direction and set, Walter Kerr's Sunday column concluded: "Now ask me if I liked the show...
...Back in 1982 Director Blake Edwards rescued his fading career by writing and directing a film comedy with songs...
...In its day Company advanced the American musical theater, and it still seems far ahead of the weary, flat, stale and profitable rivals down the street...
...These shortcomings are covered by Scott Ellis' bright direction, which uses the best of Hal Prince's original work and adds some fillips of its own...
...Superficially happy, they harbor resentments, flaws and urges that go deep and wide...
...Variety foresaw a very different future: "As it stands now it's for ladies' matinees, homos and misogynists...
...But even at a quarter-century remove, it is the work of two men whose noses are pressed against the picture window, acrimoniously tweaking haute-bourgeois marriage from the outside...
...The plot structure had been used twice before—once in Nazifying Germany as Viktor und Viktoria, and three years later, in 1936, in England under the title First a Girl...
...The second reason was that people were mistaking our saying that relationships are difficult for relationships are impossible^ Arguable as that is, Company remains a landmark musical not only in Sondheim's career but in the history of the American theater...
...The composer-lyricist maintained that many of those who disliked the musical "wanted a strong story line and they didn't get one and were disappointed...
...Here's to the girls who stay smart/Aren't they a gas?/Rush-ing to their classes in optical art/Wishing it would pass/Another long, exhausting day,/Another thousand dollars ./A mati-nee,/A Pinter play,/Perhaps a piece of Mahler's...
...In the stage version, nothing is the same except for the composer and lyricist (the late Henry Mancini, and Leslie Bricusse) and Andrews herself...
...Sorry-Grateful," sung by three husbands, conveys an indulgent, if short-lived, view of marriage...
...His difficult yet ultimately rewarding tunes and, more important, his astringent lyrics were so far above the standard that the show won almost every award that Broadway had to give?including money...
...More influential critics on the Times found Company wanting: Clive Barnes saw "the kind of musical that makes me say, 'Oh, yeah?' rather than 'Gee Whiz...
...certainly the evening would not be as predictable as the one at the Marquis Theater...
...And then there is the problem of general credibility...
...Hardly any of these individuals appeared to have a job, and although some are supposed to be mothers and fathers, not a single line hints at a knowledge of authentic family dynamics...
...Apparently he regards this as the functional equivalent of a closeup...
...Is marriage a cell or a sanctuary...
...It's sharing little winks together/Drinks together/Kinks together...
...Joanne (Debra Monk) talks tough, and her world-weary husband Larry (Timothy Landf ield) speaks with an amused tolerance...
...Sarah (Kate Burton) and Harry (Robert Westenberg) seem a light-hearted middle-aged couple...
...Which way will Robert lean...
...speaking of weary musicals, Victor/Victoria could stand as a dictionary definition of adaptation sans imagination...
...The Daily News raved...
...Take, for example, the opening song, "The Little Things You Do Together...
...Deprived of any personal background or stage magnetism, she functions as more of a prop than aperson...
...A second girlfriend, Marta (La Chanze), comes on to sing "Another Hundred People" about Big, Cold New York...
...As with all the other songs in the score, "Sorry-Grateful" contained more character revelation than singable melody...
...He appears to have very little idea of what works on a stage...
...Even in 1970, though, they were a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of Manhattan, and time and taxes have undone most of that crowd...
...Since the '70s many labels have adhered to the drug culture, but "amusing" is not one of them...
...The show offered neither plot, nor chorus line, nor any major marquee names...
...Although he wants to commit to someone, he also cherishes his liberty...
...Gaines is thoroughly ingratiating, and so are most of the spokes radiating from his center...
...It's the concerts you enjoy together/Neighbors you annoy together/Children you destroy together/That makes perfect relationships...
...Surprise...
...Or both...
...Is a wife an opponent or an ally...
...The out-of-town tryout pleased and irked in roughly equal measure: The Boston Globe predicted that Company was "destined to become a classic in the American musical theater...
...Sometimes those characteristics make for hilarity...
...The bantamweight match of Burton and Westenberg brings back the pratfall as a comic device...
...When they finally decide to make their union legal, she has a monumental breakdown and he walks out...
...An ideal match, one would think, except that Joanne hates everyone with whom she comes in contact—save for Robert, a man she desperately and vainly tries to seduce...
...Nouri, in a part that is supposed to exude sexual danger, seems about as threatening as a Ralph Lauren ad...
...It took little courage then, and it takes none now, to satirize them...
...So does Kathy (Charlotte d' Amboise) who executed some melodramatic, entry-level ballet steps...
...This is his 35th birthday...
...Beneath all this movement and merriment, however, there is a subtext of disdain, and, at times, outright loathing...
...Those hyphenated words referred to a number in Stephen Sondheim's investigation of marriage and the single life...
...As he contemplates these questions time stops and he ventures into the lives of his friends, watching them at play and at bay...
...Tony Walton's set, designed around a vast sundial, extends the Roundabout's lean stage...
...But it is more than that...
...Then she displays some newly learned judo skills on her spouse...
...So it goes with all the couples...
...As the pair descend from intelligible conversation to loopy, self-amused nonsense, they seem more antique than their furniture...
...You're always sorry/you're always grateful/You're always wondering what might have been/Then she walks in...
...The Broadway opening resulted in another hung jury...
...Edwards) in the title role...
...Others are decidedly less kind and seem to hint at unhappy autobiography...
...Entering his darkened apartment, the bachelor finds a group of married friends awaiting him with presents, cake and candles...
...Ticket holders might have a better time if she did...
...As for Willa Kim's costumes, the less worn, the better...
...There are, of course, wealthy women who kill time, and themselves, with empty cultural pursuits...
...Despite the mixed reviews, Company ran for690performances and went on to a long run in London...
...Cox' dithering high-speed crack-up ("Perhaps/I'll collapse/In the apse") supplies one of the peaks of this or any other season...
...This time out, the only help Andrews gets is from an adoring audience that would probably cheer if she read and sang the Lands' End catalogue...
...She was backed by Robert Preston as Carroll Todd, her eccentric homosexual mentor, and James Garner as King Marchan, a visiting American gangster who falls for Victor/Victoria even though he is not quite certain about his/her gender...
...In the original production, Elaine Stritch's unique rasp was reminiscent of a kitchen match on sandpaper...
...All it does is slow the story's momentum—a fatal result in something with so little velocity to begin with...
...So long as this creaky remake runs—and it has a $ 15 million advance sale thanks to Julie Andrews—Company will never look its age...
...This season, Broadway may well be defined by the Company it kept...
...It concerned an impoverished chanteuse who rescues her career by posing as a female impersonator in a Paris boite...
...Robert is furnished with a stewardess, April (Jane Krakowski), to certify his straightness, yet she is too much of a beautiful-but-dumb caricature to be believed...
...Edwards' version was the best, less for his customary ham-handed comic techniques than for a brilliant cast headed by Julie Andrews (the real life Mrs...
Vol. 78 • December 1995 • No. 9
