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Long Beach: Company Town
Guys and dolls and Stephen Sondheim
By Steven Leigh Morris
The ensemble of Company (Photo courtesy of Long Beach Playhouse)
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Psychotherapy meets existential ennui as another institution (marriage) bites the dust. Or is something else going on?
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When it debuted on Broadway in 1970, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company (book by George Furth) rattled both social and theatrical sensibilities. Imagine having a boy-meets girls scenario where the boy, Robert (Cris Cortez), starts and ends the musical single. Why? He just doesn’t see the point of marriage and/or he’s unable to connect/commit. Psychotherapy meets existential ennui as another institution (marriage) bites the dust. Or is something else going on?
Robert, or Bobby as he’s frequently called, is a kind of theatrical cipher. Even Hamlet, still attending university (Bobby opens the play celebrating his 35th birthday) is far younger, more depressed and agitated than Bobby. Like Bobby, Hamlet waltzes through his play sabotaging his most intimate relationships, but at least the reasons for his behavior are evident, and he eventually does something about it. Bobby, however, just swirls among five hetero married couples, who each in their respective ways tries to get him to settle down, grow up and get married – as most people felt compelled to do 50-plus years ago.
There’s scant explanation or revelation as to why Bobby is so mercurial – the guy who can’t commit – because the play is actually about those five other couples, and their respective blends of affection and marital dysfunction. Bobby spends most of the play serving up platitudes and offering aghast expressions at those moments when his friends’ marriages seem on ice. And, to be fair, Cortez does all this quite well. It’s not the actor’s fault that he’s given so little of substance to do, or to feel.
Here we sit, in 2022, well more than half a century after Company’s Broadway premiere, and observation number 1, watching Sean Gray’s perfectly capable staging for Long Beach Playhouse, is how none of the five couples is gay – in New York City no less. In fact, it was suggested that Bobby’s issue is just that – well, of course he’s gay! Along with the George Furth Estate, Sondheim (closeted at the time and, by his own admission, and unable to find a romantic connection) insisted that Bobby was hetero.
By 2013, however, Sondheim was working on a revision in which Bobby was indeed gay. A West End revival, directed by Marianne Elliott, in 2018, went one step further, re-casting the male Bobby as a female Bobbie, and indeed rendering one of the five couples gay – all with Sondheim’s blessing.
So that Brit version, which appeared on Broadway in 2021, made the drama about a woman unable to commit to marriage rather than a man. This certainly brings the musical up to speed with the waning institution of marriage, all within the larger context of marital confinement versus impulses of autonomy and independence. How can marriage endure if both partners need to be bread winners to pay soaring housing costs. Does the new 9.1 percent inflation rate for June, 2022 even need to be mentioned? Who takes care of the kids? Who can afford to take care of the kids? Who can afford to have kids?
So director Marianne Elliott inverted the musical’s question from, Does a man need a woman? To Does a woman need a man? – begging larger questions, such as, what are any of us good for? Here for? How well are we navigating these ever-shifting cultural dances?
None of which even touches on the 21st century issue of non-binary identity. Never mind marriage. The institutions of male and female are now up for grabs, or will be until some political theocracy shuts all that down with monuments to some sacred divisibility of men and women.
Which casts light on the larger agony of why we feel so damnably alone in a society where we have so much available to us? This sends us hurtling back to Company, via the abject loneliness and confusion of mid-20th century characters in the plays of William Inge and Tennessee Williams. All Bobby wants, needs, is company. Not responsibility. Not intimacy. But company. To keep the darkness at bay.
Cortez’s Bobby pulls that off, that ache. Never spoken, it lies behind the eyes.
Sasha Bada as April the airline attendant, and Cris Cortez as Bobby. (Photo courtesy of Long Beach Playhouse)
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The 2018 London revival didn’t reinvent Company. It simply pulled on one of its strings.
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Despite the actors’ 21st century haircuts and and Christina Bayer’s era-fluid costumes, Sean Gray’s production is nonetheless a vestibule of the 20th century, more by omitting the gender issues that evolved over the past half century in faithfulness to the original libretto and music. In this regard, the Playhouse itself is a kind of museum of recent history that nonetheless feels so, so long ago. As in any museum experience, it serves as a measure of where we’ve come – not how far we’ve come, which is far too optimistic for our times; more like the ditch where we’ve landed. How did we get here? Long Beach Playhouse’s Company provides a window onto that.
Greg Fritche’s set places the audience on three sides of the tubular stage. There’s a small bar on one side. A bed, real and metaphoric, sits at one end— used for a scene in which Bobby indulges himself in a one-night-stand with a dim-witted airline attendant, played with endearing understatement by Sasha Badia.
Then morning comes. In song, he’s so exasperated that he can’t remember her name. She’s off to “Barcelona,” but he’s too groggy to care.
“Where ya going?”/”Barcelona.”/”Oh.”/”Don’t get up.”/”Do you have to?”/”Yes I have to.”/”Oh.”/”Don’t get up.”
And indeed, of course, he doesn’t get up. If he were capable of getting up after a night of sex, if only to see his conquest out the door, if only with some pretense of concern, he’d be with somebody by now.
The other women in the ensemble (Serena Bottiani Henderson, Lea Mano, Kelsey Weinstein, Mabel Schreffler, Megan Cherry, Carole Louise and Colleen McCandless) are also fine, perhaps stronger than the men (Daniel Berlin, Adolfo Becerra, Barry Ko, Minhsquan Nguyen, and Brian Moe); but so are the female characters stronger than the male characters, imagined and written with far more contradiction and depth.
There are, literally, some flat notes, from both the hidden five piece orchestra under Stephen Olear’s musical direction, as well as the company. But there’s sufficient talent in the ensemble and the orchestra to keep the ship afloat, along with Sonya L. Randall’s strategically showbiz choreography, executed with flair.
The beauty and sophistication of Sondheim’s score carry the day – motifs in ironic juxtapositions, that come together in songs of longing and bitterness and vibrancy.
“Another Hundred People” (just got off of the bus) – nicely interpreted by Carole Louise – plays as a spirited tribute to alienation. One bride’s terror of getting married, thereby threatening to leave the groom at the altar, comes in a lightning-paced patter song (“Getting Married Today” – beautifully performed by Schreffler). That song also foreshadows the 2018 London production that would ask, Who needs men? The question lurks in the original. The 2018 London revival didn’t reinvent Company. It simply pulled on one of its strings.
Typical of works by Sondheim, Company resides somewhere between romanticism and its opposite, which is part of its appeal: of having Bobby’s 35th birthday cake, and eating it too.
Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; thru Aug. 7. https://lbplayhouse.org Playing time 2 hours and 30 minutes with one intermission
