Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.5

Company Blu-ray Movie Review

Bobby, Won't You Play the Piano?

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 31, 2011

Now 81 years old, Stephen Sondheim is a living legend and certified cultural hero with shelves of awards, accolades and tributes, not to mention a Broadway theater bearing his name. But it wasn't always so. When Company first opened on Broadway in April 1970, Sondheim was considered an upstart of a lyricist who had no business writing music. He'd done OK supplying words for Leonard Bernstein in West Side Story and for Jule Styne in Gypsy, but when he dared to supply his own notes for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the old guard of Broadway snarled, even though the show was a success. Everything was nominated for awards except the songs. When Sondheim's next show, Anyone Can Whistle, flopped, all the naysayers felt vindicated.

History is funny, though. Anyone Can Whistle is now chiefly remembered not as a flop, but as the Broadway debut of an actress who, these days, can sell tickets to almost any show in which she chooses to appear. Her name is Angela Lansbury, and she would later star in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.

Company was Sondheim's first collaboration with Hal Prince as director, and it banished the doubters to the sidelines (at least for the fertile decade that concluded with Sweeney, which was Sondheim's and Prince's last major hit). The show was unlike anything theatergoers had ever seen or heard. The book by George Furth dispensed with a traditional story. It was loose and episodic: a series of vignettes about a 30-something bachelor, Bobby, his married friends, and the single women he dates and "drives crazy". The show had a dramatic arc that became clear by the end of the evening, but as you watched it, it seemed like a musical revue. The songs, though, were tightly structured, and they told the real story.

Sondheim won his Tony award that year, the first of many, and Company remains one of his most beloved creations. It's been revived on Broadway twice, once in 1995 and again in 2006, which is the production presented on this Blu-ray. But this version isn't just a revival; it's a reinvention by British director John Doyle, who had recreated Sweeney Todd to thrilling effect the previous season. Doyle had stumbled on a unique approach to musical theater while working in underfunded regional companies in England. When he wanted to do musicals but couldn't afford an orchestra, he hired actors who could also play instruments. In the process, Doyle discovered that certain musicals (but not all of them) reveal unexpected thematic layers when the actors play as well as sing.

In the case of Sweeney Todd, Doyle was able to strip down what had always been an epic show to an intimate scale with a small company that made you feel like you were right there in Mrs. Lovett's kitchen or Sweeney's tonsorial parlour (neither of them comfortable places to be). After the success of his Sweeney on Broadway, which won Doyle that year's directing Tony, he went off to Cincinnati to develop the Sondheim show for which his actor/musician technique was truly ideal: Company.

The stage for Doyle's Company is deceptively austere, but there's really a lot there: the piano, which is both instrument and multi-purpose prop; various plexiglass shapes adaptable to many purposes; a strategically placed column; a vase of flowers; some discreetly concealed seating; the ever-present cocktail bottles and glasses; and, of course, various instruments that appear and disappear throughout the evening.

The costumes appear monochromatic, mostly shades of gray and black. But if you look more closely, as this Blu-ray makes it easy to do, you can pick up all the variations in patterned ties and blouses, especially where sequins are involved. It's partly a style and partly a visual joke by which Doyle is saying that this is a play about New Yorkers, since they stereotypically dress in black. Sondheim has said that he wrote Company about the very people who have supported Broadway for years and who thought they had come to a show to escape their problems. Instead they found them exposed and explored on stage.

Sure enough, a running theme of Company is the dissatisfaction of married people, even those who want for nothing. The five couples who, as the play opens, throw a "surprise" birthday party for Bobby (Raúl Esparza)—which isn't really a surprise, because they do it every year— exhibit all manner of discontents. The men are constantly trying to live a single life vicariously through Bobby ("Have I Got a Girl for You"), and the women clearly enjoy having a single man around ("Side by Side/What Would We Do Without You"). Joanne (Barbara Walsh), the scary rich broad who's been married three times and seen it all (or so she says), ends up propositioning Bobby directly, while her long-suffering husband, Larry (Bruce Sabath), is out of the room for a moment.

Harry and Sarah (Keith Buterbaugh and Kristin Huffman) are in constant competition, Sarah needling Harry about his drinking, Harry needling Sarah about her dieting. Eventually the two of them end up in a karate battle. Peter and Susan (Matt Castle and Amy Justman) seem like the perfect couple in their apartment that almost has views of the river—until they announce they're getting divorced. David and Jenny (Fred Rose and Leenya Rideout) spend a rollicking evening smoking pot with Bobby, during which the usually strait-laced Jenny seems to be finally kicking loose, but at the end David confesses to Bobby that she hates smoking pot; she only does it to please him. And then there's Amy (Heather Laws), who, after two years of living with Paul (Robert Cunningham), is so terrified at the prospect of "forever" ("which is maybe the most horrifying word I ever heard of") that she tries to call off the wedding at the last minute in the tour de force number "Getting Married Today". All in all, the proceedings on stage give savagely ironic bite to the genial satire of "The Little Things You Do Together":

It's not so hard to be married
When two maneuver as one;
It's not too hard to be married
And Jesus Christ is it fun!

Bobby, the detached and often bemused observer of these antics, has no interest in getting married. The city provides him with an endless stream of available women ("Another Hundred People"), of whom we meet three: the free spirit, Marta (Angel Desai); the pretty but dim flight attendant, April (Elizabeth Stanley); and the small town girl, Kathy (Kelly Jeanne Grant). They don't find Bobby as amusing as his married friends ("You Could Drive a Person Crazy"). Oh, he's "personable", all right, but:

Knock-knock! Is anybody there?
Knock-knock! It really isn't fair.
Knock-knock! I'm workin' all my charms.
Knock-knock! A zombie's in my arms.

By the end of Act 1, Bobby himself is wondering whether he might be missing out on something ("Marry Me a Little"). At this point, the effect of Doyle's musical staging should have become clear, because Bobby is the only character on stage who is not playing an instrument. Everyone else is contributing sonically to the larger orchestration that is the play's equivalent of life, while Bobby holds himself aloof. This situation won't change until the very end of Act 2, when Bobby decides that his life has to change after a particularly ugly confrontation with Joanne ("The Ladies Who Lunch"). He sits down at the piano to begin singing the number, "Being Alive", and that represents a decisive turn in his life. (Raúl Esparza performs this so affectingly that the performance still works even after one has experienced the parody, "Being Intense", that was almost immediately offered by the mock revue called Forbidden Broadway that, for twenty-five years, ingeniously satirized whatever was playing on the Great White Way.)

Director Doyle has repeatedly cautioned that the technique of having actors double as musicians isn't appropriate for every show, and indeed his next production of a Sondheim work, the off-Broadway mounting of the long-gestating Bounce, featured traditional staging with an orchestra. But in the case of Company, Doyle's approach is an ideal marriage of theme and technique, and the result is to rediscover a classic.

Company Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The source for this Blu-ray is a hi-def recording of a performance before a live audience at the Barrymore Theatre overseen by Lonny Price, who is himself a distinguished director of Broadway musicals and knows where to place cameras for optimal coverage and minimal interference with the performers. The recording was broadcast in February 2008 as part of PBS's Great Performances series, then released by Image on this 1080i, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. The result is generally good, although it reveals limitations that are probably unavoidable when photographing a production whose lighting and production design were created for the stage, not the camera. A greater amount of aliasing can be observed than is typical in hi-def video captures, especially on fine patterns of the men's ties and sharply drawn edges along the stage; it's even occasionally visible on the illuminated bricks of the rear wall. While this kind of video noise isn't severe, it's noticeable and can be mildly distracting. (On the plus side, many of the distractions that a live audience can create, including rustling, talking and ringing phones, are eliminated by the Blu-ray experience.)

Black levels are good enough that one can easily distinguish the gradations in the different outfits, which is essential to the design, especially because Bobby doesn't dress in true black; his outfit is dark gray. Detail is very good, except where it shouldn't be; when cast members retreat to the shadows at the side of the stage, they're supposed to be hard to make out. (I saw the production live, and that was the intended effect.) Colors intended to establish contrast (e.g., the white of the floral bouquet, the red of southern belle Susan's hair, the washes of green light that appear during "Have I Got a Girl for You" and "Another Hundred People") stand out vividly, as they should.

Company Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

When Company first hit Broadway, miking and amplification were still the exception, and you heard musicals according to the accoustical character of the space where they were performed. Today you hear them according to the character of the sound system through which they're piped, and every theater has its own crew of technicians to oversee the electronics. No matter where you sit in the theater, you can hear everything, but there are "sweet spots" where the mix will be much better balanced. (And the ability to hear everything doesn't necessarily mean that the audience actually listens, as Sondheim ruefully notes in the supplements.)

The DTS lossless 5.1 mix puts the Blu-ray's listener in a "sweet spot" that perfectly balances the instruments and singing voices, which, in this case, requires an entirely different approach, because here there's no separate orchestra in a pit below the stage or on a platform behind it. This mix has been carefully prepared to separate the acting and singing performances from the instrumental presentations, even when they're emanating from the same person. In that regard, a Blu-ray listener may even have a slight advantage over an audience member, because the sound mixer of a live show cannot possibly fine-tune the mix with the same finesse as a recording studio engineer. Audience reactions, primarily laughter and applause, are directed to the surrounds. The performances are spread across the front soundstage. The track has both great presence and excellent clarity. If anything, it sounds better than when I saw the show live.

Company Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• An Audience with Stephen Sondheim (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 38:59): Sondheim was interviewed before a live audience in Australia in 2007 by actor and comedian Jonathan Biggins. The occasion was a 2007 production of Company by the Kookaburra Musical Theatre in Sydney, but the interview ranges widely over Sondheim's career. Sondheim has told many of these stories before (notably his education in musical theater by the legendary Oscar Hammerstein II), but, perhaps because he is out of America, he is unusually frank in this interview about his not always harmonious relationship with the Broadway mainstream.


• Video Interview with Raul Esparza (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 15:29): Esparza discusses the challenges of playing Bobby and of performing Sondheim's work in general.


• Video Interview with John Doyle (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 9:21): Doyle discusses his evolution as a director and the intricacies of what he calls the "jigsaw puzzle" of having actors double as musicians.

Company Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you've never seen Company, you owe it to yourself to experience one of the 20th Century's greatest dramatic and musical works. (Trust me, they'll never make a movie out of it, and if they do, it won't even remotely resemble the original.) If you've seen it before, this is a chance to rediscover it in a thrilling reinvention. The play, the production and the Blu-ray are all highly recommended.