Original Cast Album: "Company" Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		5.0
Overall		5.0

Original Cast Album: "Company" Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 17, 2021

Stephen Sondheim wasn't quite yet "Stephen Sondheim" when Company premiered on Broadway in 1970, and in fact it was Company which arguably finally put him firmly on the path toward recognition as musical theater's reigning composer-lyricist. Prior to Company, and after some early "student" material like Saturday Night where he essayed both roles, Sondheim had also previously written music and lyrics for an actual honest to goodness Broadway show, the hugely appealing (and very successful) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum . It's perhaps some indication of how Forum's score was kind of curiously overlooked at the time of the original production that Sondheim didn't even receive a Tony nomination for his work, despite the fact that the show itself actually won for Best Musical, as well as taking home several other statuettes. (In terms of what did get nominated that year, while there were standouts like Oliver!, which won, Stop the World — I Want to Get Off, and the ebullient Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh musicalization of Patrick Dennis' hilarious Little Me, the fourth nominee, and one which is often cited as having "replaced" Forum in the nominations list, is a show probably only diehard flop lovers have even heard of: Bravo, Giovanni.) But in 1970 Sondheim was probably still best known as "only" a lyricist, albeit with both West Side Story and Gypsy on his CV, which would most likely have been more than enough to guarantee him entrance into whatever Broadway Lyricist Hall of Fame might be accepting applicants. Unfortunately, though, Sondheim's more recent history at that point had included the legendary flop Anyone Can Whistle (for which he wrote both music and lyrics) and the less than blockbuster Do I Hear a Waltz? (for which he provided lyrics to Richard Rodgers' music), and he had in fact had relatively few other (official) writing credits other than occasional pieces like the fantastic Evening Primrose that had aired on ABC as part of their short lived experimental series Stage '67.

Sondheim is actually on hand on this Blu-ray both in the documentary itself (of course), but perhaps more importantly to salivating theater geeks across the globe, also on a newly recorded commentary track and a Zoom-like piece with orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and moderator Frank Rich, which in and of itself should make this a "must buy" for any serious musical theater aficionado. In the documentary Sondheim speaks about his history in a brief interstitial, where his status as "only" a lyricist seems to be almost wryly amusing to him, since he always considered himself a composer as well. The commentary track gets into the genesis of Company, as well as Sondheim's relationship with book writer George Furth, which began when Sondheim was called in to help doctor some tunes in another flop only diehard fans have heard of, Hot Spot, which starred Judy Holliday but which featured Furth in a supporting role.

For those unacquainted with Company, it was a bit of a groundbreaker at the time since it was a "book" musical which nonetheless often functioned quite like a revue, in that there really wasn't a traditional through line for the narrative, and instead the musical consisted of vignettes involving a single guy named Bobby (Dean Jones, rather quickly replaced by Larry Kert in one of the more interesting sidebars to the history of this show) and a coterie of his married friends and single women with whom he interacts. As a kid who already had a pretty significant musical theater obsession and who ran right out and bought the original cast album (as in LP) of Company back in the day, I can tell you from personal experience how the "plot summary" on the back cover of the record was a bit confounding, since it didn't have the "arc" of your standard book musical, and even the order of the scenes described didn't seem to be "chronological" in any real way.

D.A. Pennebaker's documentation of the recording session (sessions, if you include the now infamous Elaine Stritch incident which is covered in the piece) came about almost serendipitously and was in fact supposed to be just the first of a series of "Original Cast Recording" documentaries. Both the camaraderie as well as the occasional panic of an all day (and well into the night) session coming just a few days after the opening of a show is completely on display here, and you get a virtually palpable feeling of what experiencing a situation like this can be like. Classic television fans should keep their eyes peeled for various Company cast members, which included future Murphy Brown anchorman Charles Kimbrough and future Alice waitress Beth Howland. Fans of the original stage version of A Chorus Line will also be delighted to see Donna McKechnie featured prominently.

Original Cast Album: "Company" Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Original Cast Album: "Company" is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. In lieu of an insert booklet, Criterion offers an accordion style-ish foldout which has the following information on the transfer:

Original Cast Album: "Company" is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. This new digital transfer was created in 16-bit 4K resolution on a Lasergraphics Director film scanner from the original 16mm A/B Ektachrome reversal, except for the opening credits, which were restored from a 35mm blowup. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, and warps were manually removed using MTI Film's DRS, while Digital Vision's Phoenix was used for jitter, flicker, and small dirt.

The monaural soundtrack was remastered from the original 1/4-inch and 16mm magnetic tracks using Avid's Pro Tools and iZotope RX.

This is a wonderfully organic looking presentation that preserves the "grittiness" of the 16mm source while noticeably improving both saturation and general detail levels over previous home video releases (I've had them all). There are definitely ebbs and flows to fine detail, some resulting from technical issues like focus pulling on the fly, but close-ups in particular offer abundantly precise renderings. Some of the relatively wide shots are slightly blurry at times, as has always been the case. The restoration efforts have definitely improved things, though there are still just a few errant moments, as in a very noticeable hair in the gate during one of the Beth Howland sequences.

Original Cast Album: "Company" Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Original Cast Album: "Company" features a fine sounding LPCM Mono track. While there's arguably not an overly wide presentation here, fidelity is excellent, delivering both the musical and spoken moments without any issues. Those hoping for an improvement in some of the indecipherable comments made during the "Stritch incident" will unfortunately be disappointed. Optional English subtitles are available.

Original Cast Album: "Company" Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentaries

  D.A. Pennebaker, Harold Prince and Elaine Stritch offer their reminiscences in this archival commentary which was originally recorded in 2001.

  
  

  Stephen Sondheim offers a really sweet and appealing remembrance on this newly recorded track.

• Side by Side (HD; 29:27) is a fantastically engaging conversation between moderator Frank Rich, orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and Stephen Sondheim, conducted in a Zoom-like setting. All sorts of interesting information is disclosed. Among the tidbits that I found particularly interesting was Sondheim's "revelation" that he was responsible for getting Tunick the orchestration gig on the Burt Bacharach- Hal David musicalization of The Apartment, Promises, Promises. Lovers of musicals have long pointed out the stylistic similarities between at least some aspects of the scores of the two shows, and the orchestrations in particular (including the use of pit singers for both productions, which was not standard practice back in the day).


• Jonathan Tunick (HD; 18:39) is an honest to goodness sit down conversation between Tunick and Ted Chapin, where Tunick discusses the art of orchestrating.


• Original Cast Album: Co-Op (HD; 24:37) is the hilarious IFC Documentary Now! spoof of this documentary which originally aired in 2019. The marquee stars here are probably John Mulaney and/or Renée Elise Goldsberry, but see my closing comments below, because the "and the rest" cast all come from my hometown of Portland, where this piece was produced.


• Documentary Now! Conversation (HD; 33:10) offers another Zoom-like assortment of talking heads from 2020 discussing both the Pennebaker piece and the parody.


• Additional Commentary Excerpts (HD; 11:46) offers some unused snippets from the Prince, Stritch and Pennebaker commentary (above), playing to scenes from the documentary.

Original Cast Album: "Company" Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Some regular readers of my reviews know I do quite a bit of theater Music Directing in my "other" life, and in fact I Music Directed one of the first west coast productions of the Sondheim revue Putting It Together, where we actually got a few handwritten revisions from Mr. Sondheim during pre-production. (I've joked for years that Putting It Together, which included a number of tunes from Company like "Getting Married Today", was a major cause of carpal tunnel syndrome for music directors worldwide due to its non-stop accompaniment figures in the piano.) But I'm also fortunate to have worked with several of the Portland based actors and singers who hilariously spoof this Pennebaker documentary in IFC's Original Cast Album: Co-Op. (The episode was actually produced in Portland, as evidently was also the case with the Documentary Now spoof on the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult.) Kind of interestingly in talking to some of these young-ish Portland based actors, not all of them had actually seen the original Pennebaker piece before starting to work on the IFC parody, which frankly kind of surprised me. While Original Cast Album: "Company" is probably going to be of most interest to musical theater geeks (an aggregation of which I am an unapologetically proud member), there is both human and musical interest galore in this wonderful documentary. The only really sad thing about Original Cast Album: "Company" is that Pennebaker and, well, company weren't able to do more in the proposed series. Technical merits are solid and the supplements very enjoyable. Highly recommended.