The Washington Post is a Rave:
"In his Broadway revival of "Sweeney Todd," he gave the lovably bloodthirsty Mrs. Lovett a tuba. Now, in "Company," John Doyle places bachelor-hero Bobby behind a piano. And once again, the new notes this innovative director teases out of a Stephen Sondheim musical combine to produce a novel symphony of buoyant surprises.
Doyle won a Tony in June for his deconstruction of "Sweeney," in which the actors sang the show from a bare platform and doubled as members of the orchestra. In a musical so rooted in the ghoulish, having the actors provide their own accompaniment was less violation than inspiration -- as if the Sondheim characters, both the maimed and the monstrous, had been asked to play at their own funerals.
"Company," the 1970 show now set in a contemporary Manhattan of affluence, neurosis and ennui, seems a less likely fit for this kind of meta-theatrical tinkering. There was the worry that the production, coming so soon after "Sweeney," would seem like mere opportunism, an attempt to artificially extend the life of an esoteric concept.
Turns out the anxiety was misplaced. If skepticism is in the air as you walk into the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where "Company" opened last night, elation is the feeling walking out.
Invigorated by the brooding charisma of Raul Esparza, in the most controlled and captivating performance of his career, Doyle's "Company" proves a marvelous showcase for Sondheim's artistry. Many of the songs in this savvy, inventive musical -- whose importance seems only to grow with time -- are handled as wittily and tenderly as you are likely to hear them.
Esparza's renditions of "Someone Is Waiting" and, especially, the climactic "Being Alive" thrillingly expose the central tensions in this story, about a man afraid of intimacy who learns he can't live vicariously. For this revival, Esparza has been given another solo, "Marry Me a Little," cut from the original production. The song sends us into intermission with just the right taste of bittersweet.
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The important thing is that Esparza makes Bobby believable: He's a man who lives at arm's length from his feelings and as a result, is in danger of imploding. Doyle's concept aids in the view of Bobby as a man emotionally ill-equipped: for most of the evening, he's the only one who doesn't play an instrument. (It isn't until the final moments that he really tries to plunk out a tune by himself.) If the assorted grotesques of "Sweeney" seemed at home with strings and brass, so do the more familiar types of "Company." In the privileged, overachieving circles they inhabit, they now seem like just another group of multi-taskers.
Doyle's musical device never feels intrusive, but it's more effective when it's used to advance, or at least embroider, Furth's comic vignettes."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/29/AR2006112901565.html
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
Updated On: 11/30/06 at 12:49 AM
