Who's seeing COMPANY tonight?- Page 5

Posted: 4/8/11 at 6:56pm

"
I always agree with Sondheim's statement that the original version/performance of his work is the best."

Umm he doesn't say this at all. He's a big defender (though I disagree) of Something Just Broke in Assassins, the Merrily revisions, etc. For other shows he often seems to go back and forth with his opinion. But I'd like to think he said exactly what you claim he did

[theminutepast]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:26pm

Based on the clip, I'm not impressed with Anika Noni Rose or Neil Harris. Their voices were weak compared to their counterparts in the 2007 revival. I no longer regret being unable to see this.

[ljay889]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:26pm

^ The Marta in the revival also sang a much lower key.

[somethingwicked]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:31pm

While I adore Anika Noni Rose, for me, LaChanze's "Another Hundred People" in the 1995 revival is thrilling in a way no other version I've ever heard has managed to top. She captured a joyful, quirky exuberance that, combined with her top notch vocals, sent the number into the stratosphere.

That revival also contained Veanne Cox's knockout "Not Getting Married Today," which Sondheim has gone on record as saying is his favorite rendition of that song.

Updated On: 4/8/11 at 07:31 PM

[AC126748]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:35pm

Vocally, LaChanze was great, but onstage she was a dead fish. She sang the song like an American Idol contestant. For me, Marcy Harriel (in DC) takes the cake for best rendition.

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:38pm

The clips to me show potential but look really under-rehearsed. Dare I say it it looks almost like a good amateur production... I know concerts don't get much rehearsal, but maybe Company is too hard to really pull off without it. (And was the sound that muddy live? Plus I thought they were original orchestrations, but I don't hear the prominent early synth...)

Of course this was first night, but I didn't get that feeling of under-rehearsed, despite having mixed emotions on, with the Sweeney or Passion concerts... (That said, full disclosure, I don't think Lonny is very good at directing these concerts... The Sondheim Birthday concert was one thing, but haven't been too impressed with any of his concert versions of full shows).

Yes, complain, complain :P I'll still see it in theatres.

Updated On: 4/8/11 at 07:38 PM

[Scarywarhol]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:40pm

I think that the whole argument about whether the show can be "updated" doesn't necessarily need to go one way or the other. At the end of the day, the only important circumstance for the performance is that it's New York. I didn't necessarily feel like the John Doyle version was set in 2006 because of the production, or the 1970s because of the text. It is just set in The City. With the vague concepty-ness of the piece, I think it works for it to be a vague 20th/21st century New York. The main things don't change. The sentiment of Another Hundred People isn't defined by "My service'll explain." The archetypal city vs. country life idea doesn't change. You're seeing these odd, floaty snippets of life, anyway. I don't think it particularly matters.

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:43pm

A valid argument, and I admit if you make it too 70s it can come off as a show like Promises Promises, which it shouldn't. And yet, and yet... I really do think the time does matter--the way people talk, the relationships between the sexes and husbands and wives, etc, HAVE changed in 40 years.

I saw a production in Seattle a few years back with Hugh Panaro that I thought was great--it seemed to use (from my memory) the original script, and had full original orchestrations. And was clearly 1970, but not kitschily so (from what I've seen the Kennedy Center version with Barrowman did play up the 1970 a bit too much.)

Does updating the show to "now" work? Sure, depending on the production, it works fine. Does it improve the piece at all? I'm completely unconvinced it ever has...
Updated On: 4/8/11 at 07:43 PM

[ljay889]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 7:57pm

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=13332585

Where is the Times review?

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 8:23pm

It's here, but it was written by their music critic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/arts/music/neil-patrick-harris-in-company-at-avery-fisher-hall-review.html?_r=1&ref=music

[ljay889]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 8:29pm

^ Seems Mixed-to-Positive with a rave for LuPone.

[ljay889]

Posted: 4/8/11 at 8:37pm

. Updated On: 4/8/11 at 08:37 PM

[thismyshow]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 12:55am

saw the show tonight, really enjoyed it however for 100 bucks having to lean over a rail to see everything for 3 hours was a bummer (who designed avery fischer hall, id like to tell them that you should have all your seats pointed toward the stage)

as for the stagedoor bummer that cryer, NPH, and colbert took other doors however jon stewart was there tonight and took photos and signed for people (takes that as a consolation prize)

[uncageg]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 1:10am

Regarding "Something Just Broke". It is one of my favorite Sondheim sings. It gave me goosebumps when I saw the show.

Posted: 4/9/11 at 1:31am

I get why it would give anyone goosebumps, it's a powerful moment. I just feel (and I guess this should be a seperate thread) that it takes away from the power of the entire piece--taking you out of seeing things, however warped, from the perspective of the assassins--with the baladeer as the only different voice--and skews the entire play in a way, again IMHO, it shouldn't be. Frankly the reprise of Everybody's Got the Right, after the amazing Lee Harvey O scene, gives me goosbumps, even on the superior off Broadway recording, but on stage too, and that's the true power of the piece. To ruin that moment by having Something Just Broke before, dissipates the whole play's power.

[TonyVincent]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 9:55am

Saw it last night. Phenomenal night at the theater. So much talent on that stage that I wish many of them had been given more to do, which is obviously impossible given the equal distribution and length of the show. The only two things that disappointed me musically were Anika Noni Rose's head voice (if they had done it in that lower key, it would have been perfect), and NPH at the end of each act, who just didn't quite have the power and sounded a bit fatigued. I love his voice and was really hoping he'd pull it off, but I think the NYT review summarizes my thoughts well in this regard.

I also expected Colbert to be able to carry a tune given the amount he "sings" in his other work, but he and Cryer disappointed me. Fortunately, it's only for half a song ("Sorry-Grateful"), and Jim Walton comes in to save that.

Also, the only other version I've seen is the video of the '06 revival, but I liked that ending better than the more upbeat, trite one last night. Were the original productions similar to this one (NPH's actions after everyone leaves)? And the balance between the huge orchestra and the small cast was often a little off, though that could have been where I was sitting.

So, take the show, lower "Another Hundred People," give Cryer/Colbert a week or two of professional singing lessons, and give NPH Raul Esparza's voice, and it would have been a near-perfect evening at the theater.

Oh, and the subway saxophonist on the 1 train platform was playing "Another Hundred People" as we got down there after the show. That was awesome.

[NYUrickydrummer]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 10:13am

Anyone have a ticket for tonight that they need to get rid of in a hurry (friend dropped out, etc.)? If so, shoot me an email at richard @ exeuntmagazine.com (sans spaces).

[morosco]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 10:59am

I really hate the cast being pushed around on the couches. All I can think of is Atlantic City.

[Dollypop]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 11:05am

Do they use a show curtain? What's it like?

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 3:11pm

What a wonderful evening. Neil Patrick Harris may not have the strong male belting voice of Larry Kert/Dean Jones/Raul Esparza, but neither did Matt Cavenaugh in the last West Side revival.

Nevertheless, he played the part and acted the songs beautifully, as did Martha Plimpton and Katie Finneran and Anika Noni Rose, whom I very much liked.

I'm trying to remember my first time seeing it in 1970. I was 14, and wanted to be an actor, so I was taking the subway downtown from the Bronx every Saturday morning to attend classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where one of my teacher was Anita Morris, 12 years before Nine.

She was teaching the Movement for Actors class and we all had to wear leotards, which was a little embarrassing for 14-year-old acting students who had never worn tights before. Anita wore a pair that were so well-worn that there was a hole that would get bigger as she stretched, displaying a large patch of her very muscular inner thigh. Her technique for stretching us out was to place her feet on the insides of our calves and press outward, until our two bodies formed a diamond. Then she would go on to the next student, leaving the boys in a bit of a pickle and the girls, most likely, confused.

Even though I was a budding homosexual, I got a boner. It was, after all, Anita Morris stretching me out.

After the classes ended every Saturday around lunchtime, I would buy a ticket for a matinee, and then take the subway back up to the Bronx.

I saw a lot of shows I loved: 1776, Katharine Hepburn in Coco, Frank Gorshin in Jimmy, Jimmy Coco in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Lauren Bacall in Applause, Melba Moore in Purlie, Shirley Booth in Look to the Lillies. There was a very creepy thriller called Child's Play about possessed students in a boy's boarding school. I liked that one a lot. But my favorite was seeing Shelley Winters in Minnie's Boy's, which I saw on my 14th birthday. I had waited outside the stage door for Shelley Winters and when I told her it was my birthday, she gave me a very gooey kiss on the cheek that didn't give me a boner but totally made my heart stop. Shelley Winters, the movie star!

I would go back to my school each Monday and brag about the Broadway shows I had seen, but it was 1970, and my friends were into rock music and sports and certainly not older women in star vehicles on Broadway. And there was no Internet, no BroadwayWorld, no AllThatChat, no YouTube. I was pretty much on my own.

But there was this one kid, Karl, whose parents were divorced, which was still pretty shocking in the world I grew up in. He was tall and gangly, with thick black glasses and a chip on his shoulder. Nowadays we would call him a "theater geek" or a "theater nerd," but in 1970, he was just weird.

He would listen to my Broadway reveries, approving of my choices in straight plays but not of my enthusiasm for musicals, particularly Minnie's Boys, which was seemed to be the lowest of the low, as far as Karl was concerned.. He sneered when I went on and on about how good Shelley Winters was.

Sometime in May of that year, Karl asked if I had plans to see Company. I had to ask what it was. He explained, patiently. I had no idea, really, who Stephen Sondheim was. He explained less patiently. I knew who Dean Jones was, from The Love Bug, but I had to ask who Elaine Stritch was. He loved that I didn't know, because he got to tell me.

But it was the writing of Company that Karl was most excited about. He talked of its sophistication, and its cynical attitude toward marriage and divorce and its mentions of pot and sex. He made me promise I would go the next Saturday.

After Acting and Movement class the following Saturday, I went up to the Alvin Theater on 52nd Street (now the Neil Simon) and bought one of those $2.00 tickets in the last two rows of the balcony, which Hal Prince had for all his shows through Night Music.

And then my life changed.

I don't know what hit me first--it must have been the Boris Aronson stainless-steel set with the exposed elevators that moved the cast up and down while they sang their Bobby-Baby-Bubbis. I'd never seen anything like that--and never heard anything like that.

It wasn't the opening number that changed my life. It was the karate scene and the force of nature that was Elaine Stritch singing "The Little Things You Do Together." To this still somewhat naive 14-year-old, it seemed as if the competition between husband and wife and those words Stritch was singing seemed to encapsulate the marriages of every one of my parents' friends.

As the show went on, I felt myself obtaining a kind of secret knowledge and perspective by which I could judge the older generation and feel superior to them. I knew the secrets about them they didn't even know themselves: They weren't sorry they got married; they were sorry-grateful. The still-single men were driving the still-single women crazy--and they were deeply maladjusted. The married men were fantasizing about the single men having sex with dumb girls who were into Sazerac Slings and more than 75 Kama Sutra and Chinese techniques. And the married women were fantasizing about taking care of the single men while the single men were having tons of hot sex with girls whose names they got wrong the next morning.

I liked Dean Jones but when Stritch served up the "Ladies Who Lunch," it was not only a devastating critique of my mother's friends--it was also the kind of tour de force performance I had never seen before, in my 9 years of theater-going, not even from Shelley Winters. Stritch's shrieks and growls, at least to me, turned the ending of the song into a scathing analysis of the ladies who lunch and of Joanne herself--and of Stritch herself too. Stritch is still the ONLY Joanne I have ever seen who was able to turn the end of the song into that kind of exhilarating self-critique.

I walked downstairs from the balcony in a kind of daze and went straight to the box office to buy another $2.00 ticket for the next Saturday matinee I could go to, which was the Saturday after Memorial Day weekend.

I went back to the Bronx a changed boy. I would never think of theater the same way, I would never think of relationships the same way, I would never think of myself in the same way. Marta says in the show that her idea of sophistication is to dress all in black and sit in a bar somewhere by herself and drink and cry. I was too young to drink, but my idea of sophistication became to dress all in black and go to a theater somewhere and watch Sondheim. It still is.

I went back the Saturday after Memorial Day and saw the show a second time. This time Dean Jones was gone and Larry Kert had replaced him. I connected to the throbbing emotionality in Larry Kert's singing on a much deeper level than I had with Dean Jones. I will still only 14, but now the show was about ME. I saw it two more times, once with Vivian Blaine taking over for Stritch and once with Jane Russell--I loved them both, but neither was the force of nature that was Stritch.

By then I was 15. And it was time for Follies.

Updated On: 4/9/11 at 03:11 PM

[CarlosAlberto]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 3:24pm

That was a great write up PJ. I love getting lost in your posts that document your history and love for theater. I had no idea you were a Bronx boy as well. I was born on the Lower East Side and moved to the Bronx when I was 7. :)

[HistoryBoy2]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 3:27pm

Thank you, Pal.

[Kad]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 3:28pm

A gorgeous post, Pal.

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 3:53pm

I loved that post, PJ. Thank you.

I wish I could have been there to see it the first time around. I really, really, really do. Things like your post make me wish it even more. My first Company experience was only recently, still early in my Sondheim-loving career, but this, that year, this was me:

I would never think of theater the same way, I would never think of relationships the same way, I would never think of myself in the same way.

I have this peculiar way of looking at my life as "before Company" and "after Company." There was that night where it totally snuck up on me, and then there was everything else. I hope it's not too presumptuous to say it's quite beautiful to share that with someone else, even when you don't see eye-to-eye about specific productions. Maybe even more beautiful that way.

Updated On: 4/9/11 at 03:53 PM

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 4/9/11 at 5:54pm

What a great post, Pal. Beautiful!

I saw the show this afternoon and really loved it. The most surprising performance came from Christina Hendricks, who showed some real old-fashioned stage presence. She was great! As a huge fan of her work on Mad Men, I was glad to see her do so well in this.

NPH was wonderful, even if his voice isn't the strongest. Patti is just out of control, but we all knew that. Her "Ladies Who Lunch" brought the house down, and rightfully so. And Katie Finneran can do no wrong. Period. The orchestra sounded incredible, of course. I wish I had bought tickets to go again!

Too bad my seat was absolutely HORRIBLE. For $95, I missed 60% of the stage and had to lean over the railing most of the show. They should really let people know the box seats are partial view. I would have definitely sprung for better seats had I known. I'm not one to complain about seats, but this was really one of the worst views I've ever had, especially for (when all was said and done) over $100 a ticket.
Updated On: 4/9/11 at 05:54 PM