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
