Company

I remember with nostalgia Elaine Stritch and Donald Sinden in Two’s Company on television in the late 1970s. She played a successful American author and he was her very British butler. The only other thing I remember is that she, in real life, lived in the Savoy.

Now, after a bit of dipping and delving, I find that she played Joanne when Stephen Sondheim’s Company opened on Broadway in 1970. It’s a role that was made for Ethel Merman but Ethel was already wowing audiences in Hello, Dolly! that year. The role of Joanne needs a heavyweight, vocally not literally, and it has one in the West End revival I saw on Christmas Eve. Patti LuPone is every bit as much a star as Ethel and Elaine. Unfortunately she only has one show stopper, The Ladies Who Lunch, and that’s almost at the end. This wouldn’t matter if I could sit scrunched up in my seat looking forward to it while enjoying the show.

There are legions of Sondheim fans of which I am a centurion but I come to bury Company not to praise it. I have seen Company in London and New York and it’s one of Sondheim’s ripest; an intimate depiction of the human condition, something I can relate to; entering middle age single. Put on anything by Sondheim, sprinkle the Patti LuPone stardust and that’s box office gold, so why did the director think it needs tinkering with? The central character, Bobby,  a frequent refrain in the show, is a bachelor when all his friends are married. In this misguided adaptation Bobby becomes Bobbie and all the roles, except Joanne, are inverted.

LAMDA pulled this off with Taming of the Shrew but that ain’t a musical. Having men sing parts composed for women does not work. The characterisation does not work. The male actors, singing parts written for women, inevitably seem camp. Bobby seduces an air hostess. Bobbie seduces an air steward. I wonder what American airline had direct flights to Barcelona in 1970?