Despite the odds, "Company" revolutionized Broadway with a more pop-heavy sounding score (attributable somewhat to orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, following up in somewhat the same style from his incredible work on Bacharach and David's "Promises, Promises" two seasons previously) and a cynical, in-joke laden book by comedian George Furth that pilloried the many foibles of modern marriage as seen through the eyes of its eternal bachelor lead character, Bobby. "Company" was a massive hit, running for several seasons, and when Sondheim followed it up in successive seasons with "Follies" and "A Little Night Music," achieving a trifecta that few Broadway veterans ever have, his reputation was not only salvaged but elevated to the level of icon, something the intervening years have only burnished, despite his share of shows that never recouped their investments.

Even in 1970, "Company" was a bit of an anomaly in the rapidly changing post-"Hair" world of the big Broadway musical. Episodic and without a coherent through-line, the show has Bobby, celebrating his 35th birthday, visiting several married or about to be married couples, all of whom are caught up in their various scenarios while simultaneously trying to convince Bobby that he needs to join their betrothed ranks. Interspersed with these visits are Bobby's ruminations and one night stands, revealing a lonely, conflicted soul at the center of the proceedings. The show provides a field day for Sondheim's Mensa-level lyrical cynicism, with one couple singing, "It's the concerts you enjoy together, neighbors you annoy together, children you destroy together that keep marriage intact," and, in the famous 11 o'clock number for Joanne, "The Ladies Who Lunch," "Another long, exhausting day, Another thousand dollars, A matinee, A Pinter Play, perhaps a piece of Mahler's, I'll drink to that!" But buried underneath the rampant jaded feeling are the heartfelt sentiments of such Sondheim classics as "Another Hundred People" (heartfelt despite being about alienation), "Someone is Waiting" (in which Bobby attempts to craft his perfect woman out of the parts of the married women he's interacting with in the show), "Sorry/Grateful," in which one of the married men reveals the ambivalent feelings that accompany marriage, and probably most famously, the anthemic finale, "Being Alive," where the sandtraps of marriage are pitted against its one undeniable asset--it provides someone with whom to share everything.

"Company" was revived twice in the 1990s (once a special two night event) to acclaim if not overwhelming box office. Enter director John Doyle, the man who reinvented Sondheim's landmark "Sweeney Todd" in a 2005 revival which saw the actors playing all of the instruments (this conceit had also been used for the finale of the revival of "The Music Man", where of course everyone is supposed to be playing instruments). This caused a major brouhaha at the time, and not just from the Musicians' Union. Anyone who follows Broadway has known the trend for decades now has been to cut the size of pit bands down to the bare minimum, with synthesizers making up the difference. With weekly operating expenses for big musicals routinely in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, producers simply have been unwilling to pay for twenty or more musicians when they can hire four or five, even if they must weather the very occasional complaint from astute listeners who know the difference between a sine wave and a clarinet. But when Doyle had his actors traipsing around carrying tubas and snare drums, it seemed the bottom had fallen out of the traditional Broadway musical, in more ways than one. Incredibly, it worked, at least some of the time, no doubt due to Doyle's reimagining of the show as a kind of music hall vaudeville romp (replete, of course, with ghastly murders). But what worked for a period costume piece with a specific staging gimmick seems stretched to its breaking point in Doyle's revival of "Company", a patently contemporary show that can't be jiggered with enough to sustain this bizarre conceit. What's the point?

This patently strange reimagining of the show leads to a number of shortcomings, not the least of which is the lack of a real rhythm section. Tunick's original orchestrations (here radically reduced and rewritten, and not very effectively if I may say so, by Mary Mitchell Campbell) were propelled by an almost Bossa Nova-esque trap set in a lot of the numbers (notably the oft-reprised title song and "Tick Tock"). But even in the originally brass-driven "Have I Got a Girl For You," there was an incredible momentum in the accompaniment that is simply lethargic in this version. Other songs are just outright ridiculous, as in the Andrews Sisters pastiche "You Could Drive a Person Crazy," which Doyle now has redone with the three women playing saxes as they attempt to spit out the words and still have enough breath left over to interject musical interludes. It's interesting that Doyle chooses not to highlight the more demanding pianism of "Another Hundred People," "Getting Married Today" and, to a lesser extent, "Marry Me a Little." The onstage grand is certainly not being used, though the far upstage synth played by Matt Castle may be--it's hard to tell with the televised direction of Lonny Price. To be fair, and as might be expected, some of the quieter moments in the show work fairly effectively with this dumbed-down instrumentation. "Someone is Waiting" works beautifully with a simple guitar accompaniment, though I kept wondering why Raul Esparza altered the opening melody from the original in each verse. Color me a Sondheim purist, I guess.

On the plus side, this is far and away the best sung "Company" ever, for the most part. The original Broadway cast recording was marred by a famously nervous Elaine Stritch, as detailed in D.A. Pennebaker's groundbreaking documentary Original Cast Recording: Company. In fact Stritch's hideously flat "we looooooove you" was so bad it was digitally edited from the remastered CD released a few years ago. While Esparza does a mostly magnificent job with his Bobby, and Angel Desai's Marta (with the showstopping "Another Hundred People") and Elizabeth Stanley's ditzy April are standouts, curiously it's the Stritch role, Joanne, which is the least impressive in this recasting. New Joanne Barbara Walsh is just doing a flat-out Stritch impersonation in her book scenes, and her singing is, well, not even up to Stritch standards, which is, as you may have guessed, not exactly a compliment.

Doyle misses the boat so significantly with this production that it's actually surprising that his actors are not floundering out to sea even more than they are. When Joanne and Harry are supposed to be fighting each other in a new martial art Joanne has learned, they are forced in Doyle's staging to mime their interaction from opposite sides of the stage. Where the original "Company" had Boris Aronson's fantastic multi-leveled steel grid of a set, here Doyle has them performing on basically a concert stage (a propos I guess, considering the gimmick) with, of all things, Roman colonnades. I seriously doubt Bobby's apartment would have had those. As a director friend of mine joked (hopefully, anyway) to me about this trend of actor-musicians, "What's next? Will they wear those miners' helmets with the lights on them so that the lighting designers can be let go, too?" "Company" deserves better than this. Stephen Sondheim deserves better than this. The actors, who strive valiantly in this production, certainly deserve better than this. But most of all, the audience deserves a "Company" in full-flower, with a full pit band playing those magnificent Tunick orchestrations.

The DVD

Video:
Company is presented in a generally good enhanced 1.78:1 transfer. Colors and contrast are both strong. There is occasional aliasing with some of the gobo lighting effects.

Sound:
Even in this relatively paltry interpretation, Company sounds magnificent in both its Dolby 2.0 and 5.1 soundtracks. Separation and fidelity are both superb. What it would have sounded like with an actual orchestra!

Extras:
This DVD may be more worthwhile for the 38 minute or so Conversation with Stephen Sondheim than for its main feature. Two other shorter interviews with Esparza and Doyle are also included.

Final Thoughts:
If you've never experienced a live stage performance of a Sondheim musical, this may be worth an evening's rental, though it's such a sad recreation of a classic show that I can't really even give a rental my unqualified recommendation. I do highly recommend Pennebaker's outstanding documentation of the recording of the original Broadway cast album in 1970--you get a lot of the music, plus a nice insight into Sondheim's working style in that.

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"G-d made stars galore" & "Hey, what kind of a crappy fortune is this?" ZMK, modern prophet