On March 31, 2024, Marianne Elliott’s Tony-winning revival of Company ended its stay at the Kennedy Center. The musical, the brain-child of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, playwright George Furth, and director Hal Prince, originally opened on Broadway in 1970. Elliot brought to Sondheim, shortly before his death in 2021, the concept of a gender flipped version and, with her trademark ability to extract humor from every aspect of her source material, brings the show to soaring new heights in this spectacular reimagining.
It’s about the life of Bobbi. She’s 35, unmarried, and between boyfriends. Her friends, all crazy and married, invite her to parties, out to drink, and to babysit their kids. The show is about her relationships with all of them; their crazy antics; and the real, broken and affectionate nature of their relationships.
The role of Bobbi was taken on by Britney Coleman. She’s a relative newcomer, performing only supporting or understudy roles on Broadway, but her performance throughout the show was solid. However, her rendition of the climatic song ‘Being Alive,’ was a little underwhelming. It lacked the visceral power such an iconic song demands.
The other “top-billing” role, JoAnne, was performed by Judy McLane. Veteran of Broadway’s Mamma Mia!, McLane brought the exact level of sardonic misanthropy that the role requires. The role was “immortalized by Elaine Stritch,” writes Thomas Floyd in the Washington Post, “and portrayed in this revival’s West End and Broadway runs by Patti LuPone in an Olivier- and Tony-winning turn. McLane proves to be a worthy successor to those theatrical titans,” delivering a stirring rendition of the seminal song, ‘The Ladies Who Lunch.’
Company, in both its original form and this freshly gender-bent version, is a musical of contradictions. The contradictions between being married and being single, between being sorry and being grateful, between being funny and being heartfelt, between being sure and being unsure and ‘Being Alive’; it’s the show’s greatest virtue. Few other works of the American theater so deftly toe the line of emotive and funny, and this production only exemplifies these qualities.
“I was skeptical,” Sondheim told the New York Times in 2021, referring to when Elliott brought the idea of a gender-flipped version to him. “I was a big fan of Marianne’s.[At the workshop], there was a young cameraman who had never heard of the show. When Marianne told him about what the show was originally, he said, ‘You mean it worked with a guy?’ And then I knew that we had a show.” And, of course, Sondheim was absolutely right.
The show won the Olivier Award on the West End and the Tony Award on Broadway for Best Revival of a Musical, alongside a smattering of other honors, and was highly successful in both runs and it’s obvious why: it’s an electric, modern production of a fantastic musical that retains the material’s bite while still feeling fresh in every sense of the word. If you want to see this fantastic production, it’s currently on a tour of the country that will continue until October of 2024.
