Commercial Necessities: Reviving Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company at the Turn of the Millennium

The American musical is often positioned as a uniquely open and malleable text. Discussing the popular form, Mitchell Morris acknowledges the “matrix of commercial necessities” that demands new productions of any given musical to move away from the original, adapting to and privileging new audiences, embracing the contributions made by emerging directors, designers, and performers, and implementing newly revised dialogue and song selection. Morris argues that revivals and dramaturgical revisions constitute a complicated yet integral part of the American musical theatre tradition: “Attributes such as these indicate a general assumption that the historical location of a musical— not simply its place in the chronological sequence—is an important aspect of its framing.”¹

The idea of the musical as an ever-evolving text not limited by its sequential place in the canon but framed by any given historical moment is a compelling one. In October 2012, for example, Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis presented Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s groundbreaking musical comedy Company.² This production sought, in part, to position itself in opposition to the Minnesota Same-Sex Marriage Amendment on the November 6, 2012 ballot, and worked to stage a complex yet entertaining portrait of a man on the cusp of personal discovery as well as a forthright examination of marriage as a vital and evolving institution.³ Updating the action to the present and utilizing smart phones, tablets, and video projections of social media platforms, director Peter Rothstein sought to underline the text’s concern with, according to Sondheim, the great “difficulty of making one-to-one relationships in an increasingly dehumanized society.”⁴ Twin Cities spectators were invited to deliberate and discuss, teasing out personal responses to one of the most meaningful choices any two people can make. Indeed, the Theatre Latté Da production of Company underlined the privilege to make such a choice during those politically charged weeks when the marriage equality debate was at the front lines of cultural discourse at home and across the nation. A closer look at the musical’s evolution, informed by a thorough examination of the relationship between the 1970 Broadway premiere and the revisions made by Sondheim and Furth for the 1995 revivals in New York and London, generates a far more complicated set of responses.

The 1995 revision of Company bifurcates the text and produces a strange hybrid that hovers awkwardly between past and present.⁵ While perhaps more commercially viable, this version works to close up gaps and holes, especially when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality. Returning to the 1970 book and lyrics, one notes a caustic, more rebellious interrogation of American marriage as a fundamentally monomythic institution.⁶ In particular, the musical’s engagement with the “Silent Generation”—those Americans in their thirties and forties for whom the 1970 Broadway production would resonate so powerfully—seems crucial to understanding the forces of conflict that shape the dramatic action.

It is hard to imagine a time when Stephen Sondheim’s eminence was ever in question, yet on the evening of April 26, 1970, waiting for the curtain to rise on Company, his first Broadway show in five years, the forty-year-old composer and lyricist remained an artist in transition. The measure of his success was still up for debate. The new musical was highly conceptual, yet, according to Sondheim, quite simple in design: “A man with no emotional commitment reassesses his life on his thirty-fifth birthday by reviewing his relationships with his married acquaintances and his girlfriends. That is the entire plot.”⁷ Sondheim, Furth, and director/producer Hal Prince must have been devastated by the New York Times review in which Clive Barnes castigated Company for trafficking in cocktail party grotesques, a slick portrait of the urban jungle for tourists seeking out an authentic New York City experience. Although Barnes acknowledged Sondheim to be “one of the most sophisticated composers ever to write Broadway musicals,” praising his lyrics for their “sparse, elegant wit,” he suggested the songs to be overtly clever. Barnes, who appreciated Boris Aronson...