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Marry me a little
SpeakEasy is in good Company
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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A caveat about Company, the 1970 Stephen Sondheim show considered the granddaddy of concept musicals, has always been that you don’t care about the central character, whose much scatted-upon name is Bobby, and are therefore indifferent to whether he finds happiness in the comforting noose of wedlock toward which his married friends, like a syncopated bunch of hangmen, are pushing him. Despite the achievement of a musical that radically strayed from convention and offered plums from the merrily hostile "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" to the bristling "Ladies Who Lunch," Company was criticized for being more admirable than involving. But in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s 35th-anniversary revival of the landmark work, by the time Michael Mendiola’s Bobby reached the almost prayerful climax of "Being Alive," the number that precedes the fourth enactment of the character’s 35th-birthday party and the final curtain, I was in tears. In this production, at least, the ambivalent Bobby is worth a damn, and a square if tricky landing has been made on whether marriage — an embrace, however strangling, into which a portion of this state’s populace has only recently been admitted — is anathema or balm. Company marks a departure for SpeakEasy in more ways than one: here the troupe, which has built its reputation presenting Boston premieres of unconventional musicals, essays an avowed classic more worshipped than produced at the same time that it moves from its long-time home at the Boston Center for the Arts to the 200-seat Nancy and Edward Roberts Studio Theatre in the newly opened Stanford Calderwood Pavilion next door. Eric Levenson has designed a multi-level set that both echoes the towering Boris Aronson original and serves as its own flashing billboard of shimmering metal and lushly lighted squares suggesting a cleaner, Mondrian-inspired Manhattan. Artistic director Paul Daigneault and his troupe rise to the considerable challenge of Company, with its eye-of-a-storm protagonist, its swirl of "these good crazy people" (his sporadically discontented coupled friends), and its trio of young women among whom Bobby-baby-bubi flits like a pollen-phobic bee. Sondheim’s score is among his most complex, and if some of the singing here seems to chase the quick, irregularly rhyming lyrics, when the vocals take off, they soar. Daigneault’s production incorporates changes made for the 1995 Scott Ellis–directed Broadway revival and the 1996 Sam Mendes production at London’s Donmar Warehouse. The most important of these is to restore "Marry Me a Little," which was deemed too cynical in 1970, as the first-act finale, and Mendiola delivers it with savage precision. There is also an added scene in which one of his married male chums makes a tentative pass at Bobby, and the orchestrations have been updated. SpeakEasy does a neat job of negotiating between Company as a period piece and one taking place in the here-and-now. The most bohemian of the girlfriends wears a black sheepskin coat and tie-dye, but no one looks like a sideburned refugee from Laugh In. Daigneault has gathered a good cast, many of its members SpeakEasy vets. They hardly form a Chorus Line–worthy hoofing ensemble (though they give it a game go in the ironically festive "Side by Side by Side," the top-of-act-two party scene that comes with shiny paper hats and a kick line), but the voices, from Kerry A. Dowling’s ice-cream-rich soprano to Nancy E. Carroll’s gravel borrowed from Elaine Stritch’s driveway, are strong and the dissonant harmonies are solid. One of the innovations of Company was the way in which the songs comment on rather than grow out of the scenes — as when tension-ridden Sarah and Harry take each other on in a series of karate throws as the other three couples kick around the arch lyrics of that paean to the perfect relationship, "The Little Things You Do Together." And Daigneault moves Bobby and his couple friends about their various territories adroitly, the former sometimes stalked in song by the latter. There are standout performers, among them Elaine Theodore, who nails the panicked bride’s patter song, "Getting Married Today," with a fleet tongue, zany warmth, and neurotic sensibility. And newcomer Stephanie Carlson brings a delicate, wide-eyed charm to the not-ready-for-Mensa flight attendant whom Bobby seduces before the metronomic morning-after flight of "Barcelona." But Mendiola, long-faced, laid-back, more bereft than cynical, is the soulful soul of this Company.
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