Twenty-five years ago, the Stephen Sondheim musical Company opened on Broadway, and made a sensation. Company has now returned to Broadway for the first time in a revival at the Roundabout Theater. But something interesting happened in the years between the two productions: Broadway died. And one of the causes of its death was this extraordinary piece of theater.
In 1970, Company seemed like a message from the future — an entirely new style of musical, one that would liberate a form that had grown stale and formulaic.
Indeed, despite the Roundabout’s awkward and second-rate staging, the revival seems entirely contemporary (despite some jarring references to “busy signals,. . . . answering services,” bubble-headed stewardesses, and kooky free spirits). That is due primarily to Sondheim’s songs, amazingly compact and precise depictions of modern American life — as when an aging matron sings of her life in “The Ladies Who Lunch”: “Another long, exhausting day, /Another thousand dollars,/A matinee, a Pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler’s/I’11 drink to that./And one for Mahler.” It would take John Updike or John Cheever pages to capture what Sondheim captures in just those 25 words: the self-loathing and self-congratuion of a decaying cultural elite.
Company’s emphasis on “relationships at the expense of plot prefigured the success of such 1990s sitcoms as Seinfeld and Friends, as did its custic take on are four couples whose own flawed marriages are portrayed in the broad strokes of a brilliant New Yorker cartoonist in George Furth’s sharp libretto.
A series of vignettes, Company isn’t really about Robert or his friends — its subjects are marriage, commitment, fear of commitment, New York, men, women, and sex.
And through it all, Sondheim offers a view of adulthood that is sophisticated, depressing, and sobering. About the best he can offer in praise of marriage is this lyric, sung by the four husbands to Robert: ” You’re always sorry, you’re always grateful. You think of things that might have been. Then she walks in.”
People enter marriage with dread and foreboding. A woman lets loose with a torrent of words and emotions in a showstopper called “Getting Married Today,” at the relentless, literally breathtaking pace of the “Flight of the Bumblebee”: “Pardon me is everybody here because if everybody’s here I want to thank you all for coming to the wedding I’d appreciate your going even more I mean you must have lots of better things to do and not a word of it to Paul you “member Paul you know the man I’m going to marry but I’m not because ! wouldn’t ruin anyone as wonderful as he is John Updike or John Cheever … ” pages to capture what Sondheim captures in just those 25 words: married friends.” Those friends Nor are unmarried relations any better. In Central Park, one of Robert’s girlfriends sings the first anthem to New York that actually describes the place well: “They meet at parties through the friends of friends whom they never know. “Do I pick you up or shall I meet you there or shall we let it go?/Did you get my message cause I looked in vain/Can we see each other Tuesday if it doesn’t rain,/Look, I’ll call you in the morning or my service will explain … “”
This is a show in which the audience-pleasing production numbers are all intended ironical-‘ ly. The high-stepping “Side Side by Side” is, you realize slow:
ly, a terrifying salute to life as a’ third wheel: “Year after year, olde/ and older, side by side… b.y,’ side./One’s impossible, two s dreary, three is company, safe and’ cheery.” And in “You Could Drive’ a Person Crazy,” Robert’s three’ girlfriends make like the Andrews’ sisters as they attack him for his flaws in the catchlest tune ot Sondheim’s composing career:
“When a person says that you upset her, that’s when you’re, good./You impersonate a person better than a zombie should.”
It’s startling to realize that Company made its debut at a time’ when Broadway was still dominat-I ed by shows that seem a million. years old now — lumbering behemoths like Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof and Man of Lai Mancha and 1776, all of which were going strong when Sond- ! heim and his collaborators came’ along and smashed their genre t bits.
The show was a turning point in the American theater, as notable in its way as Oklahoma? had been when it premiered in’ 1943, seamlessly merging song: story, and dance and thereby ushering in the so-called “golden age.’ of the Broadway musical.” Company was the first wholly successfull break from the rules of the golden’ age, which were pretty simple.’. First, musicals were generally set in the past. Not the past as anyone, had ever known it, but an ideal ized past, a time more innocent’ than when the show was written The Music Man, which opened in’ 1957, is set in 1911 Iowa. (1956’s My Fair Lady? Edwardian London. 1945’s Carousel? Turn-of-thei century New England. And so’ on.) Second, with few exceptions’ (like Carousel), they concluded happily, with a marriage or the possibility of a marriage. And finally, they were designed to rouse their audiences, to knock them fora loop with an explosive combination of comic patter, ballads, dance routines, broad and obvious jokes, and a big finish — an “11 o’clock song” designed to send the audience home with a buzz of excitement.
The form worked, and worked brilliantly, for about 25 years. Indeed, for about five decades altogether, the Broadway theater (especially in its pre- Oklahoma! days) was the single greatest source of the American popular song, which history will record as one of the glories of American creativity in the 20th century. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern and George and Ira Gershwin — these were theater people, writing show after show, year after year, with standard after standard in each score.
Alas, like most art that is produced unconsciously by those who think of themselves primarily as craftsmen, the musical was soon forced to contend with the disease of ambition — the pretentious desire of people who are rich, famous, and successful to be celebrated for their artistry, not for making people laugh or sing or cry. Theater folk ached to prove themselves deserving of the title of artist, and actually succeeded in winning converts to their cause with shows like West Side Story — a Supposedly daring and adult 1957 musical about street gangs based (may God help us) on Romeo and Juliet that today seems as quaint as The Music Man.
West Side Story was the first show Sondheim worked on. Later, he would write his own music, but in West Side Story he was writing words to Leonard Bernstein’s soaring melodies and gave few hints of the rhythmic and linguistic intricacies he was later to display: “A boy like that,/Who kill your brother!/Forget that boy and find another!/One of your own kind, stick to your own kind…” was about the best he could do.
So at the beginning of his career, Sondheim had already been party to a movement to change the Broadway musical, to make it more adult, more serious, more capable of addressing important issues. Only who wants serious issues addressed in a musical? Why would you even want to try? It would be like attending Madame Butterfly because that opera has a lot to say about suicide, or The Magic Flute because you are interested in exploring Masonic philosophy.
Ater all, an absurd thing happens every 10 minutes in a musical: Somebody bursts into song. This, needless to say, happens rarely in real life, and if it happened more frequently it would be cause for deep alarm. The reason that musicals traditionally concerned themselves with trivialities of plot and incident was because its makers knew they could not fool audiences into taking seriously the antics going on in front of them. Any resemblance to real life was strictly coincidental. The greatest stars of the musical stage – – Ethel Merman, Mary Martin — were bold and brassy caricatures of women, every gesture overdone and overdeliberate so that it could be seen in the third balcony rear. When Merman was required to break down in tears during the bitter and powerful 11 o’clock number called “Rose’s Turn” that closes 1959’s Gypsy, Sondheim’s second show, the original cast album records her for posterity sputtering and muttering like a dinnertheater amateur.
So along come the 1960s, with their mania for self-expression and celebration of the young, and at decade’s end along comes Company. Staged with all the glitter and dazzle that Broadway could muster — which was all the glitter and dazzle of the world then — Company had a gasp inducing set, striking costumes, hammy crowd-pleasing performances, and legendary choreography by the late Michael Bennett — all deployed in the service of a show that was, at root, a devastating criticism of the Broadway musical itself.
(This would become more explicit in Sondheim’s next show, Follies, which takes place as a great old Broadway musical theater is literally falling down around the characters’ heads.)
Even the audience came under attack: The aforementioned “Ladies Who Lunch,” so memorably skewered by Sondheim, were none other than the women sitting in the audience at the Alvin Theater night after night, paying $ 25 to hear themselves belittled.
No longer would the Broadway musical be shackled to the formal demands of plot, story, character, happy ending. No longer would they require a chorus (the original production had four extra singers, called “the Vocal Minority”; the revival dispenses with them entirely). No longer would they offer only a song, a dance, a laugh; no, now they were to deal with the humiliations and traumas of dancers and homosexuals (A Chorus Line). Or life on the verge of a nuclear war (Dance a Little Closer). Or the traumas of having a baby (Baby). Or discovering your father is gay and his lover has AIDS (Falsettos). Broadway musicals could now be about “concepts.”
This artistic impulse, this desire to free the musical from the strictures of its past, proved a devastating, horrifying failure. The “concept” musical didn’t liberate Broadway; it destroyed it. There was no new intimacy between audience and show as Company had promised. Instead, the concepts themselves changed — shows ceased being about marriage, relationships, imperialism and death, and increasingly concerned themselves with singing cats (Cats) and Boyd Gaine (center) and the 1995 Company singing trains (Starlight Express).
Instead of brilliant shows like Company and the Sondheim shows of the 1970s that followed it — Follies, Pacific Overtures, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd, each with a score more impressive than its predecessor’s — Broadway audiences today are assaulted by garish, overproduced, earsplitting examples of showbiz excess in the form of Europop bilge like Miss Saigon and Les Misdrables. They aren’t works of theater; they’re magic shows, Vegas revues, in which the singing, the dancing, the acting, everything is secondary to the spectacle.
Instead of the indescribable uplift of an infectiously tuneful Broadway show, they pummel audiences into mute submission and allow them to leave the theater thinking they’ve gotten their $ 75 worth.
Still, audiences come; old theaters are being renovated; Disney is making a mint on its stage version of Beauty and the Beast. Cats and Les Misdrables will run forever — and that may be the literal truth; Cats has been at the Winter Garden for 13 years, Les Miz at the Imperial for nine. But Broadway is dead — or rather, the idea of Broadway is, the idea that Broadway is a show business culture that is not simply a stepchild of Hollywood’s but one with its own stars, its own legends, its own stories — and that, moreover, offers its fans and spectators a high they can find nowhere else. The only two musicals scheduled to open this season on Broadway are Victor/Victoria and Big, both adaptations of movies. In 1970, when Company opened, 22 new musicals vied for attention. Sondheim and his collaborators made the old Broadway archaic and replaced it with something far worse.
The idea of Broadway is now as remote and dated as the depressing fact that this month on the Great White Way, the 74-year-old Carol Channing will open a revival of Hello, Dolly. In which she must play a desirable woman of 40. Apparently, like the body of Vladimir Lenin, Broadway will be there, entombed and embalmed, right in front of us, for many decades to come. And each year, the tickets will get more and more expensive as the body slowly crumbles to dust inside its well- preserved sepulcher.
By John Podhoretz
