Great Performances: "Keeping 'Company' with Sondheim" (WNET, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Eventually my husband Charles and I watched the rather awkwardly titled episode “Keeping Company with Sondheim” on the PBS series Great Performances. Their record with Stephen Sondheim has been mixed – first-rate versions of his later musicals Sunday in the Park with George (to my mind’ Sondheim’s masterpiece) and Into the Woods along with a sad, inadequate version of Follies from a 1985 New York Philharmonic concert production. The Follies show was 90 minutes long and half of it was behind-the-scenes interviews and rehearsal footage, and 45 minutes of a very abbreviated version of the concert. This show centered around the revival of Company, Sondheim’s 1970 show set in the New York City of the time and dealing with a 35-year-old man named Bobby who, alone of his friends, has never had a serious relationship with a woman and certainly has never been married. The show takes place on the night of his 35th birthday party and contrasts his single state with the marital dysfunctions of his friends.

The show was originally done with a white lead, Dean Jones (mostly known as a Disney actor and star of The Love Bug and similar trifles), but for a 1995 revival they made Bobby Black and cast Boyd Gaines in the role. Later in 2006 they cast another person of color, Raúl Esparza (best known to me as the prosecutor on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in the immediate aftermath of Christopher Meloni’s departure, and to my mind the only genuinely sexy leading man they’ve had on the show since Meloni left). For a London West End revival in 2018 director Marianne Elliott asked Sondheim for permission to make two key gender changes in the cast: she asked to turn Bobby into a woman, Bobbie (played by Rosalie Craig on the West End and Katrina Lenk in the current Broadway production), and the character of Amy from a woman to a man, Jamie (Jonathan Bailey on the West End and Matt Doyle on Broadway). Elliott acknowledged there would be criticism, especially over her taking the song “Not Getting Married,” originally presented as a feminist anthem to independence, and giving it to a Gay man expressing his anxiety over the prospect of marrying his partner Paul. (In the current Broadway production Paul is played by Etai Benson, and the Great Performances show featured footage of them being interviewed together, and they showed off so strong a “couples vibe” I wondered if they’re a Gay couple in real life as well.)

The show inevitably brought up Stephen Sondheim’s own Gayness – as early as 1970 some critics ventured that maybe the reason Bobby hadn’t got married to a woman was that he was supposed to be Gay – and it struck me that Sondleim, like Noël Coward, looked on straight people as essentially lab rats, to be observed and studied without being taken all that seriously. I’ve long felt that some Gay artists (thougn defiinitely not all) tend to look on lie and love with that kind of cynical detachment, perhaps because being Gay or Lesbian removes you from the cycle of generations by which the human race reproduces itself. (It’s true that there are plenty of Gay or Lesbian parents – either of children they conceived before they definitively “came out,” ones they’ve adopted or brought into being via surrogacy or artificial imsemination – but it’s still an inescapable biological fact that you don’t get to be a parent by having sex with partners of your own gender.)

The show also ran headlong into the COVID-19 pandemic; Company had already got as far as public previews (the last stage before an official opening) when the axe fell in March 2020. Af first the cast members believed they would be delayed only for about two weeks or so; as the weeks turned into months and the months turned into over a year, the actors went into quarantine and the show didn’t actually open until November 2021, 17 months late. At least it opened in time for Stephen Sondheim to see it – he’s shown at the theatre for the first performance just 11 days before he died in his sleep at his Connecticut home at age 91. One of the actors described the eerie feeling of walking into the theatre once the ban on Broadway performances was lifted – and finding it exactly the same as he'd left it 17 months earlier.