BROADWAY REVIEW: A ‘Company’ that no longer believes so much in love

The 1970 musical “Company” ends with Stephen Sondheim’s greatest musical number “Being Alive.” Therein, the long-single, 35-year-old New Yorker, Bobby, declaims in song how he finally has figured out that while love and commitment bring pain and strife, they sure as heck beat spending your days on this planet alone.

To love is to live, the song says. At the end of the last Broadway revival of his musical, Bobby, played by Raúl Esparza, literally and figuratively joined the band of his fellow humans.

But the world has changed since 2006 and it has not been pretty for love and unity. And in Marianne Elliott’s new production, which arrived from London and finally opened on Broadway Thursday night after pandemic delays, a more apt title for that song as sung by Katrina Lenk would be “Being Alone.”

The ode and, thus the message of the show, which also stars Patti LuPone, is not that you have to love someone else despite the cost, it’s that a single person most importantly needs to know herself. And how you feel about that change will likely dictate how you feel about this radical reboot of one of the late Sondheim’s (an agonizing thing to type) most beloved musicals. Either way, there’s no question that this revival is a perfect match for the Broadway moment.

In essence, Elliott’s auteur production, which Sondheim, long committed to allowing his shows to change for different generations, personally approved, reassigns the central message of a classic, and classically ambivalent, Broadway musical to better align it with today’s progressive, self-actualizing values. It’s not so different, really, from what Daniel Fish recently did on Broadway with “Oklahoma!” and it is constructed with similar expressionistic detail and narrative determination.

This trend of highly skilled directors rehabilitating old musicals by redirecting their points of view is fascinating and maybe even a good thing, overall. Certainly, an inevitable one now. The downside, though, is that these evangelical shows tend to squash much of the ambivalence already present in the original. And they decouple the American musical from its perennial belief in the power of love. Pity.

Love is love is love is love.

In this case, the bed-hopping Bobby has become intimacy-averse Bobbie and several of the iconic numbers (such as “Another Hundred People”) are sung by performers of a different gender, which some will find musically jarring and others fresh, exciting and revealing.

That’s actually not what is radical here; the Bobby/Bobbie swap works perfectly well and, given the greater societal pressure on women to get married, it actually solves one of the perennial “Company” problems (as in, why is being single at 35 so weird and so big a deal?).

What’s radical is the emphasis on satirizing all the surrounding couples, highlighting their presence as lousy role models for an urban single.

You really don’t see a lot of mutual feeling in the show, at least not in a way you can believe. Most of the supporting cast (Matt Doyle, Christopher Fitzgerald, Christopher Sieber, Jennifer Simard, Terence Archie, Etai Benson, Bobby Conte, Nikki Renee Daniels, Claybourne Elder, Greg Hildreth, Manu Narayan and Rashidra Scott) are playing caricatures of couples.

That’s not a criticism of their performances, which mostly are excellent, but a statement of the show’s belief in the you-must-rely-on-yourself doctrine over the possibility of love among equally flawed souls. In fact, you end up believing that no one here is really ever in love at all, which is why the famed, superbly performed “Getting Married Today” (not!) song is so effective in this show.

Similarly, “Barcelona,” traditionally an agonizing song to experience in the theater, is here played mostly, and very cleverly, for laughs, notwithstanding the sweetness of Elder’s work as the naive flight attendant, who is now a man struggling with sexual performance.

Which brings us to LuPone. Her visceral, show-stopping, rendition of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” performed as her character, Joanne, sits perched in a grinding nightclub, is simply extraordinary, filled with angst, hope, cynicism, possibility, vulnerability and all of the qualities you typically and traditionally look for in “Company.” Unlike Lenk, who is perfectly charming and perfectly consistent throughout the entire production, LuPone’s Joanne actually changes over the course of the number, journeying toward some kind of love (or at least human communion) as people typically do in musicals.

You don’t mess with LuPone, of course, and she was a close associate of the beloved composer. There is a lesson there for today’s Broadway.

New musical ways still need the anchor of unimpeachable affection and need.