Theatre in Review: Company (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)

	Katrina Lenk and the cast of Company. Photo: Matthew Murphy.

An old friend is back in town, looking remarkably soigné; well, she's had work done -- not to mention a gender reassignment. Marianne Elliott's stunningly original production of Company brings a famously tricky show -- the most "now" musical of 1970 -- into the twenty-first century. This sort of conceptual tinkering, which includes many tweaks to the script and score, can be a dicey business, but the director (aided, of course, by the late, great Stephen Sondheim) preserves Company's essential nature -- wisecracking, martini-dry, and secretly yearning -- while bringing it thoroughly up to date. At 51, it is fresher, funnier, and far more substantial than most of its Broadway neighbors.

Company has always worn its modernism proudly. An anthropological study of marital manners as practiced by the natives of New York City, it dispatches its protagonist -- the charming, commitment-phobic Bobby -- on an odyssey into the lives of five couples, exposing their competitions, manipulations, deceptions, and occasional panic states. George Furth's book dispenses with plot for a non-linear series of scenes wrapped around a 35th birthday party that may or may not be happening. It's the first stream-of-consciousness musical: Characters wander, uninvited, onstage -- there but not there -- offering crisp commentary. A sexual encounter is interrupted by a chorus of kibitzers, unhappy with Bobby's choice of bed partner. Entire production numbers unfold in a kind of liminal space, untethered from everyday reality. It's all part of an argument, unfolding inside Bobby's head, set to the jumpy rhythms and crossword-play of Sondheim's score.

The big switch here is that Bobby -- a role previously played by leading men ranging from Dean Jones to Neil Patrick Harris -- is now Bobbie, in the person of fetching, funny Katrina Lenk. In Elliott's staging, Bobbie is an adult Alice, lost in a wonderland of constantly shifting interiors designed by Bunny Christie. (At least one scenic effect consciously evokes Lewis Carroll's upside-down world.) The opening number finds Bobbie inside a tiny room, packed to the walls with friends ostensibly celebrating her birthday while busily taking selfies. Later, she opens a manhole cover and up rises a terrace into which she slips, like a burglar, in time for a couple to announce their upcoming divorce. As she swipes through a dating app, out comes a trio of disillusioned suitors, fed up with being kept on a string.

This number, "You Could Drive a Person Crazy," originally conceived as an Andrews Sisters parody, works equally well as an exercise in masculine close harmony. Similarly, "Getting Married Today," that nervous breakdown set to music, is delivered by Bobbie's friend Jamie, who is terrified of tying the knot with his partner Paul. The song, an unchecked flood of neurotic obsessions and run-on sentences, is delivered by Matt Doyle without seeming to exhale. Bobbie's one-night stand with Andy, a sweet-but-dim flight attendant -- a dated and slightly sour sex-comedy exercise in the original version - is loaded with laughs, thanks to Claybourne Elder's pricelessly slow-dawning line readings. "Tick Tock," previously a solo dance set to the intimate thoughts of lovers, is now a fantasy vision of married life, with multiple Bobbies and Andys robotically enacting banal rituals -- brushing teeth, changing the toilet paper, rubbing a stomach elongated by pregnancy. It's a precisely staged bedroom farce expressing Bobbie's worst fears of being stifled.

All these alterations serve to highlight the question at Company's famously anxious, ambivalent core: Can Bobbie -- a party animal, serial dater, and everyone's best friend -- find contentment with a spouse or partner? Does she want to? Is she happier in a world of infinite possibilities and no lasting disappointments, or is the air she breathes getting a little too chilly?

Lenk makes fine comedy out of Bobbie's dilemma, whether ironically toasting a pair of birthday balloons, frantically extricating herself from a couple's judo moves, or quietly registering astonishment at an ex's surprise announcement. Her voice, breathy in the lower register, rising to a steely belt, isn't one of the prettiest, but her thoughtful renditions of "Marry Me a Little" and "Being Alive" reveal a mind at work, painstakingly working through fears and emotional blocks before arriving at a new, painfully vulnerable, place.

In cast loaded with familiar faces, the standouts include Jennifer Simard and Christopher Sieber as couple united in self-denial (she in exercise gear, doing squats and balancing a luscious tray of brownies, and he looking at a bourbon bottle like a spurned lover); Christopher Fitzgerald, lost in a marijuana haze, examining his thighs in newfound wonderment; and Manu Narayan, sensible and tinged with regret as the man who might have been Bobbie's husband but for a missed moment.

And then there's Patti LuPone, as the much-married, cocktail-swilling, shade-throwing Joanne. Armed with a Louise Brooks bob, an array of oracular pronouncements, and a stare courtesy of Medusa, she earns an ovation with her first line, earning additional cheers while handing out jaded matrimonial pro tips in "The Little Things You Do Together" and putting her cut-glass diction to work on "The Ladies Who Lunch." The last, a masterpiece of acid social observation, also serves here as lacerating self-criticism and a not-so-veiled comment on Bobbie's inability to choose a partner. You can confidently add this to your scrapbook of legendary LuPone performances; nobody handles zingers with such lethal force and her voice remains in astonishing shape. (And cheers to Terence Archie in the infinitely difficult role of Joanne's all-seeing, all-forgiving spouse.)

Christie's set design, dominated by wagons moving in various directions, delivers a variety of stylized interiors; as a bonus, she deploys a set of human-sized letters, spelling out the show's title, in "Another Hundred People," Sondheim's ode to the city's perpetual energy. More than in any other production of Company I've seen, Christie's costumes provide each couple with a sharply defined style; clearly, Bobbie finds her friends in all walks of life. Neil Austin's lighting precisely picks out each performer in the cacophonous opening sequence, adds a lively ballyhoo to the ensemble number "What Would We Do Without You?", and provides dramatic light-curtain backwash effects everywhere else. In a Sondheim show, not one syllable may be lost, so it's a relief that Ian Dickinson, of Autograph, provides such clarity, along with the sounds of traffic, car alarms, crying babies, and other dubious joys of urban life.

Not everything works. Given the way Christie has dressed the extras, the second act nightclub scene, originally set in a chic discotheque, feels rather too downmarket for Joanne and Larry. Certain lyric revisions are questionable; any desperate housewife "clutching a copy of Time just to keep in touch" would do better to log on for the latest updates. And choreographer Liam Steel sometimes seems intent on moving people around, for no reason, in the background of certain numbers.

But this is a daringly conceived, freshly imagined look at a musical that many of us thought we knew all too well. A report from an era when answering services were de rigueur, all of Manhattan was in analysis, and pot parties and the sexual revolution were racy novelties, is remade into a surprisingly relevant comment on the way we live and love right now. Of course, the songs still capture the restless pulse of a city where self-invention is a way of life. And, thanks to Elliott and her collaborators, Company is reinvented, too. --David Barbour