Company (2006 Broadway Revival Cast)
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Brand: PBSComposer: Stephen Sondheim
Performer: Raul Esparza
Performer: Barbara Walsh
Performer: Keith Buterbaugh
Performer: Matt Castle
Performer: Robert Cunningham
Performer: Angel Desai
Performer: Kelly Jeanne Grant
Performer: Kristin Huffman
Performer: Amy Justman
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-02-20
Music Label: Nonesuch
Soundtracks:
- Opening
- Company
- The Little Things You Do Together
- Sorry-Grateful
- You Could Drive a Person Crazy
- Have I Got a Girl for You
- Someone Is Waiting
- Another Hundred People
- Getting Married Today
- "What did I just do?"
- Marry Me a Little
- Side by Side by Side
- What Would We Do Without You?
- Poor Baby
- Barcelona
- The Ladies Who Lunch
- "You have a good third husband, Joanne"
- Being Alive
Music reviews of Company (2006 Broadway Revival Cast)
Music Review: 3.5 Stars...with an Extra .5 for the Immortal Score
Rating: 4 Stars
This Broadway revival recording of the seminal Stephen Sondheim score of "Company" is a major disappointment, and this is NOT the best sung recording of this score, as the Amazon reviewer claims. That honor remains with the original cast. To begin with, this recording is bland and a bit mushy. The arrangements are fuzzy and even irritating at times (the jazzy intro to "Side By Side" is the best {worst} example of this). Worse still, the performances are virtually characterless, so one voice melds into another and you don't know who you're listening to. The original had Dean Jones at the top of his game as Bobbie, the immortal Elaine Stritch, the classic trio of Donna McKechnie, Susan Browning and Pamela Myers, the iconic Beth Howland and the underrated Charles Kimbrough at their best. Not all great singers (though Jones, McKechnie and especially Myers belie that assumption), but each actor put a very personal stamp on her / his performance. This recording cannot compare.
Examples abound. "You Could Drive a Person Crazy" literally does that. Aside from lacking the tight, precise harmony of the original, the "do-dos" have been replaced by the instruments played by the performers - big mistake because it robs the song of its off-the-wall quality. In addition, Kelly Jean Grant chooses to punch the line "...likes to pull the hooks out of fish", which robs one of the funniest lyrics in the song its impact by overstating it, a chronic problem on this recording. Raul Esparza does a fair job as Bobbie, but even he can't resist the high note at the end of "Someone is Waiting", which is simply a show-off move. His voice is not up to most of the material, though he does get to sing "Marry Me a Little", a song that should never have been cut from the original, and he does a nice turn on this number. Unfortunately, it seems that Barbara Walsh can't get Elaine Stritch out of her head, which is a surprise, both because she's capable of so much more and she reinforces that Stritch's "Ladies Who Lunch" will never be topped (a belief I don't ascribe to - Stritch was great, but she ain't the only ballgame in town).
Most damaging to this recording are the dialogue passages, which are read with about as much vigor and inflection as the pledge of allegiance in any elementary school. Worse yet, because the book represents vignettes rather than a linear story line, these passages are totally dispensible as they add nothing to the cohesiveness of the score. Most damaging is "Another Hundred People." The dialogue that may work onstage totally destroys the song's structure on this recording. Listen to Pamela Myers on the original to discover a phenomenal song rendered by an extremely talented actor / singer.
So why 4 stars? This is one of Sondheim's most precise and memorable scores. The original, sharp Jonathan Tunick orchestrations are sorely missed, but the score itself remains the magnificent, challenging work it has always been. That alone makes this CD a worthwhile purchase; one that I will listen to again and again and, maybe one day, come to love just as I do the original.
And no, all of you who are damning my review, I am not an OBC purist. I bought this CD at 9AM the morning it was released, wanting to love it because the score is so great and Doyle's "Sweeney Todd" revival of last season was a classic example of reinventing a classic. This recording doesn't cut it, and that's that.
Description of Company (2006 Broadway Revival Cast)
Maverick British director John Doyle, a 2006 Tony Award winner, enjoyed a surprise Broadway hit last year with his radical reworking of Sweeney Todd. He dispensed with the pit orchestra and handed all the instruments over to his on-stage performers, who doubled as musicians in between their turns acting and singing. Doyle has taken a similarly unorthodox approach to his revival of another Stephen Sondheim classic, the revered yet notoriously difficult to stage Company. As with Sweeney Todd, the results of this theatre-as-concert have entranced both critics and audiences. Linda Winer of Newsday called it "the very best revival that Broadway has ever seen of Stephen Sondheim's landmark 1970 musical."Variety described it as "striking, revelatory and thoroughly compelling." For Sondheim fans, the recorded score to Company has long been as much an object of adoration as the six-time Tony-winning play itself. Company on disc functions as a deeply moving song cycle, even apart from George Furth's libretto, about the vicissitudes of marriage and the joys and trials of the single life, seen through the eyes of the coolly dispassionate Manhattan bachelor Bobby on the occasion of his 35th birthday. This is truly the stuff of sex and the city - wry, sophisticated, painfully honest and deeply melancholy, even in a comic seducing-the-stewardess duet like "Barcelona." As with Sweeney Todd, which featured a bravura performance from lead actor Michael Cerveris, Doyle has found in rising star Raúl Esparza (Cabaret, Taboo, The Normal Heart) an extraordinary singer and actor who, in the words of the New York Times' Ben Brantley, gives Company "the most compelling center it has probably ever had." "Mr. Doyle and his invaluable music supervisor and orchestrator, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, have shaped Company into a sort of oratorio for the church of the lonely," says Brantley. He also praises the work of the entire ensemble - playing five married couples, three single women and one deeply ambivalent, unmarried man: "It's their work as a team that sounds new depths in Company in ways that get under your skin without your knowing it." Variety's David Rooney concurs: "Angel Desai's `Another Hundred People' nails that quintessential New York song; Heather Laws lands every laugh in the mile-a-minute `Getting Married Today' with amazing speed and clarity; and Barbara Walsh is bone-dry as brittle, world-weary Joanne. She reveals the emotional hunger beneath the character's hard shell and adds fresh nuances to `The Ladies Who Lunch,' a song indelibly associated with Elaine Stritch." As Time Out New York put it, "Sondheim's expert musical etchings, his acid craftsmanship, remain unmatched." Sondheim fans will note that this new version of Company, to be released by Nonesuch and PS Classics, restores the original act one closer, "Marry Me A Little," which was dropped from the show before its 1970 Broadway debut; the song has since taken on a life of its own as an orphaned Sondheim gem. The Company cast album is produced by PS Classics co-founder Tommy Krasker (Sondheim's The Frogs, Saturday Night, Assassins, and Sweeney Todd, among others). Along with Company, Nonesuch has also released the original cast album to Doyle's 2006 production of Sweeney Todd and the Tony-nominated A Light in the Piazza, which features a score by Nonesuch artist Adam Guettel.Broadway & Vocalists CDs
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