Moving in Fast ‘Company’

Raising funds to improve their already fine facilities, the Conejo Players are staging a limited-run reading of “Company,” the 1970 show with songs by Stephen Sondheim.

The group, which has in the past produced Sondheim shows including “Follies,” “Into the Woods,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Assassins,” is keeping the current show--which closes Sunday--low-key by eliminating most of George Furth’s book and concentrating on the songs. The result is a brisk, 90-minute look at relationships, centered on a middle-aged man who’s torn between the single life he enjoys and the happiness evidently shared by his married friends.

For a Sondheim show (or at least one on which he didn’t collaborate with another writer), “Company” has a number of familiar, even hummable tunes. Among them are the ‘20s-flavored “You Could Drive a Person Crazy”; “Side by Side,” which lent its title to a later Sondheim revue; and “The Ladies Who Lunch,” which Barbra Streisand recorded on one of her Broadway albums. Co-director Scott Mansfield has cast himself in the leading role of Robert, surrounding himself with actors he’s met and, for the most part, worked with in previous Conejo productions. Because most have worked together before, it’s a particularly homogenous cast, well-matched by Mansfield to their roles.

The principal singers are the three women who play Robert’s girlfriends: Sandy Gaskell-Oei, Diann Alexander and Katy Wright. Others featured include Lady Jane Faulkner, Natalie Holcomb and Devery Holmes, whose patter in “Getting Married Today” is as much a highlight as Gaskell-Oei’s “Another Hundred People” or Linda Steigler’s “The Ladies Who Lunch.”

It’s more than just a reading--there are costumes, choreography by Tyler Wright and a nice, onstage nine-piece band conducted by co-director Charles Padilla. Sondheim fans will want to see it, and those whose interest in the composer ended when he stopped collaborating with more commercially oriented writers may find “Company” an ideal introduction to the solo Sondheim.

‘Menagerie’ in Oxnard: Normally prone to relatively lightweight comedies, particularly with a British flavor, the Elite Theatre Company is changing pace with a production of Tennessee Williams’ autobiographical “The Glass Menagerie.”

Directed by Dorothy Scott, the play is something of a breakthrough for the group. And, as is the case with “Company” and Sondheim, this “Glass Menagerie” is a fine place to introduce oneself to Tennessee Williams.

Grant Fagg plays Tom Wingfield, the narrator (and the playwright’s surrogate). Wingfield’s mother, Amanda (Joyce Rieske), and moderately disabled sister, Laura (Lissa Giossi), are both thinly veiled replicas of Williams’ own family members. Wingfield’s father, it is explained, was “a telephone man who fell in love with long distance and deserted the family years earlier.”

All three share a small apartment. Tom’s trying to start a career as a writer and Amanda seems to be spending most of her waking hours in a dream in which her (perhaps fictitious) earlier life as a Southern belle continues into adulthood.

Amanda pressures Tom into inviting a fellow worker (Edward K. Hudson) home to meet and court the excruciatingly shy Laura.

None of this is particularly subtle--you don’t need to have studied Freud to wince when the glass unicorn loses its horn--and everybody except Giossi overplays by about 30%, which may be appropriate when performing Williams’ gothic dramas.

But all in all, Elite’s “The Glass Menagerie” stands among the best productions in the company’s nearly six-year history.

DETAILS

“Company” will be performed at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Conejo Players Theater, 351 S. Moorpark Road in Thousand Oaks. All tickets are $10. For reservations or further information, call 495-3715.

“The Glass Menagerie” continues at 8 Friday and Saturday nights and 2 p.m. Sundays through April 3 at the Petit Playhouse, 730 S. B St. in Oxnard’s Heritage Square. Tickets are $12; $10, seniors. For reservations (recommended) or further information, call 483-5118.