Staging and Theme Make Good ‘Company’

WASHINGTON--The audience gets a bird’s-eye perspective on midtown Manhattan in Derek McLane’s set for “Company” in the Kennedy Center’s Sondheim Celebration. On each side of the stage, skyscrapers recline horizontally, their tops jutting out at the audience. Projections of city street scenes, shot from overhead, occasionally cover the backdrop.

This viewpoint of a detached observer matches that of the musical’s central character, 35-year-old Bobby the bachelor. In this landmark musical, first produced and set in 1970, Bobby carefully notes the advantages and disadvantages of his friends’ marriages and wonders whether he will ever take the plunge himself.

It’s an ingenious match of set and theme, and McLane’s set also clears most of the space between the skyscrapers for plenty of unimpeded movement by the cast as they approximate the busy peregrinations of New Yorkers on the go in Jodi Moccia’s choreography.

In other words, Sean Mathias’ staging hums with the frantic pulse of big-city life, even as it examines the essentially static thought processes of its central character--a goal for any production of “Company” but one that is met with dazzling success here.

John Barrowman, who was seen in the Sondheim revue “Putting It Together” at the Mark Taper Forum in 1998, plays Bobby as a grinning Tom Cruise look-alike, a real “cutie,” to quote one of his women friends. He’s more physically flirtatious than most Bobbys, frequently touching his women friends with brief and seemingly innocent caresses--a device that appears to be part of a decision by the production’s creators to banish the slightest consideration that Bobby might be gay.

This subject of sexual orientation has been controversial in the history of “Company.” In 1995, Sondheim and book writer George Furth approved a London staging in which one of Bobby’s male friends made an incomplete pass at him. But in the same year, they disapproved a Seattle staging in which the producers radically altered the show’s sexual road map without consulting the authors. Here, the incomplete homosexual pass is again missing. Apparently the authors believe Bobby is undecided enough without introducing additional ambivalence.

The authorized 1995 productions also restored a previously cut song, the incisive “Marry Me a Little,” which fit Bobby so perfectly that its absence in this latest version is hard to fathom.

Still, in his climactic “Being Alive” number, Bobby finally makes a decision, and Barrowman sings it with the requisite fervor. His decision is sparked by his encounter with Lynn Redgrave’s eagle-eyed Joanne, who overdoes “The Ladies Who Lunch” exactly as required. Walter Charles, also seen in the concurrent “Sweeney Todd,” plays her amiably forgiving husband.

As usual, the single most show-stopping scene belongs to Amy, the neurotic off-and-on bride, who is embodied with peerless comic precision by Alice Ripley. And Marcy Harriell is a dynamo as Marta, the “Another Hundred People” girlfriend. The musical director is the veteran Sondheim orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, whose appearance in the pit draws especially warm applause from the houseful of Sondheimaniacs.

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“Company,” Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. In repertory through June 29. Sold out except for cancellations. Call (800) 444-1324 or visit the Web site at www.kennedy-center.org/sondheim.