Getting ready for ‘Company’

The musical “Company” is framed around a surprise birthday party for Robert, a bachelor who’s surrounded by married friends as he turns 35. As with many such parties, the guest of honor is inadvertently tipped off in advance.

But Christopher Sieber, playing Robert in the Reprise! production of the show that opens Wednesday at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, was in for a real surprise at the first rehearsal, at a hall in North Hollywood this month.

The “Company” company had begun singing the hard-charging title number, the first song in the show. And there in the Stephen Sondheim score were some solo lines for Robert that Sieber had never heard and knew nothing about.

Although he had often listened to the recorded score, he had never seen the show. And even in performance, these are lines that usually go unnoticed by the audience, in the swirl of competing thoughts that make up the opening number. In them, Robert offers to take another character’s kids to the zoo and juggles social arrangements with other characters.

A star in “Chicago” on Broadway during the preceding six weeks as well as a regular on the TV series “It’s All Relative,” Sieber hadn’t had an opportunity to study the “Company” score. And the music for these lines, as might be expected of Sondheim, isn’t especially predictable. “Sondheim likes these augmented notes that don’t sound dead-on,” Sieber says. “My part rubs off against the others in the wrong direction.”

If no one in the audience is likely to hear these lines anyway, is it essential to sing them perfectly? Sieber doesn’t hesitate. “God forbid that Stephen Sondheim shows up” and hears the wrong notes, he says, recalling how the composer took him aside during the recent Broadway revival of “Into the Woods” (he played a prince) and coached him “in a supportive way” on little passages he was doing “just slightly wrong.”

The actor’s first day of rehearsal for “Company” ended with a private session with the production’s musical director, Gerald Sternbach. They went over the lines in the opening number as well as Robert’s climactic solo, “Being Alive.” This song, about the nagging drive to form a permanent relationship, “hit such an emotional bone” with Sieber that he was in tears by the end of the session, he says.

The next morning, while driving to the second rehearsal, Sieber was thinking to himself: “Oh, my God, this is huge. And very complicated.”

That has been the reaction of many “Company” performers since the show’s 1970 premiere.

“There has never been anything like it in my career -- the intensity,” recalls original cast member Pamela Myers (who played Marta). When she first saw her big solo, “Another Hundred People” -- with its extremely sustained, speed-singing lines -- her reaction was “I’ll never learn that,” she says. “Obviously I never let them hear me say that.

“Stephen wanted that whole first phrase of the song in one breath. I wanted to please him, and I’ve done it occasionally, but I also have my original music marked where I could take breaths.” She doesn’t plan to try doing it in one breath again any time soon -- “when you’re over 50, you can’t.”

The rhythms and the intervals of a Sondheim score are equally difficult, Myers says. “Another Hundred People,” she says, straddles what is sometimes called “the break” in a woman’s voice, between the higher and lower registers. It was originally too high for her, and she was afraid she might be fired if she mentioned it. But when she did speak up, the song was quickly recast in another key.

It’s pronounced ‘bu-bee’

In a documentary D A Pennebaker made about the recording of the original cast album, Sondheim is seen coaching Myers on the pronunciation of the Yiddish word “bubee,” as in the phrase “Bobby bubee.”

“I just couldn’t get it right,” Myers says of that situation. “I had only met about two Jewish people when I was growing up in Ohio. I had such a Methodist take on it.” She said it “booby.”

Deborah Gibson, the former pop star who’s playing Marta for Reprise!, says she was confident she had “bubee” well in hand. Indeed, she says, the biggest challenge of “Another Hundred People” is the breathing. And, she says, Sternbach wants her “to start intense and let that grow. For me, the challenge will be to get that impact and also sing in a healthy way.”

Gibson had planned to try out for another role, she says, and had not prepared “Another Hundred People,” so she auditioned while reading it from the score. Her musical training helped. “I can’t imagine how a nonmusician learns this score,” she says.

However, when Sternbach asked the cast members how many of them read music, as opposed to simply singing by ear, only about 60% raised their hands.

“Another Hundred People” isn’t the fastest, most tongue-twisting song in “Company.” That distinction goes to “Getting Married Today,” the anguished plea of Amy, a bride who wants to back out on her wedding day.

Beth Howland, who sang the song in the original production, says she had only a couple of days to learn it in New York before the company went to a Boston tryout. But “I found it thrilling,” she says. “If they had asked me to do it in Hindi, standing on my head, I would have done my best.”

She later repeated her performance in an original cast concert in Long Beach in 1993, but she has never seen anyone else do her role. “I just like having it be mine,” she says. “It was a perfect song for me. I’m not a singer, and it has maybe four notes.”

Jean Louisa Kelly, who is singing “Getting Married Today” for Reprise!, says the key to memorizing the song is remembering the order of the verses. “If you can get the first couple of words of each verse, you’re set.

“It took a few weeks to get it under my belt. Once you do that, if you start thinking about it, you’re dead. You have to have it in your entire body.”

A regular on the TV series “Yes, Dear,” Kelly has never seen “Company.” But she has gone through a wedding day, at age 25, and recalls that she “was definitely fraught with anxiety.”

A return to the stage

Judith Light knows anxiety regarding “Company.” The former “Who’s the Boss?” costar recently returned to the stage after a 22-year absence to star in “Wit” on Broadway, but it has been even longer since she sang on a stage -- in a revue about 25 years ago that was, she says, “a really bad experience.”

She’s singing “The Ladies Who Lunch,” a bitter, alcohol-soaked tirade. Her goal, she says, is to create the right combination of emotion and intoxication “without hurting my voice and making it discordant.” As with “Getting Married Today,” “The Ladies Who Lunch” isn’t pretty. “It’s definitely a character part,” Light says. “That’s what I tell myself in the middle of the night.”

As Sternbach led the singers on the first day of rehearsals, he often alluded to the parts of the score that require a certain edge or, as he put it while rehearsing the title song, “uchiness” (the “u” is pronounced like the “u” in bubee). And just what does that mean? “A sense of nudging, of goading, of complaining that’s intended to force your opinion,” he explained.

At one point he told the group, “Make it almost like a group of Fran Dreschers here,” referring to the star of the television series “The Nanny.”

But some of his other analogies were more highbrow. Taking apart the title number “is like taking apart this beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright building and putting it back together,” he told the cast. “I don’t want you to think about counting all the time. We’ll learn the math now, and then if you think about your character’s context it should come alive for you.”

It’s no surprise that Sondheim once wrote a song called “Putting It Together.” And Sternbach noted the composer’s affinity for all kinds of puzzles.

If few people actually hear Robert’s lines in the opening number, he said later, “they’ll hear strands of something else, glean what they can, appreciate the overall texture. Everything is beautiful in itself, but the whole is greater than the sum.”

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‘Company’

Where: Freud Playhouse, Hilgard Avenue, just south of Sunset Boulevard, UCLA campus

When: Opens Wednesday. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Sundays, 7 p.m.

Ends: June 6

Price: $60-$65

Contact: (310) 825-2101