‘Company’: Musical about couples, pal proves hard to stage

Sam Morris

The cast of “Company” rehearses last week at UNLV. The 1970 Broadway musical centers on the interplay between a 35-year-old bachelor and his married friends.

By Joe Brown (contact)

Monday, Oct. 5, 2009 | 2 a.m.

My friend’s cell phone rings as we’re driving to see “Company” at UNLV’s Judy Bayley Theatre on Friday night. After a few minutes of small talk, it becomes clear that the caller is distressed about her spouse.

I stay silent and drive, though I can hear the hurt and anger and frustration pouring out of the phone. My friend listens quietly, softly soothing, shoring up and laughing when she can. She sits outside the theater and stays on the phone with her friend, taking her seat moments before the show begins.

And that’s what it’s really about, isn’t it?

The brilliant, mordantly funny 1970 musical “Company,” with book by George Furth and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is about love’s triangles, necessary third wheels, the power of three in a marriage. “Three is company, two is boring,” Sondheim says in these songs, the ambivalence and reward of marriage, and how single friends become audience, referee, witness, diversion, conspirator ... and plain old company for their married friends.

At the center of the musical, Manhattan bachelor Bobby is surprised on his 35th birthday by his constellation of married friends — five couples, all “good, crazy people” — and by three orbiting girlfriends. The married couples enact and project their farces and dramas on their single friend, the satellite women hope for something more, and all of them adore Bobby, worry about him, envy him and, in some cases, lust for him. But Bobby remains elusive, shying from the commitment, surrender, heights, depths and voids promised and threatened by marriage.

A real game-changer when it first appeared on Broadway, “Company” remains one of the most ambitious and challenging musicals to present, whatever the budget and pedigree of resources available. Furst’s tartly funny vignettes are interwoven with infernally, intricately intelligent Sondheim songs, many of which have become modern standards and are notoriously difficult to sing correctly and to imbue with character.

For UNLV’s Nevada Conservatory Theatre, which pairs professional actors, directors and designers with advanced graduate and undergraduate students, taking on “Company” is a laudable leap. This company, which has presented impressive work in the past year, has taken a big, brave bite. And from what I saw in Friday’s opening night performance, it’s still chewing.

Friday was one of those “if something can go wrong, it will” occasions, pestered with early and late lighting cues and, most problematically, an imbalanced sound system that delivered wincingly loud vocals from some actors and distortion or dead air from others. The company invested in tiny, expensive-looking earpiece microphones, but they seem to be still working out the bugs.

Bowing to the significance and difficulty of presenting this still entirely relevant piece, the Nevada Conservatory Theatre brought in a veteran Broadway director, two Equity actors, a musical director and a scenic designer to help accomplish it. But for the most part, the imported talent disappoints.

The bright lights in this “Company” are from right here in our own back yard. There are especially fine characterizations from Lisa Williams, playing April, a winsome flight attendant who succumbs to a one-night stand with Bobby (Wilson wistfully sings her side of the morning-after tango “Barcelona”), and Phil Hubbard, who gives Larry, the wealthy, older husband of a world-weary socialite, a glimmer of lived wisdom.

As Amy, an already neurotic bride-to-be with last-minute jitters, Lisa Ferris both steals and saves the show, skillfully traversing the verbal rapids of “Getting Married Today,” which she renders adorably touching and hilarious.

Tony Blosser brings an understated comic presence to Paul, Amy’s sweetly smitten fiance, who is willing to look beyond her panic. All by itself, their scene makes a visit to “Company” worthwhile. But it also throws the rest into deep shade.

The less familiar you are with Sondheim’s songs, the more you’re likely to enjoy this valiant-effort version. If you know the original cast (or 2006 revival) album by heart, you’re going to flinch a bit. The hit-or-miss quality of the musical numbers puts more focus on the cuttingly clever scenes between the songs.

Director/choreographer Michael Lichtefeld has a nimble hand with the acting, but what he has done to some of Sondheim’s elegantly constructed songs borders on sacrilegious, coarsening them with crude gestures and shtick that betray the characters and Sondheim’s stinging observations. He keeps the stage movement and dancing fundamental — actors are either stock still and staring, or parading up and down and clustering in front of the staircases and stylized skyline set.

Sondheim and original director Hal Prince broke a lot of theatrical rules in 1970, for instance sticking what you’d customarily think would be the big finale production number in the middle of the show. Where “Side By Side By Side” should dazzle and swing and sway, here it settles for rote top hats and kicklines shtick. Lichtefeld and costume designer Kehler Relick have mostly disregarded the rich style possibilities of the early ’70s period, ignoring social class, which deprives both actors and audience of big parts of the characters.

Bobby, the musical’s center of gravity, is also its most enigmatic character — it’s really up to the actor to capture and create the character. Anthony Holds ably plays Bobby’s sitcom-funny side, but he misses the quicksilver attractiveness and ambivalence of this character, who holds so many sophisticated people in his thrall.

Bobby’s show-closing number, “Being Alive,” also one of the most technical and emotionally difficult songs in musical theater, should describe a transformation, a breakthrough, but Holds settles for merely maudlin, hitting the notes, hands shoved in pockets. It’s a missed opportunity.