Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s legendary Company has come to the Hollywood Pantages in what just might be the most thrillingly reimagined revival in Broadway musical theater history.

The story composer-lyricist Sondheim and book writer Furth have to tell remains essentially the same one that’s been entertaining and intriguing audiences since its 1970 debut, with one major difference.

The musical’s resolutely still-single-at-35 protagonist has undergone a gender flip, and Bobby-turned-Bobbie isn’t the only one of his/her friends and lovers to have their sex reassigned by director Marianne Elliott beginning with the production’s 2018 West End debut before heading off to Broadway where it won five Tonys three years later.

No wonder Elliott’s Company was named Best Revival Of A Musical, given how brilliantly Furth’s freshy-tweaked book reinvigorates a show that had gone from being a contemporary look at love and life in the 1970s (later updated the early 1990s) to becoming a period piece of a less enlightened time, at least as far as race, gender, and sexual orientation were concerned.

Audiences who first discovered Company in its Broadway World Premiere probably thought nothing of the fact that every single one of its characters was white and straight (or in one case straight-ish).

Not so a half-century later, beginning with Bobbie (Britney Coleman), whose married (or soon-to-be-married) friends have gathered to celebrate the now African-American protagonist’s 35th-birthday.

All but one of them is in an interracial relationship, including gay fiancés Paul and Jamie, and Bobbie now finds herself juggling three young men (one of them a person of color) in non-monogamous relationships, not to mention dealing with a biological clock (implied, though not directly stated) that the previously male Bobby never had to worry about at a mere (for him) 35 years of age.

In other words, Zoomers, this is not your grandparents’ Company, and Boomers like this reviewer can celebrate its (and hopefully our own) evolution.

Even as originally staged, Furth’s book was revolutionary, eschewing a linear plot in favor of a series of vignettes unfolding in no particular chronological order.

These feature the about-to-be-amicably-divorced Peter (Javier Ignacio) and Susan (Marina Kondo), the self-declaredly on-the-wagon Harry (James Earl Jones II) and his workout-obsessed wife Sarah (Jessie Hooker-Bailey), glamorous Joanne (Judy McLane) and hubby #3 Larry (Derrick Davis), and the role-reversed David (Matt Bittner) and Jenny (Emma Stratton). (He’s now the straight-laced one and she’s the free spirit.)

As for the soon-to-married twosome, Amy has become Jamie (Matt Rodin), a young gay man every bit as terrified of tying the knot with Paul (Jhardon Dishon Milton) as his straight white female predecessor was five-and-a-half decades before.

And where Bobby found himself juggling three casual girlfriends, his female counterpart gets to enjoy commitment-free sex with Andy (Jacob Dickey), PJ (Tyler Hardwick), and Theo (David Socolar).

Talk about moving with the times!

Not only that, but the gender reassignment of five of its characters means that we get to hear Coleman’s glorious pop soprano reinvent “Marry Me A Little” and “Being Alive,” Hardwick’s PJ’s tenoriffically sung “Another Hundred People,” the all-male harmonies of “You Could Drive A Person Crazy” (this time round as The Andrews Brothers would have sung it), an all-male “Poor Baby.” and Bobby and April’s “Barcelona” duetted by Bobbie and Andy.

Most remarkable of all is Jamie’s “Getting Married Today,” given new meaning as sung by a gay man for whom marriage equality means a legalized commitment that less than two decades ago would have been virtually unimaginable and still divides the LGBTQ community as to its necessity or value.

Even minus the gender swaps, director Elliott’s Company would be a knockout, beginning with Bunny Christie’s supremely imaginative scenic design, one made up of multiple-sized neon-framed boxes that house assorted apartment rooms and stoops and even a crowded dance club.

Production numbers (featuring Liam Steel’s fresh and fun choreography) go from dazzler to dazzler.

“Another Hundred People” features freshly arrived New Yorkers moving in and around and about the letters C-O-M-P-A-N-Y, eventually reduced to just three letters, N-Y-C, for its grand finale.

“Tick-Tock,” a frequently cut mid-coital dance interlude, has been stunningly reconceived as a surreal vision of what lies ahead for a stageful of look-alike, dress-alike Bobbies.

And the absolutely fabulous Rodin’s fast-paced and frenetic “Getting Married Today” has the jittery groom-to-be’s friends popping out of cupboards, the refrigerator, and even a wedding cake to wild and wacky effect.

Coleman Bobbie lights up the stage like nobody’s business, McClane’s “The Ladies Who Lunch” is every bit the gut-punching star showcase it’s intended to be, and Dickey’s Andy is as adorably dumb a himbo as the multitudes of Aprils before him.

Indeed there’s not a less than sensational link in Company’s cast of fourteen, each of whom deserves at the very least a few adjectives of their own.

And the same can be said about production designers Christie (doubling as costumer), Neil Austin (lighting), and more, whose designs make previous productions pale by comparison.

Last but not least, music director Charlie Alterman and the show’s ten-piece orchestra do Sondheim (and David Cullen’s orchestration’s) proud.

Matthew Christian, dance captain Christopher DeAngelis, Kenneth Quinney Francoeur, CJ Greer, Elysia Jordan, Beth Stafford Laird, Emilie Renier, and dance captain/fight captain Christopher Henry Young are understudies.

Steve Bebout is associate director. Simone Sault is associate choreographer. Jay Carey is production stage manager.

I’ve been dying to see Marianne Elliott’s Company since its 2018 West End debut and to say that the Broadway National Tour of Company is by far the finest of the eleven Company stagings I’ve now seen is an understatement. Its arrival at the Pantages proves more than worth the six-year wait.

Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles.
www.broadwayla.org

–Steven Stanley
August 2, 2024
Photos: Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade

Tags: Broadway In Hollywood, George Furth, Los Angeles Theater Review, Pantages Theatre, Stephen Sondheim