Shows What I Know
I am a regular reader
of Terry Teachout's About Last
Night (part of ArtsJournal's
group of blogs) and he reviews for The Wall
Street Journal, of which I am not a regular
reader but, y'know, I've heard of, and he likes the
new version of Company:
So there you have it, straight from the influential reviewer's mouth, er...pen. I have no reason to doubt his word, but I still don't like Bobby.In an act of recreative genius, Mr. Doyle has knocked the cobwebs off “Company” and turned it into an utterly contemporary chronicle of marriage and its discontents, one whose implications have never been more immediate.Like Mr. Doyle’s 2006 revival of “Sweeney Todd,” this is a small-scale production in which the 14 members of the cast double as their own onstage orchestra, playing everything from piccolo to double bass. It’s no stunt, either: By making their own music, the actors create an atmosphere at once intimate and intense, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s astringent new orchestrations strip away all the tired pop-music clichés of Jonathan Tunick’s original arrangements. Add in David Gallo’s appropriately glossy lucite-and-lacquer unit set and Mr. Doyle’s bracingly Brechtian “presentational” staging, in which the performers mostly play to the audience rather than to one another, and you get a show that looks and sounds less like a leave-’em-laughing Broadway musical than an avant-garde theater piece. No, this isn’t your parents’ “Company”—it’s better….
