We saw Company on Broadway last weekend. It was the day that Sondheim passed away, so it was very sad. The show itself was directed in a broad, over-the-top sort of way. Later we found a version on youtube and listened to that. I prefer that traditional take, which was bittersweet with comic elements rather than being comic with bittersweet elements. When we saw the show on Broadway, from the reaction of the crowd to each line it seemed that everyone but us in the audience had seen the show many times before. Every line was getting a zillion laffs. I can see that if you’re already familiar with the show, you might enjoy an offbeat version; to me, though, the crowd reactions and the show’s pacing detracted from the larger themes and the music as well.
I guess this is a general issue in any performance: do you aim for the aficionados or the noobs? When you’re doing greatest hits, do you riff or do you play it straight? And how does this work in the context of Broadway performers doing 8 shows a week? Instructors sometimes teach multiple sections of the same course, but even then they get to move on to new material as the semester goes on.
Ideally a production should aim for the noobs. However, for a lot of shows that are well-known, like those of Sondheim’s, the people who buy the tickets are the afficianados. So, what to do …? The original production of the show had many cultural references to the ’70s, which may not be very understandable now. One should always try to make it fresh.
Andrew;
“Being Alive” is one of the six songs featured on this engrossing 2013 HBO documentary about Sondheim:
https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/six-by-sondheim
Another broadway Company
To make a buck on Stephen.
The critics may grouse grumpily
but you know it will break even.
I’ll drink to that.
My spouse was for many years a voter in the voter for the Tony Awards. After a while, I adopted a rule that I’d stop going to revivals of shows I’d seen before. In my experience, the understandable desire to “make it new” had too big a tradeoff with the necessity to “make it good.” But of course this is only a problem for people who go to the theater a lot and whose desire for novelty is low, ie not very many people. So the economics of the new production of Company vastly favor novelty. And to the complaint some people (albeit not my wife) made about my choice, that I would miss those productions that actually improved on the original, I cheerfully admit that they are right, but the odds were in my favor.
Interesting. The experience of sitting through a production of All My Sons at Arena Stage in DC in which I thought every. single. line was misdelivered (shifted into the register of some sort of political thriller) actually put me off attending live theater for many years.
I remember reading an actor (Gielgud? Sher, maybe?) talking about playing Shakespeare in a long run, and the assumption that you got bored, or tried out new things. His view was that even if you did a hundred performances, you only actually said each line a hundred times, and that’s not many if you’re trying to get it right. And it’s dangerous to pander to audiences, and move too far from the way you rehearsed it. You get more laughs, but lose the magic.
Same should apply to something like Company, you would have thought. Just doing it justice, and performing it as well as you can, is hard enough, without worrying about whether the audience is overfamiliar with the source material. If the performers can still find new things in it after a hundred similar performances, the audience can after having watched five, or ten, with different casts but a similar approach.
Maybe less true if you spend three years playing Rum Tum Tigger in Cats.
The most famous incorrect review of a soon-to-be Broadway colossal hit belongs to Mike Todd (who eventually became one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands). Before its opening on Broadway in 1943, his review of the New Haven preview performance of “Oklahoma!” contains just six words: “No tits, no legs, no chance.” Considering the amazing and enduring success of this musical, Todd’s review of “Oklahoma!” must go down as the greatest forecast miscalculation per word.
It’s art. Part of the artistic endeavor is to keep challenging oneself (as an artist) and audiences. I think “playing it safe” or “sticking to the original” is oftentimes frowned upon. The process of the artistic endeavor includes reinterpreting material. Sometimes such reinterpretation is done in the context of making themes relevant to the current times. Other times it includes reinterpreting characters and their motives, reinventing set design, changing some plot points, casting people as animals, casting animals as people, performing in-the-round instead of proscenium, changing the scoring or instrumentation, changing gender/age of certain characters–you name it! It’s sort of an ever-mutating entity: if there are too many changes, too fast, or if poor choices are made, the result could be an alienated audience, and the production may not survive. On the other hand, if the artistic product isn’t making enough changes, or not making the material relevant or fresh or challenging–if the production doesn’t have anything new or interesting to say, then what’s the point of it?
There are two answers to that question. First, it can say the “same thing” to a new audience. The ephemerality of theater means that original productions are often inaccessible other than through revived productions. And there is lots of theater which is great, but completely forgotten. The Mint Theater in NYC makes their mission the rediscovery of these forgotten productions, and I’ve found the vast majority of them surprising and enjoyable. But then for “interesting,” it depends on what was interesting in the original production. As I say when I watch a rerun, it may not be new, but it’s new to me.
Second, there really are new insights that can eb presented from old familiar work. It happens. But as I said above, it doesn’t happen enough, in my experience, to justify my time and effort to see them. Many of these productions sound like bad movie pitches: Macbeth, but set in Nazi Germany. And the best of them use the basic plot but change it enough so that no one would call West Side Story “Romeo and Juliet, but set in NYC gangs in the 50s” or call Rent La Boheme, but set in late 20th Century Lower East Side. When you call the show All My Sons (not a riff on All My Sons) you mislead an audience that expects to see All My Sons if you deliver a political thriller (see the comment below mine above). And for the audience that has never seen the original, using the title borrows respect you haven’t earned.
So sure… make it new. That’s the artistic impulse. But Sturgeon’s Law says 90% of everything sucks, so 90% of the attempts to make a classic “newly relevant” are going to fail, except when they dutifully replicate whatever made the show a classic in the first place.