“THOSE GOOD AND CRAZY PEOPLE, MY MARRIED FRIENDS” Bobby (Dean Jones) is the protagonist of “Company,” a single man having an important birthday. He’s surrounded by the New York City couples who are his inner social circle and wish he’d get his act together and settle down. The show opened on Broadway in the spring of 1970.
THERE WE WERE, IN our little Zoom boxes, getting ready to talk about “Company.” Donna McKechnie, who played Kathy in the original Broadway production, was there. So was Tandy Cronyn (you may have known her parents, Jessica and Hume), who played Amy — the would-be bride who’s “(Not) Getting Married” today — in the 1972 national tour. And Jane A. Johnston, who played Jenny on Broadway in 1971.
So were lots of others. The event’s organizer, Jeffrey Sweet, playwright, author and Renaissance man, was in the top row., ready to talk about what people remembered about being in, working on or just seeing a certain show — and what they made of it now..
ALL THOSE PHOTOS UP ON THE SCREEN. The May 5, 2021, Zoom confab on “Company.” Donna McKechnie is fourth from the left in the second row. Tandy Cronyn is far left in the third row. And Jeffrey Sweet, the organizer, is second from the left on the top. And you can see a slice of Jane A. Johnston in the fourth row.
Let me tell you about “Company,” Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s meaning-of-life 1970 musical. It’s about a single man who is late for his birthday party. Bobby is 35 now, and his friends, all married New Yorkers living in shifting degrees of contentment (“sorry, grateful/regretful, happy,” as the couples confess in song), are worried about him – mostly because he doesn’t seem to be able to settle down. (“Robert ought to have a woman,” the women sing.)
10 THINGS I LEARNED AT THE ‘COMPANY’ ZOOM
(OR AT LEAST UNDERSTOOD BETTER AFTERWARD)
(1) The whole concept was Harold Prince’s idea. And as director, he was always the boss. “In the room, Steve deferred to Hal,” McKechnie recalled. So did Michael Bennett, the choreographer.
(2) Prince was inspired by Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage.” As Cronyn remembered, Prince loved how people just broke into song. “Characters were talking, and then they just started singing. And you don’t have to make any excuses about it.”
‘YOU COULD DRIVE A PERSON CRAZY’ Donna McKechnie is at far right, with Pamela Myers (left) and Susan Browning.
(3) Dean Jones, who played Bobby, was convinced that everyone else in the cast hated him. In fact, they’d all been warned that they should leave him alone because he was going through a difficult divorce. In 1993, doing a reunion concert at Lincoln Center, they explained and everybody felt much better.
(4) In the South (during the national tour), people were always walking out. “Especially in the Bible belt,” one veteran remembered. Another said, “You should have seen them in Tennessee.”
(5) Michael Bennett was deeply relieved that one cast member was an actual dancer. (That would be McKechnie.)
GROWNUPS. From left, Dean Jones as Bobby, Charles Braswell (although he looks like Charles Kimbrough to me) and Elaine Stritch as Joanne.
(6) There is no linear plot. Everything that happens is going on inside Bobby’s mind. And sometimes it’s even more amorphous than that.
(7) Performers weren’t always in character when they sang musical numbers. Marta reflecting on “Another Hundred People” just getting off the train and arriving in New York wasn’t Marta – just an objective narrator. Joanne’s signature number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” is definitely not Joanne making those observations. Nor is that her character turning the word “I’ll” into an extended growl in the last verse.
(8) There was talk about doing a movie version with Warren Beatty as Bobby – and famous married couples (e.g., Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss — maybe even Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn) as the friends.
(9) George Chakiris, best known as Bernardo in “West Side Story,” played Bobby for a while on the national tour.
(10) Coming up with an ending was the hardest part. Does Bobby sit down on a park bench one day and realize he’s just met the perfect woman? At the end, does he walk, defeated and alone, upstage and into the darkness? McKechnie remembered Prince saying, “We can’t presume to have the answer to personal happiness.”
NEXT? We’ve all just missed Jeffrey Sweet’s June 2 Zoom event dedicated to “A Raisin in the Sun.” But the next one, coming up in July, is all about Lanford Wilson’s “Lemonn Sky.”https://www.thenegotiatingstage.com/classes1/p/playwrights-roundtable
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DID YOU MISS OUR “CASTING COUCH” POST IN THE MAY ISSUE?
Well, shame on you. Then you don’t even know who should play Jay and Daisy in the forthcoming “Great Gatsby” musical. Or the clever World War I prisoners who use a Ouija board to escape in “The Confidence Men.” Or the next Effie when “Dreamgirls” comes back. Thank God you can still find out.
See “Tales From the Casting Couch” in Latest Stories. Just go to LATEST under the black-and-white Press Nights photo on the home page.