If you're afraid of loneliness
Stephen Sondheim's Company
If you know who Stephen Sondheim is, chances are good that you have heard the sad news about him. He left behind a body of work that was indisputably great — iconic, genre-defining, humanistic and beautiful — but still odd enough, personal enough, alienating enough to mainstream sensibilities to create a cohort of true believers who think of his work as their special secret, their very own. Of course I count myself as among their number.
Reams of words about Sondheim have been written this weekend, and I have so little to add other than to say what so many others have said: that my feelings about his work go far beyond mere admiration, that enormous pieces of my selfhood were shaped by his songs, that without his work I don’t know if I would be quite the same person. As a kid who loved musicals I loved his songs, and as I grew up and came to understand them in their complex adult fullness, they became consolations, mirrors, probes.
Back in March I wrote some words about him. I’ll try not to repeat them, and I’ll try not to stray into hyperbole, only to say that his work has meant everything to me. I wrote then:
When I think about which living artists I hold in total reverence, which artists I’d beg for an autograph with shaking hands, he’s the first (and sometimes the only) name that comes to mind.
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing the revival of Company on Broadway, probably one of the three or four best shows Sondheim wrote. There isn’t much plot to speak of: the protagonist, Bobby, is single and turning 35, and all his friends have coupled off. He observes their marriages from the outside, and sees that they’re alternately passive-aggressive or openly dysfunctional. He longs for companionship, but with deep ambivalence, and holds potential mates at arm’s length. His friends anxiously urge him to partner off, while joking the next moment about how they wish they were still single.
In the new Broadway production, Bobby (a male character) becomes Bobbie (a woman). All of Bobby’s concerns translate pretty seamlessly to the opposite gender, although it changes the character of the show in certain ways I’ll describe below.
In no particular order, here are my thoughts, on Company in general and this production in particular.
I first started listening to Company when I was a pre-teen, much too young to know anything about adult relationships, and especially too young to know about the kinds of relationships in the show: the kind where the romance has mostly drained out and what’s left is a mixture of rituals, resentments, obligations, inside jokes, and the kind of deep understanding of the other person that allows one to be perfectly attuned to them while ignoring most of what they have to say. No pre-teen could learn all the songs from Company and retain an idealized picture of marriage. “There’s no Happily Ever After” is the message of almost all Sondheim shows, and it made me feel very sophisticated at thirteen to believe I understood this.
There are no children in Company, an important omission for a show ostensibly about marriage. Some of the songs refer to children, but they never figure in the story or even appear on stage. Yet the absence isn’t felt — I can’t recall any review or essay about the show that wonders what these couples did with their kids. I wonder if the true subject of Company isn’t “marriage” but rather adulthood — songs about grown-ups relating to other grown-ups, learning to cope in the world of ordinary people without idealizing them nor holding them in contempt.
In one song, “Barcelona”, it’s the morning after a one-night stand and Bobby is in bed with a woman. She’s getting up to leave for work, gathering clothes, and Bobby pleads with her to stay in bed with him. Where ya goin? he asks. Do you have to? Stay a minute. He implores her so sweetly that she eventually gives in, agrees to stay… and then Bobby lets out an anguished, rueful Oh, God. As a child I was confused by this ending. Why is he upset, if she did what he asked? I couldn’t figure it out. Now, I understand the Oh, God. From not understanding this moment, to understanding it: that’s a sad kind of growing up.
There’s a classic documentary about the making of the original cast recording of Company, filmed by D. A. Pennebaker. The whole thing is available to watch on YouTube. If you have any interest in the show, it’s worth a watch: for Sondheim’s black turtleneck and his ring with the tassel, for Elaine Stritch’s little white hat and black leggings and her famous meltdown while trying to get a good take of “Ladies Who Lunch”, for the way everyone is constantly smoking even while singing, but especially for Dean Jones’s take of “Being Alive”, the show’s climactic number. Jones’s real-life marriage was in the process of falling apart when he recorded this, and you can see in the video that every last frayed nerve of his body went towards making his performance as powerful as possible.
“The Ladies Who Lunch” is just such a great song in its supreme glorious bitchiness. I accept only the Elaine Stritch version (about the other one I will say nothing):
In the original version of Company, with man-Bobby, the character’s sexual orientation is glaringly (and possibly unintentionally) ambiguous. Sondheim always insisted that Bobby is not gay, but some critics have responded with: oh, come on. In the gender-swapped version, woman-Bobbie is 100% heterosexual, with the lines that might have been ambiguous either cut from the show or straightened out. This has the effect of making the show more coherent — it’s surprising how easily it slips into a post-Sex-and-the-City “single and fabulous” millennial narrative — but it also loses a lot of its strangeness, in a way that didn’t always sit well with me at the performance.
Company ostensibly asks the question: is marriage worth it? In “Being Alive”, Bobby seems to conclude that it is. But alongside this question is its shadow, perhaps more visible to me because of the Bobby/Bobbie gender switch: is it okay to be alone?
Originally, the show ended with a song called “Happily Ever After” that shares many lyrics with “Being Alive”, but seems to come to the opposite conclusion: “Someone to need you too much / Someone to read you too well / Someone to bleed you of all / The things you don’t want to tell — / That’s happily ever after / Ever ever ever after/ In Hell.”
Sondheim’s shows are usually a bit messy. Most of them have at least one song that doesn’t quite land, scenes (or entire acts) that feel superfluous and meandering, and some muddled dramatic action. The only Sondheim show with the tight precision of a clockwork thriller or classical tragedy is Sweeney Todd. But, of course, that’s part of what is greatest and most meaningful about his work — that he did not strive for tidiness, the kind of bow-on-top ideal where everything fits together cleanly and there’s nothing extra and the themes are laid out like a three-paragraph essay. He worked in a genre that had always valued catchy tunes, punchy lyrics, and uplifting endings and — though he could, and often did, deliver these things — used it to explore the doubt, ambivalence, bewilderment and contradiction of being a human. Making it great was his goal. Making it crystalline-perfect was not.
What does Company really conclude about marriage? In Finishing The Hat Sondheim had this to say:
Chekhov wrote, “If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.” Luckily, I didn’t come across that quote till long after Company had been produced. Chekhov said in seven words what it took George and me two years and two and a half hours to say less profoundly. If I’d read that sentence, I’m not sure we would have dared to write the show, and we might have been denied the exhilarating experience of exploring what he said for ourselves.