In Good Company

This is PRECISELY why I love theater.  A bad Stephen Sondheim show is like a really amazing game of chess, or glass of Cabernet, or conversation with a dying loved one—all of that, in that it gets you thinking about what you never wanted to think about in the first place.  Like the truly great ones in their fields, Sondheim attracts intellectuals and sophisticates to the theater, to his sort of theater, and expects them to leave entertained, yes, but better and more inspired than they came in.  Everyone says they try to do that, and some come close.  But there is something so beyond magical and magnificent and transcendent in a show like the one I just came from...something that makes you wonder what you’ve been doing your whole life, how to do it all better.

(A caveat, I should mention, is that there really is no such thing as a bad Stephen Sondheim musical.  Some more poignant and coherent than others, but none that are ever quite bad.)

I attended a performance of “Company,” Sondheim’s ode to the mid-life crisis, at Niagara University.  A midlife crisis? you ask, why would that be performed at a college?  I had the same concern walking in.  The show is a non-linear peek into the happenings of a 34-going-on-35-year-old Manhattanite whose friends throw him the surprise birthday party to end all surprise parties.  All of his friends are partnered, in marriage or about to be entangled involved blessed with one.  They plead for him to find someone (to “want SOMEthing,” as his best female friend urges) so he can experience the joys and heartaches they all have—because happiness means nothing without the kinks to worth through, the struggles to overcome.

We see throughout the show that no one couple is picture perfect, and that furthermore, none of them know what it takes to achieve happiness.  It’s sort of an old gag, unlocking the wedded couple’s bedroom door only to find they aren’t so pitch-perfect.  But in Sonheim and librettist George Furth’s way, we understand the tortured irony in this man’s life, that none of the impulses his closest friends are sending mea anything if he doesn’t send himself those same moments of motivation.

What a show like “Company” professes is that we must never settle for what we think our “happily ever after” will be.  As a friend once told me when home her freshman year of college, “If you didn’t know how to study in high school, you don’t just magically know how to study in college.” You don’t become who you think you’re going to become without working for it.

Fine, okay.  That’s not such an original concept either.  Most hard workers get that it takes the blood, sweat and tears to appreciate and achieve the fruits of your labor.  But it’s more than that.  It’s the desire to want to change, and the ability to see your own gifts inside that wish, those dreams.  It’s knowing the task and assessing your tools and putting two and two together to get four.

I implore each and every one of you, a fan of musical theater or not, in close vicinity to Niagara County or not, to see this fine production by a cast of uber-talented young artists.  They not prove that it’s never too late (or early) to work for your goals, but it’s often the most torturous fights that make life worth living.  This is not an easy show to digest if you aren’t used to thinking so astutely in a theater.  But what Sondheim and these very gifted performers get is that to be entertained is just one side of being a patron of the arts.  You have to really show up and participate, for the real show to begin.

For information on “Company” at the Leary Theater at Niagara University, visit here.
The show runs through Nov. 18 and tickets are very inexpensive.  Don’t waste your time at “Saw 18.” See this instead. PLEASE.

Image of lyrics to “Being Alive,” the 11 o’clock number from “Company,” as taken by a fan “obsessed” with the song’s pertinence, courtesy this lady.

Posted by on 11/11 at 12:12 AM