“Phone Rings, Door Chimes, In comes…”

Posted by mwblogger

May 8, 2009

The sixties were of course an absolutely wild time of weird change and complex feeling. I missed it all (being born five days into the seventies), but in listening to Company I can only imagine. It must have been terrifying—Rock music, those high-volume gyrations of the Dionysian youth, was everywhere, including on Broadway, which was then still the land of Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Lowe. I know that Hair devastated Richard Rodgers, who when seeing it (in 1976) knew he was finished, that his beloved Great White Way (which loved him back, to be sure) was headed elsewhere, but six years before a show called Company opened at the Alvin Theatre, that must have raised more than a few eyebrows. Even listening to this re-released cast recording (in slimmer packaging—who doesn’t prefer those sexy little cardboard sleeves?) which opens with an insistent and rather dirty electric guitar, it is hard to imagine how aficionados of musicals must have felt. And the show goes on from there—there’s sex with multiple partners, the smoking of marijuana, a (gasp!) couple in the midst of divorce, and even weirder, a man who is turning thirty and is not yet married nor does he show any signs of getting married. Imagine.

Yes, Company has aged and not exactly well. For one thing, the notions of New York that it has (cocktail parties on the Upper West and a whole chattering class) are as vanished as its principal idea of a man being a feckless bachelor simply by entering his fourth decade unmarried. But what a glimpse into a vanished era, like Network on Broadway. It now reads as a strong, driving, emotionally complicated period piece. The rock music is always there (hard, the above-mentioned opening; or soft, in songs like “Someone is Waiting” or “Poor Baby”) which, when mixed with more standard B-way fare (“Getting Married Today”, “The Ladies Who Lunch”) and songs that entertain both genres while defying them both somehow (“Another Hundred People” or “Being Alive”) is positively electric. And while it is not credited with being the show that changed Broadway (now a place of mediocre musicals fashioned out of bad films or tours through the catalogues of pop music icons with thin storylines weaved within) it certainly must have been one of the quieter shots-heard-round-the-world.

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