Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Company
Venue: Gielgud Theatre, London
Writers: Stephen Sondheim and George Furth
Director: Marianne Elliott
Producer: Elliott & Harper Productions
Cast includes: Rosalie Craig, Patti LuPone, Mel Giedroyc, Jonathan Bailey, George Blagden, Ashley Campbell, Richard Fleeshman, Alex Gaumond, Richard Henders, Ben Lewis, Daisy Maywood, Jennifer Saayeng, Matthew Seadon-Young, Gavin Spokes.
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, including interval.
Dates of run: Until March 30
Any story-line involving a single woman is inherently more dramatic than a narrative of a single man because of biology’s cruel deadlines.
With Sondheim’s blessing, director Marianne Elliott takes this as the premise for her stylish and sophisticated update of the 1970 musical comedy Company that changes the lead role Bobby, a man, into Bobbie, a woman. In the process, Elliott gives us a flowing production that is right for our times – when a 35th birthday is terrifying for a woman who has yet to meet the father of her child but no big deal for a man. Implicitly, it acknowledges every permutation of the girl-doesn’t-meet-boy story that followed Sondheim’s ground-breaking departure from happy-ever-after musicals.
As the lead, Rosalie Craig brings to the part cool, elegant detachment, not the desperation of Bridget Jones.
She looks on in her bright, red dress, not so much jealous as bewildered as she brushes against the mostly drab married lives of the friends who are her only company.
They are a modern diverse bunch, but married or divorced and married again or teetering on the brink. Only Bobbie can’t contemplate commitment to an outdated establishment that ruins your sleep and tangles your identity with another “good and crazy” person.
Bunny Christie’s perfectly-judged design places the orchestra at the top of the stage, while the action unfolds beneath it in an array of boxes separated by endless doors.
We begin with one in a series of 35th birthday celebrations in a claustrophobically small compartment that represents Bobbie’s home, narrowed for now to a table and ansaphone messages from various men. Who knows how suitable any of them is. Bobbie’s problem is an inability to commit to one.
In the first of many vignettes of married life, Gavin Spokes as Harry and Mel Giedroyc as Sarah don’t exactly make the case for life-long partnership. As Harry wrestles with being on the wagon and Sarah diets, Bobbie the temptress, more envied than envying, turns up with a plate of brownies and a bottle of bourbon and demands extra sugar in her coffee.
The husband-wife dialogue, as each seeks to deny the other what they most want, is superbly edgy. It is offset by much broader comedy as the ironic celebration of married life in the song “The Little Things you do Together” is accompanied by the couple’s Jiu-Jitsu moves that amount to attacks and blocked attacks.
Another of the couples Bobbie observes are the twice divorced Joanne (Patti LuPone), now happily-married to Larry (Ben Lewis), who claims to be endlessly fascinated by his hard-drinking, hard-smoking wife.
She seeks to lure Bobbie into all her vices, including offering out her husband for an afternoon and inciting Bobbie to take up smoking with the fond reminiscence: “Remember when everybody used to smoke?… It used to be more festive.”
I can’t claim total familiarity with the original script but the lines smack of the production’s light-touch updating.
Equally, the independent, 21st-century Bobbie, whose means are unexplained, seeks to “get the check”, but Larry beats her to it.
She also seems to express her freedom as the well-oiled set allows her at one point to push off stage one of the boxes that happens to be containing all her married friends, as if to underline her lack of neediness. You might argue that is almost as emotionally unlikely as a happy-ever-after ending, or is it just society’s lingering prejudice that everyone deep-down wants to be in a relationship?
In a production where every dramatic decision makes sense and there are no longueurs, the centre of the action is the song Getting Married Today.
The happy couple is made up of the serene Paul (Alex Gaumond) and Jamie, played by an hilariously manic Jonathan Bailey, whose cold feet and rapid-flow anxiety are a tour de force, accompanied by all sorts of onstage hijinks, including Daisy Maywood as an operatic priest, salivating to perform the ceremony Jamie dreads.
The tension melts into calm in the following scene with Bobbie alone on an otherwise empty stage singing Marry Me a Little with its cry for emotional independence. It’s a mark of how far feminism has come that a woman director has cast another woman in a role in which her demand from a relationship is that both the people in it will be free.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Only Fools and Horses, the musical. Review by Barbara Lewis.
March 2, 2019 by Barbara Lewis • comedy, musicals, theatre, year 2019 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, musicals, theatre •
Only Fools and Horses, the musical
Venue and town: Haymarket, London
Writers: Paul Whitehouse and Jim Sullivan
Director: Caroline Jay Ranger
Music: John Sullivan and Chas Hodges
Cast: Peter Baker, Chris Bennett, Tom Bennett, John Bradley, Lisa Bridge, Andrew Bryant, Oscar Conlon-Morrey, Pippa Duffy, Pete Gallagher, Lee Van Geleen, Ryan Hutton, Adrian Irvine, Chris Kiely, Samantha Lane, Andy Mace, Melanie Marshall, Jeff Nicholson, Dianne Pilkington, Samantha Seager, Adam Venus, Paul Whitehouse
Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, including interval
Dates of run: booking until August 31.
Five hundred years ago, Peckham was green and pleasant. By the 1980s and 1990s, when two of its most famous fictional characters Del Boy and Rodney Trotter were plying their dodgy wares, even the pigeons wanted to be elsewhere, or so Rodney tells us.
Now you need to be one of the millionaires the Trotters dreamed of becoming to afford Peckham’s property prices, raising the question: where have all the cockneys gone?
As the London bubble becomes ever more exclusive, it’s a question that resonates in our BREXIT-troubled times, making this the moment to deliver what co-writer Jim Sullivan, son of the late John Sullivan, the creator of Only Fools and Horses, describes as an act of homage.
As a tribute, it recognises its limitations. The wafer-thin plot and light musical texture do not aspire to match the content of the 64-episode run of Only Fools and Horses.
But, like the original, which at one point in 1996 captured a record-breaking audience of more than 24 million viewers, it responds to an enduring appetite deep in some sections of the British public for characters who are loveable failures that they like to believe can succeed: if they had their chance on the London stage, they would make the grade.
For the space of an evening of West End nostalgic fun, we’re back in a contained community, where family counts for everything and bending the rules to get by never leads to anything more serious than a few broken bones.
The one-liners are the work of highly professional comic writing, delivered with great naturalness by Del Boy, who is played with swagger, warmth and hints of pathos by Tom Bennett, and by Ryan Hutton as the put-upon Rodney.
For the most part, the jokes are more mainstream than edgy and daring, but they’re not devoid of depth.
I particularly enjoyed the bickering between Grandad (charmingly performed by co-writer Paul Whitehouse) and Rodney and Del Boy. They are all expert at doing each other’s heads in and they trade blame and emotional blackmail: Rodney is fed up of being the downtrodden slave, Grandad is sick of being ignored, and Del Boy could have been “something” if only he’d put his little brother into care instead of bringing him up. In their affectionately-insulting ways, they are devoted to each other.
As grandad ponders his limited remaining time, the brothers battle with their “sort-of” feelings and the quest for romantic satisfaction with the eligible Cassandra (Pippa Duffy) and the kindly Raquel (Dianne Pilkington).
By way of subplot, Marlene (Samantha Seager) and her pompous freemason man Boycie (Jeff Nicholson) are struggling to conceive. It may not be quite ground-breaking, but we’re still only in the infancy, so to speak, of tackling infertility as subject matter for a musical.
The sperm-shaped fireworks that light up the sky above Liz Ascroft’s believable set are a fine visual joke and the seedless “jaffa” verbal joke verges on the genuinely offensive, only forgiveable in the everyone-is-family community of Only Fools and Horses Peckham.
The punters at the Haymarket roared for more. John Sullivan, whose own story was a rags-to-riches rise from poor, working class roots, via the back stage of the BBC to a man who entertained millions and continues to do so, would surely be content.
Barbara Lewis © 2019.