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      Welcoming Back Live Theater Doesn’t Mean Agreeing About All of It

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      The year that just ended was a difficult one for people who make theater, as they faced economic, aesthetic and medical challenges. In a smaller way it was therefore a strange year for those of us who write about and review their work. Not until late summer 2020 — and then more fully in the fall — did we see live plays and musicals, and enjoy the pleasures that come with doing so: not just the communal experience in the theater but also the shared reflection afterward.For us — Jesse Green, the chief theater critic, and Maya Phillips, a critic at large — that shared reflection often included the gift of disagreement. And so, on the last day of 2021, we met, in cyberspace, to talk about what each of us liked most over the last several months, what we disliked most — and how a bit of (respectful!) head-butting can expand our understanding of both. Below, edited excerpts from the conversation.JESSE GREEN The return of live theater, however precarious, was a great thing for both of us — as critics, of course, but also as lovers of plays and musicals. There was a lot to see, and a lot we liked.MAYA PHILLIPS It was strange, though, to return to crowded theaters after being holed up in our apartments for so long. And it felt overwhelming — in a good way, but still overwhelming — to dive right back into a full fall season. But, yes, it was great to be back. What stood out to you?GREEN I found myself gravitating, somewhat unexpectedly, to the extremes of experience, rather than the subtle middle ground I often find so amenable. I went for big comedy and sensation, as in the first live show I saw, “Merry Wives,” Jocelyn Bioh’s Shakespeare revamp for the Public Theater in Central Park. To share belly laughs with hundreds of people again was a joy. I felt that way again, indoors, with “Six.”A grand Broadway spectacle: The cast of “Six,” the new musical about the wives of Henry VIII. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPHILLIPS I agree. I loved the color of “Merry Wives” in every respect — the bright costumes, the flashy ending, the vibrant performances and, of course, that cast of people of color. “Six” was the epitome of the grand spectacle that Broadway can be — in all the best ways. And don’t forget “Trouble in Mind.” That was one of my favorites, and I thought the comedy worked so well in that production.This should come as no surprise to you, but I’m more of a tragedy girl myself. What appealed to you on the more somber side of things?GREEN Funny you should mention “Trouble in Mind,” which I responded to both as a comedy (which it is, formally) and as a tragedy (which it is, sociologically). That’s part of what made Alice Childress’s play, which was supposed to have its Broadway premiere in 1957, so smashing in 2021: It finds a way to tell a story about the waste of Black talent within the warm, familiar confines of a backstage setting. But I suspect your penchant for tragedy is more in the classic vein — and there, I think we would want to talk about “Pass Over.”PHILLIPS I’m an equal opportunity lover of all forms of tragedy, but yes, my preferred brand of comedy is laced with the kind of biting sociological satire and subtly tragic moments that Childress offers in “Trouble in Mind.”When I think about “Pass Over,” the explicit moments of tragedy aren’t what stand out. In fact, those moments of physical and emotional and verbal violence — the ending in particular — didn’t always work for me. The most fascinating aspects, and the most tragic, were the ways the two Black characters related to each other, within this framework that the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, adopted from Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” It’s the same kind of nihilistic view that Beckett had, with similar linguistic play, but it’s so much more meaningful because it’s used to reveal how race is its own trap, a purgatory, in America. But then it also contains humor, like “Trouble in Mind.”From left: Brandon Micheal Hall, LaChanze, Chuck Cooper and Danielle Campbell in Alice Childress’s 1955 play “Trouble in Mind.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGREEN Inadvertently but appropriately, purgatory was a frequent theme as live theater ventured out this fall. Another show that dramatized it — and sang about it, too — was the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “Caroline, or Change,” in which the title character, a Black woman in Louisiana, spends most of her working life in the subterranean laundry room of a Jewish family. And in Martyna Majok’s “Sanctuary City,” the limbo of being Dreamers — the children of undocumented immigrants in the United States — becomes not just a political problem but an emotional one, as two teenagers, denied a place in the country, try to find a place for themselves in each other. With a few reservations, I loved both those shows, and I think you did too.PHILLIPS Yes, both were fantastic, and I’d also add Sylvia Khoury’s brutal “Selling Kabul,” at Playwrights Horizons, to that category of shows featuring characters trapped in a kind of political limbo. Though, in that case, it’s also literal, because the whole play takes place in one small apartment, and one of the characters is unable to leave. But I want to get to some of the things we disagree on, because I feel as if — despite our different preferences — we’re often on the same page when it comes to the criticism. The fall had a lot of shows we didn’t see eye to eye on!Francis Benhamou, left, and Marjan Neshat in Sylvia Khoury’s tense drama “Selling Kabul,” at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGREEN I guess that brings us to “Clyde’s” by Lynn Nottage — another purgatory play. This time the purgatory is a truck stop sandwich shop run by a diabolical character (played by Uzo Aduba) and staffed by former prisoners who have almost no way back into society. And yet, somehow, it’s a comedy.PHILLIPS A comedy that I didn’t find funny! I love Lynn Nottage, but I’ve noticed I’ve had problems with her comedies. And this one in particular I found flimsy. To use the already heavy-handed sandwich metaphor, I’d say there wasn’t enough meat to it, despite the performances, which I liked. But I also wished that Aduba had more to do; it was great watching a Black woman be this ridiculously arch villain, but that character, and the whole theme of redemption and connection through the creative art of sandwich-making, felt one-note to me.GREEN Comedy is more personal than tragedy. I laughed and laughed — no doubt in part because of the performances but also for the very reason you were disappointed: It didn’t try to explain itself. Also, it gave us characters, most of them Black and Latino, without a white filter, which for me was a pleasure and a relief. Also a pleasure and a relief: The characters (spoiler alert) escaped their purgatory. Which is not to say I don’t understand your criticisms; I find them useful because one person can only absorb one idea of a play at a time. I wonder if you feel the same way, or whether it’s just annoying when we disagree?Uzo Aduba and Ron Cephas Jones in Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s,” one of the shows our critics had differing opinions about.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPHILLIPS What you say about comedy being more personal is exactly right. I had issues with the allegory to begin with, and because it’s so prevalent, I was looking for other dimensions or nuances to latch onto but was just left with the element of the play — the main element — that I found unappealing.But I never find our disagreements annoying! At first I found them unsettling. I’m not sure if you still get the anxiety I do — that you’ve missed something that your fellow critics haven’t, and that must be the root of the disagreement, that you’re just wrong. Now I find our disagreements informative. Like with your review of “Clyde’s,” you pointed out the same problems I had with it, but while those issues couldn’t redeem the show for me, for you there was more to it. What’s most important to me there was that we saw the same things and just had different responses.GREEN I like that formulation, and wish it were more commonly held. But it’s understandable that people want critics to love what they love; critics feel the same way! I do feel scarily out on a limb when I dislike something so many people, including my colleagues, like. That was most painfully the case with the new gender-switched revival of “Company,” because I spent a lot of the running time trying to convince myself that I was enjoying it when in fact, as I had to accept when I got home, I wasn’t.Katrina Lenk in the director Marianne Elliott’s gender-flipped revival of “Company.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPHILLIPS That is difficult! I admire that you stuck to your guns there, especially because I think a lot of people went in expecting to enjoy it because of the cast, because of the reputation of the show, and of course because Stephen Sondheim died this fall. With “Company,” you had context I didn’t have going in. I’d heard the songs and knew the story, but this was my first time seeing the show. And yet again, I agreed with your points, especially about the elaborate set overwhelming the content, but found the gender swap, with some small exceptions, more interesting and relevant. There were definitely some awkward lyric changes, but I thought the way the dialogue was changed and how the characters’ relationships with a now-female Bobbie changed created fresh tension that worked. And I found it refreshing to see a female lead who might be passive and aloof, yes, but is able to own that — and the fact that she’s single — in a way that a man can in society. It’s much more rare to see that kind of female character, and I loved Katrina Lenk’s performance.GREEN Did you feel that way about Victoria Clark in “Kimberly Akimbo,” the new musical by Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire about a teenager (played by Clark) who, because of a rare disease, looks like she’s in her 60s? I gave it (and her) a rave review but you told me you weren’t convinced.PHILLIPS Yes, I enjoyed Clark’s performance but had a similar experience to the one you had at “Company” during this show — I sat there wanting to enjoy it but had to admit to myself that it just wasn’t clicking for me. I admired what it was trying to do, and I welcome bonkers new musicals like this one, but I thought the book just needed a lot more work. The funny but random scheming aunt, who takes up so much room in the show; the awkwardly incorporated student chorus; Kimberly’s relationship with her parents; her relationship with her own disease — there were so many places where I felt the show could have cut or expanded and refocused itself while still maintaining its quirkiness. And to be honest, the songs weren’t very memorable to me.Victoria Clark as Kimberly, with Justin Cooley, center, and Steven Boyer in “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Atlantic Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGREEN Oh, that stabs me in the heart! But that’s what it means to accept that theater, like all experience, is subjective, and therefore so is criticism. You’re going to hurt sometimes. People have told me — most recently at a funeral! — that they dislike my reviews because they’re “so mean.” When I engage those people further, it often turns out that it’s not the supposed meanness but the disagreement itself that makes them angry. Some people just can’t be happy unless everyone loves “Diana, the Musical” and “Flying Over Sunset,” to name two shows I didn’t — and you didn’t, either. Do you get that?PHILLIPS I do get that! But more so on Twitter, with random internet trolls, and more so with fandoms other than theater. I often am seen as a curmudgeon or contrarian by my family and friends, but then when they read my reviews they always tell me I’m fair. Sometimes it is fun to be the one with the controversial opinion. But I’m interested in discourse; disagreement is just part of the job, and we need it. We’re not the same people with the same experiences. Our differences of opinion reveal the differences in our experiences, which in turn highlight different dimensions of what we’re critiquing. As long as that criticism is thoughtfully considered and argued, it’s all useful.GREEN I grew up arguing with my family about everything we saw. In a way, that’s how you learn that other people exist as much as you do, and how you come to understand what you experience more fully. In that sense, unexpected or outré or at least strongly worded positions are necessary. Even when they are quite negative they can be seen, I hope, as joyful contributions to the mutual project — as “Company” has it — of being alive. More

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      On Broadway Stages, the Beautiful Rooms Are Empty

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      In recent musicals, hyperdesign is outstripping writing and direction for clarity, expressiveness and excitement.When Bobbie’s balloons are more fascinating than she is, your production of “Company” has a serious problem.I’m speaking of the inflatable Mylar numerals that, in the current Broadway revival of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, keep drawing the eye away from the main character as she is feted by friends on her 35th birthday.Those balloons — stand-ins for Bobbie’s disappearing youth — aren’t the only scene stealers. Bunny Christie’s ingenious design for the revival is filled with visual gimmicks that in representing the production’s themes keep crowding out the characters.During the song “Another Hundred People” — a barbed tribute to the missed connections of urbanity — large neon letters that spell the show’s title start wandering about the stage, as if stalking the cast. Eventually, three of the letters regroup to spell “NYC”: a neatly made point, though I couldn’t help wondering what happened to the other four.Then there’s the warren of interconnected spaces, some joined by trap doors, that paints Bobbie’s path to companionship as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Chutes and Ladders.But for all the cleverness of Christie’s designs, they don’t so much nourish Marianne Elliott’s production as overwrite it, filling its many dramatic holes with eye candy.That’s no news on Broadway, which never met a conceptual problem it couldn’t attack with confetti cannons and other weapons of what we might call hyperdesign. Spectacular effects are part of the brand, and when used smartly can both thrill and inform.Yet, looking back at the shows that have opened or reopened in the last few months, it seems to me that designers, bringing evermore astonishing prowess to bear, too often outshine the work they are meant to support. As if to compensate, the stories are getting dimmer; their beautiful rooms, to paraphrase Kafka, are empty.In “Diana, the Musical,” Buckingham Palace was thinly suggested by some electric bulb tracery.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTake “Diana, the Musical,” which I won’t rake over the coals again except to say it was phony from first to last. (It closed, after just 49 performances and previews, on Dec. 19.) Nor were its sets especially assertive: Buckingham Palace and other locations were thinly suggested by some electric bulb tracery.But apparently having decided that what audiences would want most from a fantasia on the life of the People’s Princess is a jaw-dropping parade of extravagant costumes, the producers budgeted accordingly. The 38 outfits designed for Diana by William Ivey Long dramatized how she transformed herself from kindergarten teacher to royal frump to executive princess to international fashion plate far better than the writers did.No wonder those dresses — and the quick-change artistry that in one scene allowed her to change them six times — won applause. Unfortunately, in the process, the character herself was rendered about as expressive as a clothes hanger. That was almost literally so in her wedding scene, as Jeanna de Waal, who played Diana, disappeared inside a gown built like a cage.A clever enough metaphor, but why was the costume design forced to do so much work that the story should have done itself?The problem is even more evident in Lincoln Center Theater’s production of “Flying Over Sunset,” though it is a far more interesting musical. In Act II, its book, by James Lapine, imagines a weekend at the end of the 1950s during which Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley and Clare Boothe Luce experiment with LSD simultaneously. Their hallucinations are meant to address the unresolved conflicts carefully set up in Act I.But how do you dramatize a hallucination? Even if you can describe it in words, it will never be as interesting to those not tripping as it is to those who are.How do you dramatize a hallucination?“Flying Over Sunset,” starring, from left, Robert Sella, Harry Hadden-Paton, Carmen Cusack and Tony Yazbeck, tries to pull it off with psychedelic light and sound design.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLapine’s book does not overcome that obstacle, but as the director, he has been able to assemble a team of designers who at least get close. In this case, it is not the set or costumes doing the heavy lifting so much as the lighting (by Bradley King) and projections (by 59 Productions) working in concert with the sound design (by Dan Moses Schreier). In their hands, psychedelic imagery, amplified footfalls and intensely colored light become a trip in themselves, peeling away the skin of everyday life to reveal a richer world inside.It’s not a real solution, though; the often-beautiful imagery has the side effect of making ordinary perception, unenhanced by pharmaceuticals, seem banal. As soon as the characters talk, the illusion of richness evaporates. If it’s arguable whether the trips change the characters, as Lapine posits, it’s certain that they do not change us.“Flying Over Sunset” left me trying to decide whether muscular design takes over because the ideas are too frail or the ideas retreat because design hogs all the attention. Either way, it’s a predictable problem, and some productions have developed workarounds. “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” for instance, is smart enough to keep dialogue to a minimum as it inundates the theater with sound and color. If it ever lets the audience come up for air, the silliness of the story might be revealed as the wrong kind of distraction.Which is not to say there’s a right kind of distraction. A show with enough on its mind, with a minimum of muddles and longueurs, doesn’t require bombarding with extraneous sensory excitement. That doesn’t mean it should be visually dull, even if for economic reasons that’s often the case.Take “Kimberly Akimbo,” one of the finest and most feelingful new musicals of 2021, with music by Jeanine Tesori and words by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on his 2000 play. The Atlantic Theater production might have been even better with a more exciting design to support those feelings and a bigger frame to set off the prodigious performance by Victoria Clark as a teenager who ages too quickly. Perhaps we’ll have the chance to find out, if the show, which is scheduled to close on Jan. 15, transfers to Broadway in the new year.“Kimberly Akimbo” might have been even better with a more exciting set design to support the wonderful performances by Victoria Clark, left, and Justin Cooley.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn other words, Broadway pizazz is not the problem; often enough, it’s the solution. A set that can change locations instantaneously, or costumes that pin down time and class with almost taxonomic exactitude, can anchor while also heightening the illusion of life.That’s true even in nonmusical plays that have become much more visually abstract in recent years. You seldom see sofas and kitchen sinks onstage anymore, and even more seldom miss them. The 164 years of American commerce covered by “The Lehman Trilogy” take place convincingly in a rotating glass box.But for the most part, hyperdesign is a hint that something fundamental is missing. Often that missing element is the conceptual discipline that allows a piece of theater, even when set on an empty stage, to hang together and score its points. You can see it working perfectly in shows as wide ranging as David Byrne’s “American Utopia” (with its sleek aluminum chain curtains) and “Dear Evan Hansen” (with its hypnotic walls of online data) — productions in which design and direction go hand in hand.And you can see it, perhaps most vividly, in “Six,” which turns conceptual discipline into a fetish. Each of the wives of Henry VIII depicted in this sing-off gets her own theme color, song genre and pop star queenspiration. And though the set is minimal — it might have worked just as well for “Diana” — the lighting (by Tim Dieling) and costumes (by Gabriella Slade) are rock concert maximal, expressing the story’s ambition to thrill.Which it totally does, because sometimes the secret to effective design is proportion — and knowing when we really need the confetti. More

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      Patti LuPone on 'Company,' Stephen Sondheim and More

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      Her friends say there is nothing more fun than hanging with Patti LuPone while she’s having a glass of wine.That’s not true. There is something more fun: sharing a whole emerald bottle of Perrier-Jouet and dishing with Patti LuPone.Feuds! Lovers! Temper tantrums! Dictatorial directors! Wrongs avenged! Madonna’s “dead” eyes! Andrew Lloyd Webber’s perfidy! And, of course, teary memories of Stephen Sondheim.Last month, Mr. Sondheim, 91, died suddenly at home in Roxbury, Conn., just as he was about to come to New York to be celebrated at the openings of highly anticipated makeovers of two of his milestone collaborations: “West Side Story,” a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, and “Company,” the acidic musical about a terminally ambivalent Manhattan singleton. On Wednesday night, the Broadway lights were dimmed for the composer.Two years ago, when the pandemic shut down Broadway during previews for “Company,” Ms. LuPone retreated to her basement in Connecticut, where she posted videos that went viral showing off her pinball machine, her jukebox, her Ethel Merman cassettes, her husband’s bong and her dance moves to “Hava Nagila.”Now she’s back, picking up where she left off playing Joanne, the jaded, older friend of the singleton. When Ms. LuPone played the role in London before the pandemic, critics gushed and she won an Olivier. In this production, Bobby morphs into Bobbie, a woman whose friends want her to settle down, even though they concede marriage is a mixed bag.As one of Bobbie’s pals sings in the high-velocity “Getting Married Today”: “What’s a wedding? It’s a prehistoric ritual/ Where everybody promises fidelity forever/ Which is maybe the most horrifying word I ever heard of.”Bobbie is played by the lissome Katrina Lenk, who won a Tony in 2018 for her mesmerizing performance as Dina in “The Band’s Visit.”“I think it’s more poignant to have a woman,” Ms. LuPone said, “because we get asked that question, ‘When are you going to get married? The clock is ticking. Eggs are getting old.’ Boys don’t get asked that question, especially when they’re 35, boinking beautiful women.”Who better to mark this Broadway phoenix moment with than Ms. LuPone, the Long Island native who has been called “the goddess of the modern musical” by The Guardian? She is that very particular kind of animal, perhaps the last of the breed, a genuine Golden Age Broadway star, the kind that can turn a theater into a living room, throwing out an electric current that makes 1,000 people feel as if they are being spoken to, and sung to, individually.As Joanne, Ms. LuPone raises a martini glass in her socko “Ladies Who Lunch” number, with its famed primal scream — “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh, I’ll drink to that!”(Mr. Sondheim instructed the singer, who gets passionate about Republican political moves, to unleash her scream by thinking of how she feels when she reads a newspaper.)Patti LuPone as Joanne in the musical “Company.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe role of the salty, hard-drinking Joanne was originated in 1970 by the salty, hard-drinking Elaine Stritch, a Sondheim pal. As Alexandra Jacobs, a book critic for The New York Times, wrote in her biography of the actress, “Still Here,” Ms. Stritch always had her flask of Hennessy backstage when she was playing Joanne, the sort of wealthy Upper East Side woman who might drink vodka stingers and carry a bichon in her Birkin.Ms. Jacobs wrote in The Times that while “Company” is not as well known as other Sondheim shows, it has acquired a cult status among Gen Xers and millennials, who appreciate the fact that it is “drier than a sauvignon blanc, more New York than the Yankees.”Onstage, Ms. LuPone drinks water in her martini glass. But real bubbly is required to toast the lights returning to Broadway.Remembering SondheimAfter a preview performance the other night, we met up and looked for a Times Square bar, but it’s hard now to find one that stays open after shows, or one at all, really. (“Company” opened Dec. 9 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, and Jesse Green, a Times theater critic, called Ms. LuPone’s performance “perfectly etched,” in an otherwise mixed review.)“McHale’s, Charlie’s, Sam’s, Barrymore’s,” Ms. LuPone said, reeling off the names of bars that have closed.So we ended up setting up our own bar — complete with votive candles and vintage coupes — in a room at the Civilian on 48th Street. The small hotel is decorated as a homage to Broadway, with costumes and pictures from shows, so naturally we found a photo of Ms. LuPone that happened to be on the wall of our ersatz bar, a shot of her as Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd,” co-written by Mr. Sondheim..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}I asked her if there was anyone she’d like to make into a meat pie, and she shot back, “Do you have to eat it?”In her dressing room, Ms. LuPone keeps a typewritten note sent to her before the pandemic hit by Mr. Sondheim, who was clearly growing more sentimental: “Every now and then I’m brought up short by realizing what a wonderful singer you are. That’s apart from the acting and performing and the attention to detail. In any event, I just felt I had to put it in print. Thank you for enhanceing [sic] my shows — and everyone else’s for that matter, Love, Steve.”Ms. LuPone choked up talking about it. “I just was so flummoxed by it,” she said, still referring to the composer in the present tense. “Steve doesn’t give compliments. I beg your pardon. Steve does give compliments, but they’re hard-earned. His notes can be devastating, which I’ve had several of.”She got a bad note when she was playing Fosca in “Passion” at Lincoln Center; Mr. Sondheim berated her about her enunciation, saying all he heard was “monotonous mush.”“I said in my head, ‘If it was anyone with less experience than me, they would have turned in their equity card,’” she said. “It was a dress down that — I was lost. That’s been my big downfall. I’m a flannel mouth. John Houseman called me a flannel mouth when I was in school.”A Sondheim score “is not easy to sing accurately. It’s a challenge to interpret the lyrics as he intended them with depth,” she said with understatement. “That is a big accomplishment. Steve makes me better. I keep saying, ‘Who will make me better now that Steve is gone?’”Some who worked with Mr. Sondheim thought that he was harder on Ms. Stritch and other women than on men, perhaps because of his dreadful relationship with his mother. He told Meryle Secrest, who wrote his biography, that after his father left for a younger woman, his mother was sexually inappropriate with him: “What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time.” After that, Ms. Secrest said, Mr. Sondheim strived to maintain “a safe psychic distance” from women making overtures, “imagined or real.” (His domineering mother surely shaped his portrait of Rose in “Gypsy.”)“He’s not hard on people that don’t threaten him,” Ms. LuPone said. “I think he was hard on me because — I don’t know. I can’t answer for him but he was hard on me. I’ve got stuff in my scrapbook, the mean stuff and good stuff.” She saves everything, even the hate mail she got after she said she would refuse to perform if Donald Trump came to a show.The petite Ms. LuPone is routinely referred to as a towering legend, but in person she’s earthy, calling everyone from stagehands to fellow cast members to me “doll.”“She’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad,” Ryan Murphy said. “She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesOne of the numbers in “Company” is “Being Alive,” and no one is more alive than Ms. LuPone, 72, who cherishes her fiery Sicilian temperament and her ability, as the writer Karen Heller put it, to “nurse a grudge like cognac.” But it’s easy to see the vulnerability threaded through the bravado.She has her own vocabulary on Broadway: Her rhapsodic fans are called “LuPonettes” and when she publicly burns someone — from an arrogant composer, to a Hollywood star who descends on Broadway for a guest turn, to a littering or photo-snapping or texting audience member — it’s called being “LuPoned.”When she does online forums with fans, she elicits comments like this one: “I wish Patti LuPone was my terrifying but beloved aunt.”Ryan Murphy cast her in roles in “Glee” (causing his young cast members to go “gaga,” he said), “American Horror Story” and his “Hollywood” limited series.“Patti has this insane, volcanic power within her body to sing like that,” Mr. Murphy said. “She is, to the American musical theater scene, what Meryl Streep became to the film world. There will never, ever, ever be another person like Patti LuPone who has that power.“Some might think of her as a diva, but she’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad. She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Her friend Joe Mantello, the acclaimed Broadway director and actor who worked with her in “Hollywood,” talked about her duality: “She understands that she’s a great star, she’s a legend. But there’s a part of her that also sees herself as part of Juilliard Group One, a working actress,” he said, referring to the first drama class at the school.After “War Paint,” the 2017 musical in which she played Helena Rubinstein, Ms. LuPone swore she would never do another musical.“I have two new hips and one new shoulder,” she told me. “Musicals are killers. They were breaking my body.”But when she was offered the chance to do “Company” with the British director Marianne Elliott, who directed the Tony Award-winning 2018 Broadway revival of “Angels in America,” Ms. LuPone could not resist.The singer is still afraid of Covid, and she had crying jags about returning to Broadway because “I just don’t want to do musicals anymore.” But she’s back belting, her mezzo-soprano voice still thrilling 41 years after she won her first Tony as Eva Perón in “Evita.” (She won a second Tony playing Rose in Mr. Sondheim’s “Gypsy” in 2008.)And, despite the hip surgeries, she’s back dancing — in heels, no less.“Did you see I tripped tonight?” she asked, adding merrily: “The next musical is in a wheelchair.”I told her that her voice — what she calls “two tiny muscles” and what Mandy Patinkin calls “the two tiny rubber bands in your throat” — sounded amazing.“I made a pact with the devil because, believe me, I’ve abused it,” she said. “In my entire life, I smoked, I took drugs, I blew out vocal cords. I had the vocal cord operation. It’s shocking to me that I still have a voice. I feel like Ethel Merman.”At the preview, the audience was primed to see their Patti again. They got excited before the show started, merely listening to a recording of her voice ominously warning everyone to turn off their phones. (Ms. LuPone famously snatched a phone from an audience member during a 2015 performance at Lincoln Center, after the woman would not stop texting.)“Musicals are treacherous animals,” Ms. LuPone said, talking about all the backstage drama and sniping. “Hits can go south faster than flops. In hits, people become entitled. In flops, you’re holding on for dear life.”Ms. LuPone and Stephen Sondheim at a rehearsal for “Sweeney Todd.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Burden and a Blessing’She said that this final act of her career is a lot easier than clambering up to Broadway.“I went through emotional abuse because it was the thing to do to get a performance out of somebody,” she recalled. “I never had the casting couch. They said, ‘Get out!’ They never said ‘Come in.’ I never went through any kind of sexual harassment. No, it was mental and emotional harassment.”She has said that she could be her own worst enemy, letting her temper fly.It would happen in taxicabs, she said. If she thought drivers were cheating on the meter, she would do battle, jump out without paying and yell a raunchier version of “Don’t ever mess with a New Yorker!”Mr. Patinkin, who played Che to her Evita, backed up her tales of pugilistic prowess.When they were on the road doing a concert tour, she once came in with a black eye. She explained that a guy in the parking lot had stolen her space; she had “mouthed off,” and he smacked her.“But you should have seen what I did to him!” she kvelled to Mr. Patinkin.“She doesn’t pull any punches,” he said. “She gives it to you right on the chin.” It doesn’t sound like a metaphor.“I’ve gotten in trouble since I was a toddler for questioning,” Ms. LuPone said. “I got in a lot of trouble in school. When I got out of Juilliard and got into the professional world, there was some weird behavior. Mean stage managers, lousy agents that didn’t protect me. I was completely alone in ‘Evita,’ I had to fight the battles myself.”She has talked about Hal Prince, the director, bullying her, as other British members of the cast tried to prod her to do the part as it had been done in London by Elaine Paige, to which she replied: “Shut up.”“It was like a battlefield from my dressing room past the stage management to the stage,” she said. “It was Beirut. I was safe onstage and I wasn’t even safe on the stage because I couldn’t sing it, so I was in fear every minute.”Ms. LuPone may have felt as if she was in a war zone, but her co-star felt as if he was in heaven.“You’ll never find a better partner to be with onstage, she’s just absolute magic,” Mr. Patinkin said. “I’ve never felt safer with anyone. She could throw a dagger right between my eyes and I know it would stop one millisecond right before it hit my forehead.”“If you feel a little tired or worn out, if something has happened to you,” he added, “she’ll pick you up and make sure you’re alive.“Patti is so sensitive, she sings like a child, very truthfully. She can’t let certain feelings go, which is a burden and a blessing. She fights through it all and gives everything, until there’s nothing left in her.”As she sipped champagne and nibbled on prosciutto, Ms. LuPone looked like she had plenty more in her.“I have scars,” she mused. “And why are we called ‘bitches’ or ‘difficult to work with’ when we’re simply asking for what we need?” It infuriates her, she said, because it is men who are using those labels.“Apparently, I was persona non grata in California after ‘Evita,’ because everybody heard I was difficult in New York. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you want to know why I was difficult?’ No, it’s just, ‘You were difficult so you’re on the Life’s Too Short list.’ I’m saying this for every woman and guy that goes through that. Your talent will out. Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”In the wake of #MeToo, she noted, abusive bosses get the hook.“There’s no more bad guys left in the world,” she said with a sly smile. But her black humor is still intact, so she added that, for her show, “We had to go through two days of sensitivity training. I wanted to kill myself.”She played Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” in London, before it came to Broadway. In 1994, when Andrew Lloyd Webber fired her and replaced her with Glenn Close, she wrote in her memoir, “I took batting practice in my dressing room with a floor lamp. I swung at everything in sight — mirrors, wig stands, makeup, wardrobe, furniture, everything. Then I heaved the lamp out the second-floor window.”She sued him and used the $1 million she won to build a pool at her Connecticut house, now christened the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool.“The only thing we didn’t do is the police drawing on the bottom of the pool,” she said, laughing.After decades of trading insults, she says simply that Mr. Lloyd Webber is “a sad sack.” Her irritation at Ms. Close still simmers. And then there’s Madonna: In 2017, she told Andy Cohen: “Madonna is a movie killer. She’s dead behind the eyes. She can’t act her way out of a paper bag.” She added, for good measure: “She should not be on film or stage.”When we left the theater, Ms. LuPone said we were exiting through “the Madonna door,” called that because when Madonna acted there in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” in 1988, she made a quick getaway by this door to try to avoid the throngs outside.“That’s when she had that body, in that period when she was staggeringly beautiful,” Ms. LuPone said. “I couldn’t look at anything else but her body. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It was just like, ‘Wow.’ She did have presence onstage in that respect, when she came onstage with that body.”I asked Ms. LuPone if it smarts to leave every night by the Madonna door, given that Madonna got the Eva role in the movie.“I always thought that Judy Davis would have been stunning in the movie, and get somebody else to sing it — get Marni Nixon,” she said, referring to the ghost singer for Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady.”“I want to see somebody that’s going to be electrifying and Madonna is not an electrifying presence on camera,” Ms. LuPone continued. “She’s just not — not for that score, which is insane.“When Mandy and I did it onstage, thank God we had training from Juilliard, so we were able to connect the dots dramatically, because there really wasn’t anything there.”Ouch.I asked about her husband, Matt Johnston, whom she met when he was a cameraman on a 1987 TV movie in which she portrayed the young Lady Bird Johnson. (Mrs. Johnson told her, “Evita was a bird of paradise, and I’m just a little mouse.”) How has the star stayed married for so long in showbiz?“Because Matt gave up show business,” she said. “He became Mr. Mom and a farmer, and he is egoless. He understands what this is that I have to do, and he supports it.” They have a son named Josh, 31, a filmmaker.I was curious about her seven-year romance with Kevin Kline, which got off to a fractious start at Juilliard.“We were at each other in the very beginning,” she said, “and then one day in art history class, we were just all over each other.”And did it really end, as she wrote in her memoir, when Mr. Kline collided with “a chorus girl in Boston while he was doing ‘On the Twentieth Century.’”“Well, it depends on who you ask,” Ms. LuPone said mischievously. “I wanted to move to an apartment that had doors because I was in a tiny little apartment on 21st Street. Kevin thought that was a commitment.”But she still treasures the telegram Mr. Kline sent her on opening night of “Evita”: “InEVITAble!”When I left her outside her New York apartment at 2 a.m., I felt very awake and caught up in the Patti of it all.“Bye, doll,” I called out.“Bye, doll,” she sang back.“Your talent will out,” Ms. LuPone said. “Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You chided Neil Patrick Harris for not knowing what he was doing in rehearsals for your limited “Company” run at Lincoln Center in 2011.Patti LuPone: True. We had 10 days. He came in and he didn’t know anything.You once played a vengeful ghost who haunted a laundromat and lived in a dryer.Confirm.Your ideal “Ladies Who Lunch” outing would include Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Patti Smith and Bette Davis.Yes.You started your career as a toddler with a Marilyn Monroe imitation.Yes. My mother used to make me come out when I was 3 or 4 and go like this (pursing her lips).You have a long rider attached to every contract that you think of as a scrapbook for every mistake you’ve ever made.Exactly. What’s in the dressing room. What my transportation is. Just to make sure I’m not stressed out when I get there. I learned from Ryan Murphy to ask for “portal to portal.”As Helena Rubinstein said, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”I do think that’s true.It was intimidating to sing “Ladies Who Lunch” at Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday party 10 feet away from Elaine Stritch.No, I felt honored. I started singing the line “Does anyone still wear a hat?” and I looked straight at Elaine, who had a hat on, to pay homage. Elaine always said very wise things to me. She was a lovely mentor and a lovely friend.At Juilliard, John Houseman was just as frightening as he was in “The Paper Chase.”He was tough and scary. I got in an elevator with him once in 1969, 1970. I said, “Hi, Mr. Houseman.” He turned to me and said, “Louise Bernikow says you’re the most illiterate person she’s ever met.”You sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” better than the senior George Bush.Can I tell you something about Barbara and George? I did a performance at the East Wing when they were in the White House. And the next time Matt and I went back, we were in the line and I said, “We got pregnant the last time we were here!” At the Willard.By happenstance, you sang at Ryan Murphy’s wedding, which was so private, he didn’t invite any of his friends.I was singing in Provincetown, and I ran into Ryan. So I came to see him come out of his room and sang “Here Comes the Bride” and threw rose petals in his path.You were jealous when Madonna performed in leather and a mesh teddy at the Boom Boom Room during Pride Week.I can’t think of anything funny about Madonna. More

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      Review: In a Gender-Flipped Revival, ‘Company’ Loves Misery

      by

      Bobby is now Bobbie in this confusing, sour remake of the 1970 musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth.If there was ever a good time to dislike “Company,” now isn’t it.No, the death on Nov. 26 of the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim makes this more properly a time for sorrow and gratitude. He was, after all, the man who wrote those feelings into a beautiful “Company” song — “Sorry-Grateful” — and, in so doing, introduced ambivalence at an almost cellular level to the American musical theater.But let’s face it, the revival that opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater is not the “Company” Sondheim and the book writer George Furth (along with the director Hal Prince) unleashed on Broadway in 1970. Sure, the score remains great, and there are a few perfectly etched performances in supporting roles, especially Patti LuPone’s as the undermining, pickled Joanne.As directed by Marianne Elliott, however, in a gender-flipped version abetted by Sondheim himself, what was once the story of a man who is terrified of intimacy becomes something much less interesting: the story of a woman who is justifiably tired of her friends.That woman — now Bobbie instead of Bobby, and played by the winsome Katrina Lenk — no longer hears the busy signal of missed emotional connections that pulsed through the songs in their original incarnation. This time, what accompanies her as she studies five partnerships and samples three lovers is the ticking of a biological clock.Reframed that way, and with heaps of oversize symbolic baggage piled on top, the story comes to seem overwrought and incoherent. Gone is the affirmative lesson Bobbie learns from the smothering couples attending her 35th birthday party — a milestone she’d rather ignore. Instead, as if to prove that “Company” loves misery, this production drags her off the pedestal of her aloofness and into the mud of a long, dark night of the soul. At one point she vomits into a bucket.Indecent proposal, from left: Terence Archie as Larry, Patti LuPone as Joanne and Lenk.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot that coherence was ever the material’s strong point. From the start, critics complained about a main character who seemed dangerously recessive, observing other people’s foibles in loosey-goosey comic sketches that barely added up. No wonder: They started life as separate one-act plays..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In one of those sketches, the low-level friction between a husband and wife erupts in a jiu-jitsu match; in another, the apparently perfect shine of marital bliss turns out to be the glow of impending divorce. A third couple learns the meaning of devotion while smoking pot; a fourth couple — now configured as two gay men — experiences hiccups on the way to the altar.Still, as strung together by Sondheim’s diamantine songs, “Company” offered a groundbreaking way of looking at its subject, less through a microscope than a kaleidoscope. Sarcasm warming into insight was the hallmark of the style, which borrowed the nonrepresentational techniques of midcentury drama and wed it to a psychological acuity rarely before seen in American musicals. The result was a new method of storytelling in which thematic consistency trumped conventional plot — and nearly obliterated it.Though fascinating in theory, and worth considering as a way of reorienting the original’s outdated sexual politics, Elliott’s idea that the material could be regendered for a new era completely disrupts that consistency. Aside from Sondheim’s customized new lyrics, only a few of the alterations made to accommodate the thesis scan. One involves the gay couple, Jamie (formerly Amy) and Paul. For them, getting married really is the terrifying unknown described in the showstopping, tongue-twisting “Getting Married Today.” Explaining his decision to cancel the ceremony, Jamie (Matt Doyle) says, in a line that’s been added: “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”That moment rings true. But when Bobbie takes advantage of Jamie’s jitters to suggest that he marry her instead of Paul, she doesn’t seem needy or wolfish, as Bobby did when propositioning Amy; she seems foolish and disrespectful. That Lenk fails to make sense of the moment is not her fault. There are no lines or logic that would allow her to do so.From left, Jennifer Simard and Christopher Sieber, with Lenk. The low-level friction between Simard and Sieber’s characters, a husband and wife, erupts in a jiu-jitsu match.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven more flummoxing is the scene in which, as originally written, Joanne, tired of Bobby’s passivity, and perhaps her own, suggests they have an affair. Short of turning Joanne into a lesbian, which might have been more interesting, Elliott has little choice but to turn her into a pimp, goading Bobbie to “make it” with her husband, Larry. Perhaps if Larry were not a tertiary character, barely fleshed out in Furth’s script, this might not seem like a directorial hail-Mary pass.Yet it’s amazing what a little LuPone can do to distract from such things. Whether swinging her legs like a mischievous child or squatting on a toilet — yes, Elliott’s staging goes there — she brings her precision comedy and riveting charisma to every moment she’s onstage. Her two big numbers, “The Little Things You Do Together” and “The Ladies Who Lunch,” both left pretty much alone, are uncommonly taut and specific.Too bad that Lenk, so beguiling in “The Band’s Visit” and “Indecent,” is not as lucky, both miscast and mishandled. Bobby’s transformation into Bobbie has been accomplished at the cost of a few ribs, turning the character into a rag doll. Unable to meet the dramatic and vocal demands of the role, Lenk seems merely pummeled by it. To be fair, Elliott’s staging, full of athletic busywork and “Alice in Wonderland” contortions of scale on Bunny Christie’s almost too-fascinating set, is quite a workout. Maybe that’s why Christie, who also designed the costumes, has oddly given Lenk plain white sneakers to wear with her dressy scarlet pantsuit.But in trying to disguise the show’s revue-like structure by centering the action in Bobbie’s mind, Elliott paradoxically causes her to recede even further than usual. (At one point she brings on a battalion of Bobbies, as if to compensate.) In response, you become uncommonly grateful for secondary characters who have clear things to do and do them smartly, like Jennifer Simard as the jiu-jitsu wife and Claybourne Elder as a himbo flight attendant.Eventually, though, the show runs out of distractions.Sondheim was collaborative to a fault; it’s no contradiction that he hotly resented criticism of Furth’s work on “Company” and yet (after initial skepticism) eagerly endorsed Elliott’s renovations. “What keeps theater alive is the chance always to do it differently,” he told The Times shortly before his death. This was no mere bromide; Sondheim allowed a masterpiece like “Sweeney Todd” to be cut to ribbons for Tim Burton’s film and saw the cult flop “Merrily We Roll Along” through more surgeries than Frankenstein’s monster.In that sense, this “Company” is perfectly in line with his intentions: It’s new. And truth be told, I was never less than riveted — if usually in the way Bobby is, eyeballing messy marriages. Nor is the chance to hear the great score live with a 14-piece orchestra to be taken lightly; is there a more exciting opening number than the title song?So I guess I’m sorry-grateful. Sorry for not liking this version of “Company” better — and grateful to Sondheim for providing the chance to find out.CompanyAt the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; companymusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Interest in Stephen Sondheim's Music, Books and Shows Soar After His Death

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      Fans have been streaming his music, buying his books, and trying to get in to see his shows, with a new revival of “Company” opening this week on Broadway.Streams of Stephen Sondheim’s music are up more than 500 percent. New York’s Drama Book Shop sold out the first volume of his collected lyrics. And close to 5,000 people have been entering a lottery to win tickets to weekend performances for a sold-out run of “Assassins.”In the days since the unexpected death of one of the most important writers in the history of musical theater, interest in his work has surged.“There’s even greater demand to see the work of Sondheim, and we’ve been feeling the benefit,” said Chris Harper, a lead producer of the revival of “Company,” one of Sondheim’s most acclaimed musicals, which opens on Broadway on Thursday. “What has also been pretty extraordinary to watch is that audiences are listening much more intently, and it feels like a much richer and deeper experience.”Sondheim died, unexpectedly, on Nov. 26, at the age of 91; the cause of death was cardiovascular disease, according to his death certificate. Broadway theaters decided to dim their lights Wednesday night for one minute in his honor.Sondheim’s popularity had its peaks and valleys during his lifetime, and many of his shows were not commercially successful. But much of his work is now frequently performed, and his importance to the art form is undisputed; on Sunday he was hailed by President Biden, who said, “Stephen was in a class of his own as a composer and a lyricist.”The evidence of a spike in appetite for work by Sondheim is everywhere.Look, for example, to the Off Broadway revival of “Assassins,” directed by John Doyle and now running at the Classic Stage Company in Lower Manhattan. The production was fully sold out before Sondheim’s death, but now the number of people regularly entering a digital lottery hoping to score $15 tickets is ballooning. And the roughly 5,000 people seeking tickets to weekend shows face long odds: the theater seats just 196 people..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“We’re definitely seeing an uptick in interest since his passing,” said Phil Haas, the nonprofit’s director of marketing and communications. “It’s hard to judge the exact amount, because the show is sold out and has been sold out for some time, but we have seen increased numbers of people joining our lottery, more people waiting on the cancellation line, and people waiting for longer.”Then there is the Drama Book Shop, a specialty store in Midtown that stocks scripts and other theater-related publications. Needless to say, Sondheim was always popular there, but now, even more so.“We almost immediately sold out, and had to reorder, ‘Finishing the Hat,’” said Pete Milano, who oversees the store’s operations, referring to the first volume of Sondheim’s collected lyrics. After Sondheim’s death, the store assembled much of its Sondheim material for a display near the entrance, and now the second volume of Sondheim’s lyrics, “Look, I Made a Hat,” is selling strongly, as are the texts for the musicals he co-authored..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“It’s not just one, but across the board, which was nice to see,” Milano said. “Plus, a lot of people are talking about him when they come in.”Online, streams of Sondheim’s music soared 523 percent in the U.S. during the week after his death, according to MRC Data, a tracking service that powers the Billboard charts.Sondheim was cheered last month when he attended the first preview of the new revival of “Company,” which opens Thursday.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAt the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, a new display of Sondheim memorabilia — letters he wrote to prominent artists as well as set models and sketches from some of his shows — was mounted in response to his death. And on Instagram, a new account called @sondheimletters has sprung up to collect and display letters Sondheim wrote to fans as well as collaborators.The “Company” opening, for a re-gendered production directed by Marianne Elliott that stars Katrina Lenk and Patti LuPone, is proving to be a hot ticket — among those expected to attend are Meryl Streep and Lin-Manuel Miranda.And there are other productions of Sondheim shows in the works. The Encores! program at New York City Center had already announced it was planning a two-week run of “Into the Woods” next May, with public school students and older adults joining Sara Bareilles, Christian Borle, Heather Hedley and Ashley Park in the cast; last week Encores! announced that the production will now be dedicated to Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics. “I’ve been hearing from some of the performers that are in it, who are weeping as they relisten to his music and prepare for their roles,” said the Encores! artistic director, Lear deBessonet, who is directing the “Into the Woods” production. “This is a moment of grace, to celebrate Steve and all he brought to this world.”MasterVoices, a New York based chorus, is planning a concert version of the rarely staged “Anyone Can Whistle” in March at Carnegie Hall, starring Vanessa Williams. Barrington Stage Company, in the Berkshires, announced Tuesday that it would produce “A Little Night Music” next summer, directed by Julianne Boyd in her final season as that theater’s artistic director.And New York Theater Workshop, an Off Broadway nonprofit, is close to confirming plans for a production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” directed by Maria Friedman, for late next year.Plus, of course, the Steven Spielberg-directed movie remake of “West Side Story,” which Sondheim wrote the lyrics for, is already generating awards buzz in advance of its release on Friday. (“I think it’s just great,” Sondheim said of the film in an interview a few days before he died. He added, “The great thing about it is people who think they know the musical are going to have surprises.”)A film version of “Follies” is also in the works; the script is “in active development,” according to a spokesman for the production company, Heyday Films.Ben Sisario More

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      Stephen Sondheim Discusses a Gender-Swapped ‘Company’

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      Days before he died, Stephen Sondheim and the director Marianne Elliott chatted about a Broadway revival of his 1970 musical. With a gender swap, it has a “different flavor,” he said.ROXBURY, Conn. — Had I known what was about to happen, I would have asked so many different questions. But I didn’t, and, presumably, neither did he.It was Nov. 21, a lovely fall Sunday, and I had driven to rural Connecticut to talk with one of the greatest figures in musical theater history, Stephen Sondheim, about a Broadway revival of his seminal concept musical, “Company.”We chatted about the show with its director, Marianne Elliott, who joined us for the interview. We talked too, about an unfinished musical he was hoping to complete (“Square One,” adapted from two Luis Buñuel films), his work habits (“I’m a procrastinator”) and his health (“Outside of my sprained ankle, OK”). And he showed us a few rooms in the house, which he had used for years as a weekend getaway, and where he had spent most of his time during the pandemic.Five days after our conversation, Sondheim died. He was 91.What stands out, as I think back on that afternoon? Every time I looked up, I saw a big, bold “Company” artwork, a multicolored print, by Deborah Kass, with the words “Being Alive” — the title of one of the show’s biggest songs.There was the black standard poodle that joined us in the kitchen as I was tested by a Covid concierge, and then stopped by to visit as we began the interview; Sondheim explained that he had had two, Willie and Addie, named after the brothers in his last finished musical, “Road Show,” but that Addie had recently died.The house was a treasure trove, jam-packed with artifacts: set pieces from “Sunday in the Park With George,” a suspended clock face rescued from a London synagogue, orreries and Japanese trick boxes, a portrait by Annie Leibovitz and posters from international productions of his shows. Then I spotted the Stephen Sondheim action figure. “That was sent to me,” he said, laughing. “I thought it was hilarious. At first I was horrified. Then I was flattered.”Larry Kert as Bobby and Susan Browning as April in the original Broadway production of “Company.” Friedman-Abeles/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsGender flip: Katrina Lenk as Bobbie and Claybourne Elder as Andy in the revival of the show, now on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Company,” with music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by George Furth, first ran on Broadway in 1970 (and won the Tony for best musical the following year). The nonlinear show is about a single person, just turning 35, feeling pressure to settle down from paired-off friends.The current revival, which changes the gender of the protagonist (the male Bobby is now the female Bobbie), is now in previews and is scheduled to open on Dec. 9, following a lengthy pandemic delay. Over the course of 90 minutes, we mostly talked about the new revival, but he also offered flashes of insight about theater and theater-making.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Let’s talk about why you decided to revisit “Company.”STEPHEN SONDHEIM I revisited it because Marianne wanted to. I was a big fan of Marianne’s. I was skeptical. Then she did a workshop, and videoed it, and there was a young cameraman there who had never heard of the show. When Marianne told him about what the show was originally, he said, “You mean it worked with a guy?” And then I knew that we had a show.MARIANNE ELLIOTT I’d always loved “Company.” I’d never seen it actually, but I listened to it quite a lot. But if it was set now, it feels like it would have more potency if it was with a female Bobbie, because a male Bobby who is 35 now, who has clearly got a lovely life — lots of friends, lots of girlfriends, obviously doing quite well, an apartment in the city — nobody’s going to be pushing him into getting married. They’d probably just slap him on the back and say, “Have a great time.” But for a woman at 35, obviously, it’s quite a threshold. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on her from her friends to make a wish that she will actually “sort her life out” and settle down and get married and have a family, maybe.You had turned down a proposal for an all-male “Company” with a gay Bobby, directed by John Tiffany.SONDHEIM Yes. There were certain scenes that worked really well, and certain scenes that just seemed forced. Actually the scenes that worked best were what we call the girlfriend scenes. But the marriage scenes didn’t really work well.So why did you say yes to this one?SONDHEIM My feeling about the theater is the thing that makes it different from movies and television is that you can do it in different ways from generation to generation. Just as you can have many different actors play Hamlet, you can have many different ways of looking at a show without distorting it. And also, shows change their life according to what is going on in the world around them. “Assassins” now has an entirely different and ominous quality to it because of what’s going on with guns and violence. “Company” has a different flavor than it had before feminism really got a foothold.ELLIOTT I wish more people thought that way. Because theater is ephemeral. It is about the now. Even if you set it in another period, it should have something to say to the now.SONDHEIM What keeps theater alive is the chance always to do it differently, with not only fresh casts, but fresh viewpoints.Were there ways besides gender that you wanted to reset the piece?SONDHEIM It’s not just a matter of changing pronouns, but attitudes. Marianne went and looked through all of George Furth’s early drafts to find out if something was useful, and she did — there are short passages in the piece that are out of George’s notes, not out of the script he wrote.ELLIOTT We read everything he’d ever written, trying to get into his head. We were very keen that it had to be faithful to the original.SONDHEIM Getting into George’s head is quite a task for anybody. He had a really original head.What was the trickiest lyric to adapt?SONDHEIM There are words and little phrases here and there, but there are no big changes. I suppose the biggest change is in “Someone Is Waiting” where it’s a list of men instead of a list of girls.What about the music? One of the sounds that’s closely associated with the score is that of a busy signal.SONDHEIM It’s just a musical theme now — it doesn’t signify a busy signal. If you didn’t know, you’d just think it was a vamp. There was no point in throwing it out, because it’s integrated into the score, and it’s a wonderful sound to open the show with.ELLIOTT We use the clock quite a lot — the ticking clock through all of the transitions. In our head, we were thinking more of a clock than a busy signal.How did you think about the sexual situations — a man with three girlfriends versus a woman with three boyfriends?ELLIOTT I do think it might be tricky today for a man to be sleeping with a woman and not really wanting to hear what she has to say. But if you change it the other way around it’s less offensive.Lenk in a scene from the show. “The image of all of them crowding that small room,” Sondheim said, “gives a whole other meaning to the title, ‘Company,’ cause they’re smothering her.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou also wrestled with how to handle an exchange between Bobbie and her friend Joanne. In the original, Joanne propositions Bobby; in this version, Joanne makes a different suggestion.SONDHEIM That was all Marianne’s idea. That was another thing I was skeptical of, but she really wanted to try it.ELLIOTT I suppose I was interested in who Joanne was, and her self-destructive behavior. She’s much more fragile than she shows herself to be. What’s the worst thing she could possibly do? How did the two of you collaborate?SONDHEIM We just went over it scene by scene. And I would change, and Marianne would, taking some of George’s lines. And she’d say, “We’ll, that’s OK, but I wish it were more this,” and I’d say, “That’s OK, but I don’t quite understand what she’s feeling.” That kind of thing.[One of the last decisions Elliott and Sondheim made was to change the gender of one of Bobbie’s friends, replacing an Amy with a Jamie, so there is now a same-sex couple in which one person is having wedding day jitters.]ELLIOTT When I was auditioning in London, I couldn’t find the person [to play Amy]. I also felt like this woman wasn’t now, wasn’t a very modern woman. So then I did a crazy thing — I asked a friend of mine, Jonathan Bailey, who was in the workshop playing P.J., “Would you mind just coming in and trying something for me? It’s a bit crazy.”SONDHEIM I didn’t know that.ELLIOTT We worked for maybe an hour and a half, and it wasn’t perfect, but I felt (gasp), this is exciting, there’s a potential here. So I then immediately got on the email to Steve, and I said, “Steve, you have to be sitting down. You have to be having a glass of wine in your hand. And take a deep breath, but I’m going to say something to you: I think possibly we should change Amy into a man.” And Steve’s reply sums him up, really, as a collaborator. He basically said, “Marianne, you need to be sitting down, you need to have a glass of wine in your hand, you need to take a deep breath: I think it’s a great idea.”Is there something about same-sex relationships that made that work?SONDHEIM: Well, it’s contemporary. This makes it so much “of today.” The whole cast takes it for granted. It’s just, “Oh, those two guys are married.” It’s what people would do today.ELLIOTT I don’t know whether this is modern or not, but there’s something about a woman saying to a gay guy, “Oh, God, we’re both getting older, let’s just you and I get married,” in a sort of flip way, that feels quite real, but then it becomes more serious.SONDHEIM The great key line — I’m going to paraphrase it — is “Just because we can get married, doesn’t mean we should,” and that sums up everything about the gay aspect of marriage. That’s such a prescient line.During the life of this show, you got married.SONDHEIM Yes, but not because of the show. Actually a good friend of mine was contemplating getting married back in 1970. He saw “Company,” and he said, all right, I’ll try it. He got divorced three months later. So I don’t send prospective grooms and brides to see “Company.”Does the change in gender change the way you see the show?SONDHEIM Not the way I see the show. The way I see what it’s about, sure.How does it change the way you see what it’s about?SONDHEIM It just tells me something about the way people live today, as opposed to the way that people lived in 1970.So many people have ideas about how to change or update classic shows. How do you decide what the limits are for you?SONDHEIM You’re asking a general question. I couldn’t possibly answer that. But most of the shows that I’ve written, if not all but “Company,” don’t require or ask for a change. Maybe to improve something, but not to change it because the world around it has changed. An awful lot of shows that I’ve written are period pieces anyway. You don’t have to change “Sweeney Todd” to fit the contemporary world, or even “Night Music.”Marianne, I wanted to ask you about directing a musical, because most of your career has been plays. This is your first big musical? ELLIOTT It’s my second — I did “The Light Princess,” that Tori Amos wrote.How is it different from a play? What are you learning?ELLIOTT It’s more collaborative. You can share running the room, which means that it’s not always about you running the minutiae of the moment. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to sit back and see it as a whole. It just enables you to think much more creatively, much more objectively, much more about the overall.SONDHEIM But isn’t the essential difference between directing a play and directing a musical that musicals are out front, they’re presentational, whereas a play is not presentational, it’s about the characters interacting.ELLIOTT Yes, that’s true. I suppose the thing about this particular musical though, as you’ve always said Steve, it was written for actors, so that helps me. I like music, but I’m not highly educated in terms of music. But I can say things like, “Why does she have a long note there, and why does she go up on the line there, and not keep to the melody? Why is it held?” And with Steve’s stuff, there’s always a psychological reason.SONDHEIM I always approach writing a song from the actor’s point of view. I try to get into the character the way an actor gets into the character, and then write from that point of view. So that means I pay attention to each consonant and each vowel, the way you would if you were writing a play.ELLIOTT It really does tell you something psychologically.SONDHEIM Music, of course, does that wonderful thing of suggesting an emotion. You don’t have to spell it out. It makes such an impact on an audience.“It’s fantastic to come back and do a show, in the year after the pandemic, to do a show that is absolutely the antithesis of being locked down,” Elliott said.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesThis production of “Company” began its life with a run in London. Was there anything you saw there that you decided to change for New York?ELLIOTT I wanted to make it really clear that it was all about the moment when, at her birthday party that she’s going to have, she’s going to have to blow the candles out on the cake. I also wanted to make it clear that in my head — I mean, this is not in my head, this is actually as it’s written — it’s all in her head as she’s waiting for this blinking surprise party to turn up. As she’s drinking, on the bourbon, she’s probably hiding under the stairs thinking, “What’s going to happen?” And she drifts from thought to thought to thought. So it’s not necessarily a narrative, but there’s logic from one thought to another thought to another thought, which then takes her to the place of “Being Alive.”SONDHEIM That’s why it’s not a revue. It has the form of a revue, but it’s not. It’s a play.ELLIOTT Yeah. And I wanted to make that clear. So the “Alice in Wonderland” features more heavily here than it did in London.SONDHEIM And also you wanted to restage “Another Hundred People.” That’s a complete restaging of what was in London.Why?ELLIOTT Well, I didn’t think it worked particularly well in London.SONDHEIM No, it didn’t. And of course, it wasn’t written to be a group number — it was written as a solo. And so Marianne had to invent something — I don’t know exactly why you wanted a group number, but it’s nice to have one there.ELLIOTT I wanted it to look like she was being taken through the streets and the alleys and the corners and the highs and the lows of New York, and also, through, possibly even, an app. So it has connotations of her walking, but also connotations of her going through a dating app.SONDHEIM This is New York’s solo.ELLIOTT That’s a great way of putting it: New York’s solo. Every single scene, New York is mentioned. They all have something to say about New York. And it’s fantastic to come back and do a show, in the year after the pandemic, to do a show that is absolutely the antithesis of being locked down, because everybody is crammed in her apartment — all her friends — and also to do a show that is about how fantastic New York is.SONDHEIM The image of all of them crowding that small room, at the beginning, gives the show an entirely different flavor than it’s ever had before. It gives a whole other meaning to the title, “Company,” cause they’re smothering her. That’s something it’s never had before. It’s all friendly, and full of love and warmth, and they’re smothering her.You had a few previews before the pandemic and shut down for a year and a half. How did that affect you and the show?SONDHEIM It made us so happy! What a great question! Never been happier to have a show close after a week!ELLIOTT (laughing) With a great advance!I have to say, it was pretty awful. I hated the pandemic. Absolutely hated it. I felt like I was kicking like a horse against the stable door: “Let me out!” But it was worrying as well, because we wanted to come back. We were a very strong company. We all really believed what we were doing. And suddenly we were totally scattered across the globe.SONDHEIM And like other shows, we were just getting the steam up, when the door slammed.ELLIOTT There’s quite a lot of post-traumatic stress going on, I think, and that will continue to go on in humans just generally, so coming back into rehearsal after having been isolated was quite a thing. It felt like everybody knew each other. There was a trust there, an understanding. And when you’re playing a married couple, you can’t buy that, you can’t direct it, you can’t act it. It’s either there or it isn’t there. SONDHEIM The appropriate word is, it was a company. More

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      Praise for Stephen Sondheim at ‘Company’ and ‘Assassins'

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      “I would ask you to sit back and luxuriate in his extraordinary words and music,” the director John Doyle said before Friday’s performance of the “Assassins” revival.Hours after Stephen Sondheim’s death, the director of the Broadway revival of “Company” walked onstage before the curtain rose on Friday to acknowledge the news that many in the audience already knew but that some — judging by the murmurs that followed — had not yet heard.“Stephen Sondheim, so sadly, passed away in the early hours of this morning,” said the director, Marianne Elliott. “He was truly the greatest artist that we, in our lifetime, possibly will ever know.”Around the same time, 32 blocks downtown, the director of the Off Broadway musical, “Assassins,” walked onstage before the show with a similar mournful speech.“Today is a sad day for the American theater,” said the director, John Doyle. “Stephen Sondheim changed the face of the American musical, and we feel very blessed to be in this space at this time.”It was evidence of Sondheim’s long-lasting popularity that, on the day of his death, audience members lined up to see revivals for two of his musicals: “Company,” a Broadway production starring Patti LuPone and Katrina Lenk, and “Assassins,” about the people who killed or tried to kill American presidents. Both had been delayed by the pandemic.With the cast of “Company” standing onstage behind her at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, arms around one another’s shoulders, Elliott said that Sondheim’s death had been a shock to the production, whose members had gotten to know the composer and lyricist during the preparation for the revival. Even at 91 years old and with more than six decades of writing music and lyrics for Broadway behind him, Sondheim had taken an active role in the new run of the musical, which first premiered in 1970 and won six Tony Awards. The current production was a hit with critics when it debuted in London in 2019.“He didn’t need to do that,” Elliott said. “But he became the greatest enthusiast for it, and every single line of George Furth’s and every single lyric we talked about, we debated, we argued, we chatted, we laughed,” Elliott added, referring to the playwright.In this version, the central character, a bachelor with commitment issues, is played by a woman (Lenk). He had been supportive of the changes to the musical, Elliott said. “He really understood about art,” she said, “and he really understood about the now and why art should speak to the now.”Right up until his death, Sondheim was both a fairly active writer and theatergoer. Earlier this month, Sondheim had traveled to Manhattan from his home in Connecticut to see these productions himself, attending the opening night of “Assassins” at the Classic Stage Company on Nov. 14 and a preview of “Company” the next day. This week, Sondheim discussed his current project — his final musical — with The New York Times, saying, “What else would I do with my time but write?”Speaking to the audience at “Assassins,” Doyle urged the theatergoers to celebrate Sondheim’s work rather than grieve.“He would be curious if you sat here sadly tonight,” he said. “I would ask you to sit back, to luxuriate in his extraordinary words and music.” More

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      Stephen Sondheim Reflected on 'Company' and 'West Side Story' in Final Interview

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      In an interview on Sunday, the revered composer and lyricist, 91, contentedly discussed his shows running on Broadway and off, as well as a new movie about to be released.ROXBURY, Conn. — Stephen Sondheim stood by the gleaming piano in his study, surrounded by posters of international productions of his many famous musicals, and smiled as he inquired whether a visitor might be interested in hearing songs from a show he had been working on for years, but hadn’t finished yet.“And now would you like to hear the score?” he asked. Of course, the answer was yes. “You got some time?” he asked, before laughing, loudly, with a sense of mischief: “It’s from a show called ‘Fat Chance’!”That was Sunday afternoon, five days ago, when Mr. Sondheim, 91, had welcomed me to his longtime country house for a 90-minute interview with him and the theater director Marianne Elliott about a revival of “Company” that is now in previews on Broadway. It would turn out to be his final major interview.There was little indication that Mr. Sondheim, one of the greatest songwriters in the history of musical theater, was unwell. He was engaged and lucid, with strong opinions and playfully pugnacious, as with the tease about his long-gestating, unfinished final musical. At one moment he complained that his memory wasn’t as strong as it had been, but he was also telling anecdotes from a half-century earlier with ease.He was having a little trouble getting around — using a cane, seeking assistance to get in and out of chairs, and in obvious pain when walking — which he attributed to an injury. Asked about the state of his health, he answered by knocking on a wood table and saying, “Outside of my sprained ankle, OK.”Mr. Sondheim was applauded earlier this month at the first preview of a Broadway revival of his musical “Company,” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHe was busy right until the end. On Nov. 14 he attended the opening of an Off Broadway revival of his musical “Assassins,” directed by John Doyle at Classic Stage Company. The next night he went to the first post-shutdown preview for the Broadway revival of “Company” — a reimagined production, opening Dec. 9, in which the protagonist, who has traditionally been played by a man, is now played by a woman. And just this week, two days before he died, he did a doubleheader, seeing a Wednesday matinee of “Is This a Room” and an evening performance of “Dana H.,” two short documentary plays on Broadway.“I can’t wait,” he said as he anticipated seeing those shows. “I can smell both of those and how much I’m going to love them.”He was not inclined to make any grand pronouncements on the state of Broadway. “I don’t take overviews — I never have taken overviews,” he said. “Whither Broadway? I don’t answer the question. Who knows. I don’t really care. That’s the future. Whatever happens will happen.”One thing he was hoping would happen: one more musical. For years he had been collaborating with the playwright David Ives and the director Joe Mantello on a new musical, most recently titled “Square One,” adapted from two movies directed by Luis Buñuel.“The first act is based on ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,’ and the second act is based on ‘The Exterminating Angel,’ ” he explained during the interview. “I don’t know if I should give the so-called plot away, but the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”Asked if he had any sense when it might be finished, Mr. Sondheim said, “No.”Why did he hope to keep working when he could just bask in appreciation?“What else am I going to do?” he asked. “I’m too old now to do a lot of traveling, I’m sorry to say. What else would I do with my time but write?”And did he write daily in his final weeks? “No, I’m a procrastinator,” he said. “I need a collaborator who pushes me, who gets impatient.”When it was pointed out that he had been a procrastinator throughout his career, and that it had seemed to work for him, he said, “Yes, I have. Yeah, I think forever. Not when I was a hungry teenager — when I wanted so much to have a show done, I don’t think I was a procrastinator then. But once I had a show done, I think part of me got lazy.”But with his shows running on Broadway and off, and a major film adaptation of “West Side Story” about to be released, Mr. Sondheim was clearly feeling good about the current reception of his work.In the new production of “Company,” the protagonist, who has traditionally been played by a man, is played by a woman, Katrina Lenk, center. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe confirmed his longstanding lack of interest in movie musicals, saying, “Growing up, I was a huge fan of movies, and the only genre that I wasn’t a fan of was musicals — I loved the songs, but not the musicals.”But he was obviously delighted about the Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation of “West Side Story,” a musical for which Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics, that is scheduled to be released next month. “I think it’s just great,” he said. He added, “The great thing about it is people who think they know the musical are going to have surprises.”He was looking forward to even more in the months to come: a new production of “Into the Woods,” for which Mr. Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics, is scheduled to be staged by the Encores! program at New York City Center next May. Also, Mr. Sondheim revealed, New York Theater Workshop is hoping to stage an Off Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” for which he wrote the music and lyrics, directed by Maria Friedman, who has previously directed well received productions in London and Boston.Asked which of his shows he’d most like to see revived next, he appeared stumped. “What would I like to see again that I haven’t seen in a while? I’d have to think about it, because an awful lot of the shows I’ve been a writer of have been done in the last few years.” He added, “I’ve been lucky. I’ve had good revivals of the shows that I like.” More