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    ‘The Outsiders’ Heads to Broadway in March

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    A new musical adaptation of a popular novel by S.E. Hinton will begin performances in March.Get ready to rumble.“The Outsiders,” a new musical adaptation of the 1967 S.E. Hinton novel of teenage alienation, as well as the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film starring Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Ralph Macchio, will begin performances on Broadway this spring. The cast has yet to be named.The musical is set in Tulsa, Okla., in the 1960s and follows an increasingly bloody conflict between rival gangs — the East Side have-nots, the Greasers, and the West Side haves, the Socs (short for “socials”). It will begin previews at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on March 16, with an opening slated for April 11.“The Outsiders” was initially set for a world premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in June 2020 before the pandemic delayed and then scuttled those plans. When the production finally began performances in California in February, it had a nearly three-hour run time, with a cast of 25 led by Brody Grant as Ponyboy Curtis, an orphaned 14-year-old who lives with his older brothers, Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and Darrel (Ryan Vasquez), both of whom have left school to support him. (Sky Lakota-Lynch played his best friend, Johnny Cade.)Angelina Jolie was announced last week as a lead producer. Jolie, whose credits as a film producer include “Maleficent” and “Unbroken,” saw the world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego this year with her 15-year-old daughter, Vivienne, whom she said will serve as her assistant (the pair also attended a touring production of “Dear Evan Hansen” in Philadelphia last year).While some critics found the musical’s ambitious scale appealing, others thought the story was weighed down by too many characters and themes. “Awkward, yearning, fast on its feet, the show, like the adolescents it describes, is still trying on various identities,” Alexis Soloski wrote in a review for The New York Times, though she praised the “effortless yet thoughtfully diversified” casting of the Greasers, who, like the Socs, are white and male in both the book and the movie, as well as the “gorgeous, mournful music.” (The songs are by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, of Jamestown Revival, as well as Justin Levine, who won a Tony Award for his orchestrations for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)Danya Taymor (“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” “Pass Over”), who directed the La Jolla production, will return for the Broadway run, as will the rest of the creative team. The book is by Adam Rapp (“The Sound Inside”) and Levine, who also handled the arrangements and orchestrations, with choreography by Rick and Jeff Kuperman.In addition to Jolie, the show’s producers also include American Zoetrope, the San Francisco film production company founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas; as well as Sue Gilad and Larry Rogowsky (“Moulin Rouge!,” “Funny Girl”).Hinton’s novel, which was published when she was a teenager, has long been celebrated for its relatable protagonist and unpolished authenticity. But those same qualities have also put it on frequently challenged books lists for its portrayal of gang violence, underage smoking and drinking and strong language.“The Outsiders” joins two other Broadway productions that have announced dates for next year. “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s dark comedy about a family grappling with antisemitism in France, opens in January; and “The Notebook,” a musical adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling romance novel, opens in March. More

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      Review: A Pageant of Love and Antisemitism, in ‘Parade’

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      Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond star in a timely and gorgeously sung Broadway revival of the 1998 musical about the Leo Frank case.You do not expect the star of a musical about a man lynched by an antisemitic mob to be his wife. Especially when that man, Leo Frank, who was murdered in Georgia in 1915, is played, with his usual intensity and vocal drama, by Ben Platt.Yet in the riveting Broadway revival of the musical “Parade” that opened on Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, it’s Micaela Diamond, as Lucille Frank, you watch most closely and who breaks your heart. With no affectation whatsoever, and a voice directly wired to her emotions, she makes Lucille our way into a story we might rather turn away from.True, this alters the balance of the show as originally staged by Harold Prince in 1998, further tipping it toward the marriage instead of the miscarriage of justice. Also toward the rapturous score by Jason Robert Brown, which won a Tony Award in 1999. But since the legal procedural was never the best part or even the point of “Parade,” the enhanced emphasis on a love story tested by tragedy and set to song is a big net gain.It’s strange, of course, to talk about net gains in relation to such a horrible tale. But “Parade” has always been strange anyway, seeking to make commercial entertainment out of a violent history and, because he’s a victim, a hero of a nebbish.As Alfred Uhry’s book — also a Tony winner — relates, Leo, the manager of a pencil factory owned by Lucille’s uncle, is a misfit in Atlanta: a New York Jew but also a cold fish. In Platt’s highly physical interpretation, he is scrunched and sickly looking, as if literally oppressed by the gentile society around him. That Lucille’s family, longtime Southerners, seems warmly assimilated into that society makes their marriage, at the start, a curdling of cream and vinegar.Michael Arden’s staging, imported with a slightly different cast from the City Center gala he directed in November, rightly relishes such contrasts. He signals the primacy of the love story by starting, in the 1860s, with sex: a young Confederate soldier bidding goodbye to his girl. A foreboding Dixie anthem called “The Old Red Hills of Home” leaps 50 years forward to connect the white Christian bigotry that fueled the Civil War to the war against Leo as well.His troubles begin with the murder of Mary Phagan (Erin Rose Doyle), a 13-year-old white employee who works, for 10 cents an hour, fastening erasers to pencil caps. Lacking conclusive evidence and in dire need of a conviction, the district attorney, Hugh Dorsey (Paul Alexander Nolan), railroads Leo by suborning testimony from many sources: friends of Phagan, a cleaner at the factory (Alex Joseph Grayson) and even Minnie, the Franks’s maid (Danielle Lee Greaves). After a sensational trial that cynically pits Jewish Atlantans against Black ones, Leo is sentenced to hang.The minimal set by Dane Laffrey is essentially a high platform on a low one, suggesting a witness box, a cell and a scaffold, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen the first act ends on that awful note, we still do not know Leo well. His first song, usually in musicals a moment for ingratiation, is instead a bitter snit called “How Can I Call This Home?” His last before the verdict is “It’s Hard to Speak My Heart.” Whatever that heart really holds is further blurred by Uhry’s device of having Leo enact the false testimony of other characters, so we see him as a rake and a maniac before we’ve grasped him as a man.Arden begins to correct for that during the intermission, which Leo, now imprisoned, spends sitting onstage with his head in his hands. In Act II, as he recognizes his growing dependence on Lucille, she finally becomes real to him and thus he to us.It’s too bad that some of this enlightenment is achieved through huge elisions and license in relating what is still a contested history. Though it’s true that Georgia’s governor (Sean Allan Krill) opened an inquiry that led to the commutation of Leo’s death sentence — but only to life in prison — it’s doubtful he did so as a result of Lucille’s buttonholing him at a tea dance. Nor that she accompanied him like a lay detective as he reinterviewed witnesses and obtained their recantations.Even if true, it’s unconvincing here, presented almost as a series of Nancy Drew skits. Still, Diamond maintains her dignity, allowing the final phase of the tragedy — in which Leo, after two years of appeals that are summarized in one line, is kidnapped from his cell and hanged — to commence with the drama righted.It is never wronged as long as Brown’s music plays. In this, his first Broadway show, he demonstrates the astonishing knack for dirty pastiche that has informed such follow-ups as “The Last Five Years,” “13” and “The Bridges of Madison County.” “Pastiche” because of his inerrant ear for just the right genre to fit any situation, in this case including Sousa-style marches, work songs, blues, swing ditties for the factory girls, a dainty waltz for the governor’s party. “Dirty” because he roughs them up with post-Sondheim technique, scraping the surface to bring up the blood.Douglas Lyons and Courtnee Carter sing the mordant “A Rumblin’ and A Rollin’” as hysteria about the case grows.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd as one of the few musical theater composers to write his own lyrics successfully, he gives singing actors something to act. He also manages to achieve in a rhyme what would otherwise take a scene of dialogue. As the politicians and journalists foment local hysteria and national media interest in the case, he gives two Black workers in the governor’s mansion a mordant triplet in the song “A Rumblin’ and a Rollin’”: “I can tell you this as a matter of fact/that the local hotels wouldn’t be so packed/if a little Black girl had been attacked.”That the Black workers (Douglas Lyons and Courtnee Carter) are otherwise barely characterized is one of the more obvious signs that the show’s book was written in the 20th century. (Uhry has made some revisions for this production.) Arden addresses this by keeping the ensemble as particular as possible, never letting it devolve into vague masses making generic gestures. And in minimizing the visual elements — the set (by Dane Laffrey) is essentially a high platform on a low one, suggesting a witness box, a cell and a scaffold — he keeps our attention on the people and what they sing.If actual history plays second fiddle to that — by the way, there’s a terrific orchestra of 17 players, just two shy of the plush original — current history steps in as a pretty good substitute. Not just in the guise of revitalized antisemitism, though the show’s first preview, on Feb. 21, was greeted by a small gaggle of neo-Nazi demonstrators.What struck me even more vividly in this well-judged and timely revival is the quick path hysteria has always burned through the American spirit if fanned by media, politicians and prejudice of any kind. When a chorus of white Georgians chants “hang ’im, hang ’im, make him pay,” the words can’t help but echo uncomfortably in the post-Jan. 6 air. And another song, a prayer for a return of the day when “the Southland was free,” sounds a lot like current talk of a second secession.Our historical wounds never really heal over. Though Frank’s death sentence was commuted, he was killed anyway and, as “Parade” points out, never exonerated. That case is ongoing.ParadeThrough Aug. 6 at the Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; paradebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Ben Platt to Lead ‘Parade’ Revival on Broadway This Season

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      The musical’s exploration of antisemitism is timely, with rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond.Ben Platt, the Tony-winning star of “Dear Evan Hansen,” will return to Broadway next month to lead the cast in a revival of “Parade,” a musical about an early-20th-century lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia.The revival, directed by Michael Arden (a two-time Tony nominee, for revivals of “Once on This Island” and “Spring Awakening”), had a seven-performance run at New York City Center last fall. Platt plays Leo Frank, a factory boss convicted of killing a young girl in a case tainted by antisemitism; Micaela Diamond, who previously played the youngest version of the title character in “The Cher Show” on Broadway, will co-star as Frank’s wife, Lucille.The show, with songs by Jason Robert Brown and a book by Alfred Uhry and co-conceived by Hal Prince, had a brief run on Broadway that opened in 1998; it was commercially unsuccessful, but won Tony Awards for both book and score. The history it depicts is real: Frank was convicted in 1913, lynched in 1915 (at age 31), and in 1986 he was posthumously pardoned.The musical’s exploration of antisemitism has made it more timely now, when there is rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond. The City Center production garnered uniformly strong reviews: in The New York Times, Juan A. Ramírez called it “the best-sung musical in many a New York season.”The “Parade” revival will begin previews Feb. 21 and open March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, where the musical “Almost Famous” closed on Sunday. The “Parade” production is planning a short run, to Aug. 6.The revival is being produced by Seaview, a company created by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea that previously produced “Slave Play” and “POTUS,” and Ambassador Theater Group, a large British theater company that operates two Broadway houses (the Hudson and the Lyric) and also produces shows. More

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      in Music

      Review: In ‘Almost Famous,’ the Heart of Rock ’n’ Roll Flatlines

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      Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film, set in the world of bands and groupies, does not survive its Broadway musical transplant.At its best, rock ’n’ roll is “a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb” — or so decrees Lester Bangs, a character in the new musical “Almost Famous.”Alas, the show, which opened on Broadway on Thursday, gets the wrong part of that formula right. Though celebrating the rock world of 1973, when the real Lester Bangs was the field’s most influential critic, “Almost Famous” is neither glorious nor righteous. It barely even has a form.That leaves dumb, and I’m sorry to say that despite the intelligence of the 2000 movie on which it’s based, and the track record of its creators, the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been. In retelling the story of a 15-year-old who gets sucked prematurely into the world of bands and groupies and roadies and drugs, it lands instead in a mystifying muddle, occasionally diverting but never affecting.It needn’t have been that way; the source material is rich. But perhaps because the story is semi-autobiographical, Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed the movie, apparently saw little reason to rethink it for the stage. The 15-year-old, William Miller (Casey Likes), still sets out, under the tutelage of Bangs (Rob Colletti), to be a rock journalist. When Rolling Stone, thinking he is much older, assigns him to cover a middling band called Stillwater — a composite of several groups Crowe actually toured with — William is torn between Bangs’s warning not to befriend his subjects and his own craving to be cool.But musical theater is a radically different beast from film, let alone life, and Crowe, working with the composer and co-lyricist, Tom Kitt, and the director Jeremy Herrin, does not seem to have accounted for that. The screenplay limited itself to William’s point of view, revealing the other main characters — especially Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond, and his muse, Penny Lane — through the boy’s adoring eyes. William himself was characterized almost entirely by the act of watching, which was sufficient and even necessary to Crowe’s purposes.Solea Pfeiffer as Penny Lane, with Likes’s William. The Broadway show, our critic writes, reduces the story to little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Stillwater’s frontman, Russell Hammond.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical can’t work that way. If he’s going to sing — and if he’s the protagonist he has to — William must have something worth singing about. But Crowe and Kitt have given him only one real solo, the excellent “No Friends,” which is engaging because it grapples with a real conflict the boy faces. One is not enough, and though Likes, making his Broadway debut at 20, is appealing in the role and delivers when given the chance, there’s a hole at the center of the story that no amount of stage business can disguise.Not that Herrin doesn’t try. “Almost Famous” is one of the busiest book musicals I can recall, the stage so constantly and minutely activated (with choreography by Sarah O’Gleby) that it soon seems as flat and futile as an ant farm. Big moments, like Hammond’s acid-fueled dive from the roof of a house into a swimming pool, barely register; the settings by Derek McLane are resolutely unspectacular. And even in ordinary moments, filled with overdrawn caricatures slamming into one another, it’s often difficult to locate the important information amid all the empty industry.The same underwhelming overload hampers the music, which is obviously a bigger problem for a musical. Of the astounding 30 numbers listed in the program, only seven are what I’d call real theater songs. They are useful in establishing William’s overprotective mother (tartly played by Anika Larsen) and, in “Morocco,” the show’s best tune, Solea Pfeiffer’s dreamy but slippery Penny. “The Night-Time Sky’s Got Nothing on You,” a duet for her and Russell (Chris Wood), sounds, as it should, like an actual love song of the era, but for once with lyrics that trace a theatrical arc.Unfortunately, most of the rest of the songs are fragments, reprises or ensemble numbers so spliced with dialogue and served up in small bits as to nullify their expressive value. Some of them might be quite nice — Kitt’s melodies are never uninteresting — if they could just be sung through.But the show’s biggest musical problem comes from the fact that an unmanageably large proportion of its songs, perhaps a third, are covers. Originally made famous by the likes of the Allman Brothers Band, Deep Purple, Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin, these are performed diegetically, in whole or in part, in concert or backstage scenes.The use of covers made sense in the realistic format of the movie, where they add granular texture to William’s love affair with the world he was watching. But in the fundamentally surreal world of a musical, familiar pop tunes are like junk food, providing a ping of stimulation with no nutrition. Ending the first act with the company singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” — staged for our pleasure, not William’s — thus seems like a cheat and a sop.Foreground from left: Likes (kneeling), Brandon Contreras, Chris Wood and Drew Gehling in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical is not, ideally, a singalong. Nor is it a tone poem, in which it might be sufficient for songs simply to create a mood and please the ear. (At least the ones here do please the ear; they are for the most part well performed, if rarely with any special charisma.) Even the best of recent jukebox musicals have demonstrated the form’s inherent pitfalls in the process of overcoming them; the worst have demonstrated its bankruptcy. So why did the producers and the creative team of “Almost Famous” fall at least partway into the same traps?I can only conclude that they wanted to hedge their bets on material that as originally conceived seemed commercially dangerous. A quiet, personal look at the way a loud, popular medium inflates and then punctures private dreams may not have seemed very Broadway.And yet that’s exactly what coming to Broadway — a loud, popular medium if ever there was one — has done to “Almost Famous.” The workaround reduces the story to a far more conventional one, little more than a love triangle linking William, Penny and Russell. With no broader implications to give it gravitas, no real investigation of the way the rock revolution altered our concepts of celebrity, it floats away into the jukebox ether.If you believe that Lester Bangs’s precept applies equally to musicals — and it’s true that many fine ones are gloriously and righteously dumb — you might not mind that. But if you care about the form, you may wish “Almost Famous” had aimed (as its Stevie Wonder cover urges) for higher ground.Almost FamousAt the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; almostfamousthemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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

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      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