Let's begin with COMPANY. This marked the fourth - and obviously, last - time I've seen the actor-musician revival. As others on ATC have already attested, the audience was totally electric, though I sensed that maybe half of it was made up of a tourist crowd that had yet to see the show.
A cell phone rang once - and it could not have been in a worse moment - immediately following the tail end of THE LADIES WHO LUNCH, during the long pause sequence.
Compared with other times I've seen it, I felt like John Doyle's staging of the book finally worked for me. I accepted some of his odder staging choices - like having Harry and Sarah fight in Act One while facing in different directions - under the consideration that all of this is still taking place in Bobby's memories, and we're looking on these memories via his hand in a past sensory vision.
Raul's curtain speech lasted maybe ten minutes. He discussed how when he began working on the show, he considered COMPANY to be a good show, but not a masterpiece, and that - of course - he now considers it the latter. He acknowledged that Sondheim was not in the audience, that he saw the show again on Wednesday, and that he is now in Australia for a different production of COMPANY.
In Raul's best moment, he invited the show's understudies onstage. In his oddest moment, he declared that we are now living in another golden age of musical theater. Why? Because the show's producer was willing to let the show live on through the winter to the present in spite of its half full houses - and apparently beause, as Raul saw it, so many different kinds of shows can be on Broadway at once, or something to that sentiment.
Well, Raul, how could we be living in a golden age when the kind of Broadway environment which you were praising is the same one where your great revival couldn't survive financially? Just a thought...
I AND ALBERT, the Charles Strouse-Lee Adams musical about Queen Victoria that received a London production in the 70s but never premiered at all in the US, received a York Theatre reading this weekend starring Nancy Anderson, with a dozen person ensemble portraying dozens and dozens and dozens of small roles. Act One was pretty great, with some solid numbers, and Act Two it just collapsed, essentially thanks to an awkward book setup.
Still, this was a great choice for the York's MUFTI reading series, breathing life to a show that otherwise we'd never have heard of. It also felt quite different from other MUFTI shows we've seen recently, where an older show we're probably familiar with gets a reading with two-person instrumentation. Here was a show that was designed to be huge - but because nearly no one in the audience was familiar with it, we really had no basis of comparison in terms of orchestra size or set design.
And as for HAIR, I saw this weekend long non-Equity revival at the Neighborhood Playhouse on 54th Street, where I had never been before. The cast was made up primarily of Neighborhood Playhouse students and alumni. Since they did not cut a single number from the score - they even did "Dead End" and "The Bed" - it ran three hours. Luckily, it was a very good production. And the more I think about it, it was eerily authentic. Why? Because HAIR is not meant to be a polished show. It's supposed to be a happening, an Off-Off-Broadway piece of alternative theater, though once on Broadway. Here was a production in a small intimate space, where most of the cast was not vocally outstanding, but totally committed physically and dramatically. It is this kind of authenticity that professional concert productions of HAIR - Actors Fund, Encores - all lack.