for the record
by Douglas Messerli
D. A. Pennebaker (director) Original Cast Album: Company / 1970 [documentary]
Yesterday, exhausted from several days of
watching very intense LGBTQ feature films, I awarded myself the opportunity of
viewing the noted documentarian filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast
Album: Company. The film was to have been the first in a series of such
cast recordings, and received excellent reviews; the producers, however, in the
meantime had been hired by MGM, and the series, most sadly, never occurred.
We
have only this “pilot” work, but what a memorable film it is! Criterion, which
has re-released the film, most recently with commentary by critic Frank Rich,
composer/lyricist Steven Sondheim, and Elaine Stritch, and others, listed it
among their LGBTQ films; so it seemed to offer the perfect excuse for me to
rush back into the arms of Broadway theater. Yet there is little outwardly
“gay” in this production. Indeed, except for composer/lyricist Sondheim and the
musical librettist George Furth, I don’t know of another artist in the work who
is openly gay.
The
original cast album was recorded just a few weeks after the show’s opening as
most such albums are, when Jones had not yet left company which he would
shortly after due to the stress of his divorce proceedings with his then wife
Mae Entwisle after nearly 17 years of marriage. Although Jones performs a
remarkable couple of takes of the third act solo “Being Alive” and a quite
touching version of “Barcelona” with Susan Browning—Sondheim even arguing that
not only was that performance of “Being Alive” his best but that no one did it
better*—that actor, who later became a born-again Christian, has never been one
of my favorite performers.
Now if the film had featured the terribly gifted but unfairly overlooked
Larry Kert (the original Tony on Broadway’s West Side Story) who
replaced Jones soon after, that would have truly made it a “gay film.”
Kert was a particular target of the notoriously mean-spirited Jerome
Robbins who kept calling him a “faggot” throughout rehearsals, despite the fact
that Robbins and most of the male dancers were also gay; obviously Kert didn’t
even attempt to hide his gay sexuality. He died, as so very many of the
greatest talents of the time, of AIDS in 1991, leaving behind his lover, Bill
Pullen.
Only
later, in England, did they dub in Kert’s performances for Jones’ on the
recording. But the one we hear in this film is Jones as the central character,
“Bobby, baby, bubbie,” beloved by all but in love with no one until he sings
the two songs noted above. Although one of his male friends suggests a possible
gay relationship with him in the musical, that conversation was, of course, not
among this album of songs.
Although the musical opened to some quite negative reviews, and, early
on, was in danger of closing, it eventually ran for a long run of 690
performances, finally fully introducing Sondheim in Broadway as a significant
composer, not just a lyricist, who would soon change the very nature of the
medium through his introduction of darker, more complex themes, music, and
lyrics that those than the musical theater productions that came before.
One
of the most difficult songs to perform is “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,”
sung by Donna McKechnie, Susan Browning, and Pamela Myers, which, with its
close harmonies and fast- talking lyrics, is easy to flub. We see this song,
which surprised even a long-time pro like Thomas Z. Shepard, the record
producer, in its complexities, performed several times before they get it
right.
Similarly, and even more difficult to perform is the brilliant patter
song “Getting Married Today,” sung by Beth Howland. This tongue-twister is
surely the tour-de-force regarding the combination of simply singing the lyrics
and enunciating them fully enough to have them comprehended, at which amazingly
Howland succeeds. She married Charles Kimbrough, who played Harry in this
production.
And Pamela Myers, in “Another Hundred People,” discovers for the first
time that she has changed an F-sharp to an A of Sondheim’s original score, and
now sings it correctly, Sondheim getting what he wrote down on the record, so
to speak. This song I have always believed intimates some of the chordal
developments and even lyrics of Sondheim’s later Sweeney Todd,
particularly when early in the song she sings the elongated line “It’s a city
of strangers,” with great similarities to Sweeney Todd’s “City on Fire.”
Both serve as cries of the dangers of the urban space which many of Sondheim’s
works celebrate, but with always the Bernstein-like lament for the need to
escape to “a place for us,” free from those dangers. And Company, in
particular is a nearly claustrophobic world in which Bobby cannot even escape
his friends in his deepest most private desires and thoughts until he finally
refuses to attend the celebration for his birthday, and leave the ever-present
“company” behind.
The major piece of this film, however, is its last. After everyone else
has finally left the Columbia Records studio at East 30th Street and Third
Avenue at around 3:00 in the morning, the orchestra, Sondheim, Furth, Shepard,
Hastings and the orchestra remain behind with Elaine Stritch to perform the
final number, “Ladies Who Lunch,” she having given over her earlier scheduled
time to Jones.
Having heard this song sung by Stritch now so many times, I can
recognize almost immediately how tired and stressed the singer is. Sondheim, in
retrospect, suggests in was one of those times where she kept drinking a few
sips of alcohol just give her the courage to continue going on, and by the time
of her song, was drunk enough that she couldn’t live up to the demands of the
song.
The composer insists she first bring down the song into a lower key in
order to not hurt her voice. She sings it lovingly and knowingly, but it’s
“flaccid,” as Shepard puts it, slower than its usual pace, perhaps even a
little better narratively expressed, but without the zest of protestations of
those shallow ladies who try to do everything imaginable to fill in their empty
lives. By the end of the song, even Stritch can hardly “rise, rise, rise” to
full occasion of her narrative dismissal of the lot.
She
sings it again, making it even worse. And again, back in the original key,
attempts to belt it out. We are witnessing the difference between a great
performance and several mediocre ones. If there was ever an example of that
important difference in defining the greatest of both a performer and this
series of performances is revelatory.
At nearly 4:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, they finally tell Stritch to go
home, almost against her protests. They have the orchestra play the piece
without her. And the film ends the next day, as a rested Stritch, made up for
her evening performance, stops by the studio to sing it the way it should be
sung, layering her version over the previous recorded orchestral one. Stritch
seems also a little fearful, even after her performance, that they still may
cut it. But they assure her that everything is now as perfect as any such a
recording can ever be.
As
cameraman Jimmy Desmond states, no one could have imagined that such an event
would be quite so dramatic; and indeed, as Pennebaker agrees, it’s the perfect
film taking only one day and night.
*After writing this essay, I did a comparison
listening to four of the major singers of this song, Dean Jones, Larry Kert,
Raúl Esparza, and Neil Patrick Harris. The results were surprising. Far and
away, the best dramatic version was sung by Dean Jones. Sondheim and others had
been on target in their evaluations. Esparaza was the most dramatic and often
terribly effective, but there was just too much self-consciousness involved
with his performance, and his voice as not as lyrical as was Jones’. Larry Kert
had the very best voice with remarkable clarity, but there was no depth to his
“Being Alive,” which he sung almost as a ballad instead of a discovery of the
true contradictions he was suddenly to terms with. Surprisingly, Neil Patrick
Harris did a commendable version of it, although it was definitely the weakest
of the four. The prettiest version was by yet a fifth singer, John Barrowman,
who sang the role of Bobby at the Kennedy Center. But this was from a song
album and truly is not comparable with a theater production performance; it was
lovely to hear, easy on the ears, and beautiful to listen to, but had next to
nothing to do with theater. There are two illegally photographed versions of
the Kennedy Center performance on YouTube, unbearable to watch and impossible
to listen to. When will people comprehend that such “snapped” performances are
not only a crime but truly are a disservice to the artist.
Los Angeles, September 6, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2023).
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