Company

Great debate going

To me, you need to remove the word Marriage from the script (or mostly remove it) and replace it with Relationships - lots of folk are scared of settling down. Then would Company be upto date?! ... Or that or therabouts ...

I hope there are lots of Mallardonistas who boycott it because they deny its contemporaneity. Then the rest of us will find it much easier to get better tickets.

Very interesting to read the debate. FWIW, I'm with mallardo on this one.

Even without the gender-swapping, I find the whole idea of a "contemporary" Company to be extremely problematic.  I saw a local L.A. production a couple years ago which was well-sung and -acted, but which transported the action to the present day (Bobby played Xbox, used a cellphone, etc.).  It just didn't work. And it wasn't only due to the "marriage" issue.

Company comes from a time when you got busy signals, when people had answering services -- staffed by real people! -- to take and deliver messages.  It was a time when smoking marijuana was still slightly scandalous, and zombies were cold, dead things and not flesh-chomping corpses. A time of "Scrabble on Sundays", the Kama Sutra, Sazarac Slings, and Vodka Stingers.  (Thank goodness Boeing still makes jets or they'd really be in trouble.)

These cultural references woven into the piece -- but the problem goes both ways. How do you have a "contemporary" show about modern relationships without reference to cellphones, texting, social media? Nowadays, your friends wouldn't sing "Have I Got a Girl for You"; they'd just make sure you had the appropriate apps on your iPhone.

    And they meet through Tinder and the Facebook friends 
    Who they never know.
    Will you pick me up, or do I Uber there,
    Or shall we let it go?
    Did you get my voicemail 'cause I looked in vain?
    Can we check on Google Tuesday if it's gonna rain?
    Look, I'll text you in the morning or my Twitter will explain.
    And another thousand people just got off of the train...

I think there's still a lot of value to be found in Company but would much rather see a production that embraces its era rather than try to deny it.

Fab news, Drew is amazing!

It still works as a period piece. I'm young and I don't even make phone calls. Also most of my friends aren't married nor are we rushing to, some prefer to be single and have lots of dates and one night stands.

I didn't understand half the references in Ladies who Lunch. Also alcoholism isn't cool any more, most of the kind of class portrayed in Company are probably on party drugs and cocaine.

I seem to remember Adrian Lester’s Robert snorting the white stuff in the Donmar production 20 years ago. My feeling is that unless you’re going to change the lyrics (my service will explain, vodka stinger, Mahjong, Sazerac Slings), change the attitudes to gays, and rewrite the opening “phone tone” guitar riff you’re better off setting it in 1970 than any other time.

Now that Heisenberg's all ready to go, I don't imagine this is as "up in the air" as it may have seemed anymore. I'm presuming Elliott & Harper are keeping the Wyndham's for the year or so, and now it's just a matter of patiently waiting.

And the second show from Elliott & Harper is at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

I think the gender bending approach could work, after all women are still pressured to marry, pop children, in fact do that AND have a career. But I think the ending could be counterproductive and problematic if at the end Bobby still thinks she's only complete by shaking up with a dude.

The gay version works too, and I believe it was workshopped at NYU with Sondheim in attendance but he shut it down. That totally works too with gay communities becoming more and more heteronormative, and I think gay male Bobby wanting to shack up with a dude after sleeping around with so many flings in the past is slightly less problematic.

Are we talking the version that we all know, the gender swapping one or the gay version?

Personally, I prefer the the version that we all know.