Company

In fairness, this has been a pretty common complaint about Bobby/Bobbie's character since the '70s. S/he's kinda cold and doesn't display much personality, cipher is a very valid word for the way the role has been written.

To be fair, to a greater or lesser extent that has been a problem with every single iteration of this particular show since the beginning (the single exception from the various productions I've seen: Daniel Evans in a revival at the Crucible a few years ago, but that was a much darker interpretation of the show and the role than this one is. Evans's Bobby was more or less on the verge of a breakdown, and the thought of being alone with his own thoughts almost gave him a panic attack). Certainly it was a recurring complaint in the reviews for the original Broadway production. Bobby - or Bobbie - is less colourfully drawn than the characters in the various vignettes; he/she has two or three great songs ('Marry Me a Little', originally written for the 'Being Alive' slot, was shoehorned into the end of the first act in a script revision in the mid-1990s and doesn't sit very well there, although I thought Rosalie Craig made more sense of it than Adrian Lester did; Evans is the only person I've seen make it work completely), but the funniest, most memorable material goes to the various supporting characters, and nearly all of it is a knockout in this production. Craig was perfectly good, I thought, and it worked for her, and she sang very well indeed - but the role was conceived as the show's normative core, and the supporting characters are almost all comic caricatures because the show began as a series of sketches about married couples and George Furth invented Bobby as a device to link the sketches together.

These days 'Happily Ever After', the song 'Being Alive' replaced - and which replaced 'Marry Me a Little' when the show was being written - might be less off-putting than it was in 1970. It's certainly a stronger, angrier statement than 'Being Alive'; there's more room for interpretation in it, though, and you with different acting choices it could be taken as either pro-marriage or very, very anti, and they wanted a more affirmative ending. In 1970, 'Being Alive' was probably the correct choice - or at least, the correct choice for a commercial production on Broadway (it was never a sold-out Big Hit but it ran twenty months or so and turned a small profit); now, maybe, you could get away with a song with more of an edge to it, although maybe 'Happily Ever After' is still a step too far:

With big Sondheim songs like Being Alive, there is the surface character connection but then a much deeper connection between the song and the listener. Taken on its own Being Alive is a good summation of Bobby(ie) at that moment in their life. On a wider canvas, however, the similarity or otherwise to the listener's own experience brings a much more profound depth. In essence we are not sorry/grateful for Bobby(ie) but sorry/grateful for ourselves. That's the real emotional hit.

A song of his that really hits home for me is 'Move On' from Sunday in the Park With George. I doubt it's going to be many people's 'go to' Sondheim song but the resonance for me is profound and therefore the emotion somewhat overwhelming.

When people say that Sondheim doesn't write standalone songs I disagree; maybe not in the way that people expect but in a more targeted way.

"YASS QUEEN DO IT AGAIN"

would be most of our responses, probably

What does her drinking whisky have to do with gender or her being "girlie"?
She's a 35 year old woman, questioning her life in terms of her relationship/un-married status whilst looking at the relationships of her friends, which, in my view at least, is very comparable to Bridget Jones/SITC.
What was it about the production or character that made you "not get the girlie approach"?



And what do you class as "girlie"? What makes a show have a "girlie approach"?