Company on Broadway

In general it seems like a good principle to not treat comments anywhere as gospel. I certainly wasn't suggesting people on BWW have any final say.

I was lucky to see the first preview and the final performance. That gave me the chance to see what they worked on and how they changed it.

The show I saw last night was marvelous. Whatever didn't work for me in London, and a lot of it did, and it's very hard for me to pinpoint what didn't work, was flipped over its head last night.

The similarities: physically, the production is mainly the same. There might have been some dance movement changes, though I am not absolutely too sure. One specific change is during Sarah and Harry's scene, they both consume their vices rather differently than they did in London. In terms of physical differences, basically everyone has a different costume than the London production, even LuPone's. Another Hundred People has been completely rethought of it. There's no longer a train carriage. Human size letters spelling out COMPANY are now shifted across the stage, with the commuters whizzing in and out of them. The letters also work as a park bench or a seat in a bar lounge to create different scenes during the vignettes with the men that cut through the song.

Thematically, there's something clearer about how this is now set in a corner of Bobbi's mind, or in a dream or an alternative dimension of New York City. More so than ever, Bobbi is now an outsider looking in, and there are new transitions that transpose her from one location to another. Having recently moved to New York, this production truly captures the complexities of navigating the city, in a certain age, trying to negotiate love, relationships and friendships.

The cast really makes this production. Everyone worked from the bottom up to reinvent these characters. Though I've seen one show on both sides of the Atlantic, and though actors bring their own stamp to the role, they normally work off the originals' template. The charactes here absolutely have no resemblance to the original London cast, except Matt Doyle-who was good-but works off of Jonathan Bailey's original Jamie.

Then comes Katrina Lenk who is certainly nothing like Rosalie Craig. Rosalie gave a solid earnest production as a square Ameican girl. There's nothing square about Lenk, and nor could you say she's American per se. My reading of her was of an expatriate New Yorker..an international type, who is from everywhere and nowhere, who just found herself in New York and called it home. Her "un-Americanness" if you will makes her so alluring, and reinforces her outsider status, which explains her inability to full engage or connect to her friends, and their facination with her enigma. Her voice is broken and when she sings, she's sounds like a modern day European chanteuse. Even though her singing is the antithesis of musical theatre projection, that becomes a pesonality trait that works in favor of the character.

Elliot (who was in the audience) mounted a fantastic production in London, but this production takes it to an absolutely new level. Would love to see it again.