More is Company
I approach a musical much as I approach a play. I don't see it as musical theatre performers versus legitimate performers. I want us all in the same playground at the same time. Then we ask the audience to join us, too--to really listen. That's something modern audiences are not very often asked to do. Everything is pushed at them rather than, "Come in! Come ’round our fireside."
That's John Doyle (the innovative director who fuses stage and orchestra pit by having actors double as cellists) addressing the schism that has grown between plays in which people talk and plays in which people sing as much as talk. Admirably, and with the credibility of an accomplished artist, he wants to bypass conventions that have kept musical theater the most conservative of the performing arts. He wants a performance to be more than a series of carnival acts that keep an audience distracted. He wants the world of a play to emerge from the unified efforts of an ensemble rather than a blend of stars, eye-grabbing sets and gorgeous costumes. In short, he wants a radical break with tradition, and wants to bring audiences with him. This might not be unwelcome, but he faces a major obstacle: The books of most musicals are obstinately light-weight.
A case in point is Doyle's recent move to strip Stephen Sondheim's Company down to a raw, beating core. Courageous, perhaps, but dissecting one of the hollow, translucent cubes that occupy the stage might have yielded as much. After thirty-six years, George Furth's book remains a series of half-amusing vignettes that adequately stitch Sondheim's far wittier, harmonically lustrous songs and the confused yearning they capture. Furth's scenes are inoffensive when played with punch and gotten through quickly. But Doyle wants more from them. His actors speak at a deliberative, savouring pace, as if every line were pregnant with Chekhovian understatement. Since they aren't, the scenes feel lethargic, their dated hipness seems all the more strained, and the songs have to launch entirely on their own.
I say this with unbated admiration for Doyle's aesthetic. Having his cast create the music is more than a gimmick, and of a piece with his ridding the stage of everything but a few metaphorically resonant set pieces. It's a commitment to making actor and text the center of a performance, and to eliminating all barriers to an audience's encounter with them.
But if Doyle wants audiences to more actively engage with his work, a form conceived first and foremost as a happy distraction may not be consistently fertile enough to seem worth their concentrated effort. Last year's Doyle-directed Sweeney Todd notwithstanding, it's a reality even Sondheim can't usually escape from.
Posted by Scott Reynolds at February 3, 2007 11:37 PM
