The programme is under seat I 11 where I left it, so I can only note that
Bobby was Paul Bunn and there was a band consisting of two keyboards,
percussion and bass.

The Tower Theatre is home to the Tavistock Repertory Company, which seems
to do 18-20 productions a year there, mainly repertory theatre standards,
though this is where Return to the forbidden planet was on in London. The
company started in Bloomsbury in 1932, and later moved to Islington. The
theatre was converted from the community hall for the Duke of Northampton's
estate workers, and remodelled with raking seats in the mid 1960s. It seats
about 150. Fifteen singers and two amplified keyboards were often far too
much sound for the space in this production.

The production was smooth, with a neat set based on a platform around the
stage with steps down and stylized flats of the city slightly marred by the
head of the statue of Liberty to remind us that this is Manhattan. There
was some neat choreography in the show numbers. The costumes were variously
retro (Marta in painful miniskirt, Joanne and Cathy in variant little black
dresses), but the script was somewhat updated, with a reference to the
nineties as the decade of rebellion (really?) and Prozac substituted for
Valium, rather incongruously when the talk is so late 1960s.

There were no CVs in the programme that I lost, so I couldn't be sure
whether the company is semi-professional or amateur. The performances
varied from pretty good to sort of all right, but the whole show hung
together effectively. Paul Bunn was vulnerable, charming and slightly
opaque as Bobby. He was stronger on the words than the music, but clearly
knew what he was doing with his big numbers, Happy/Grateful, Marry me a
little and Being alive. Amy was a sort of inverted Miss Adelaide, full of
showgirl squeaks but terrified of getting married. Joanne seemed to save
everything for Ladies who lunch, which worked well. April was nearly a
comic tour-de-force of stupidity. There were the usual insecure accents,
especially Susan's (generic Southern) and April's and Paul's (non-existent)
but a good general sense of character.

I felt there was a general lack of incisiveness and precision in the
performance. The jokes came over, but the vaudeville routines, though
energetic, didn't quite have the ironic edge, and the painful realistic
bits weren't painful enough. There was no sense of why Sarah suddenly gave
up being high, for example. And it was difficult to tell whether the
couples were really happy or miserable -- the dialectic tended to continue
as "on the one hand, on the other" rather than evolving into a more complex
emotional whole.

Maybe a problem for the performers was that this sort of material, even
though it's still full of insight, has been thoroughly appropriated by
television sitcoms and soaps. No matter how much you get inside it, it
sounds familiar already. (Not that there's anything wrong with sitcoms and
soaps -- the misery and mutual need of Steptoe and Son, and the neurotic
domesticity of Bewitched, are as good as anything written for the stage in
the 1960s, and as well acted.) And Bobby is closely related to Woody
Allen's film persona, from around Play it again Sam to Hannah and her
sisters at least, and especially to Isaac in Manhattan. Company is really a
kind of verismo operetta, but the only-slightly-too-clever-to-be-real
dialogue and self analysis of the characters seems these days to belong to
the hyper-realism of film or television.

It was quite strange for me to see Company all through after all these
years. When I was a teenager, in the first half of the 1970s, Sondheim's
songs (Barcelona was a special favorite, replaced by Send in the clowns)
seemed to embody the height of self-awareness and adult emotional
complexity. One reason I never got to see a complete Sondheim show live was
that when I tried to persuade my theatre-going friends to go, it ended up
in thoroughly teenage rows because they said I was prematurely middle-aged.
But now most of the characters seem like teenagers in co-dependent
relationships who say predictable things in a familiar dialect that
nevertheless carry enormous emotional weight for them. In a way, the mood
is not that far from Saturday night.

The adult aspect of the show of course is that everything is distanced. The
speech-like musical settings reflect subjective and generally
self-deceiving, or at least, misunderstanding, inner monologues or
incomprehending dialogues, while the show numbers reflect something more
like objective truth.