Everyone Needs Company! A Review of This Year's Spring Musical

 Nora Penuela ‘29

The cover for the original Broadway cast recording of Company, via Spotify

From Thursday, Feb. 26 to Saturday, Feb. 28, this year’s Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) Theatre Spring Musical was unveiled and performed in the Suzanne Werner Wright Theatre. This year’s Spring Musical was Company, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by George Furth. At Sarah Lawrence, it was directed by the lovely Lauren Reinhard. 

According to the director’s note by our fabulous Lauren, Company started in the late 1960s as a compilation of short plays that explored “the intricacies of modern marriage.” When famous composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim became a part of the book-to-musical project, he decided to stray away from a typical, chronological plot, to present this story from an external perspective. Company is a concept musical that first performed on Broadway in 1970, that tells a story of five different couples, all with their own issues, eccentricities and experiences with marriage—all told from their mutual friend: Bobby. Bobby reflects on marriage and why, on his 35th birthday, he himself is not married. In modern slang, one could summarize Company as the musical about the token single friend.

After the Friday 7 p.m. show, Reinhard gave a quick lesson on the history of Company. She talked about how at first, Company’s non-linear story telling was very new at the time, as was the overall idea of a concept musical. What made the show a success, despite the new format, was that audiences hooked onto something that they did know and were familiar with: marriage. Despite being written in an external view from Bobby’s perspective, the audience made the show about his friends, the five married couples because that was what they understood. According to Diep Tran, the author of the New York Theatre Guide’s “Everything you need to know about ‘Company’ on Broadway,” after premiering, the musical would come to be nominated for 14 Tony Awards and walked away with six.  

 In 2006, the second Broadway revival of the hit musical came to the stage. However, it had changed, and not in a way that some would expect. The story stayed the same, but what did change was the audience. Reinhard puts it perfectly in her director’s note, saying, “What’s most fascinating about Company is how it has evolved, not through rewrites, but through the changing perspectives of its audiences.” In this second revival, audiences saw Company and focused on Bobby, rather than the married couples. In the newest revival of Company, there was an actual change to the story. They made Bobby into Bobbie, a heterosexual female character. 

This is where SLC comes in. As stated before, the musical Company changed as the audience changed. In that spirit, Reinhard stated that under her direction she took Company under a queer lens, “serving the population” of Sarah Lawrence. Reinhard also approached the query (no pun intended) of who gets to have these conversations about marriage. This created a version of Company shown from the perspective of Bobby, a queer woman. 

The role of Bobby was played by Marcella Cincotta ’26, a senior Theatre Third here at SLC, who delivered a killer performance. In a short interview after Friday’s 7 pm show, she reflected that “addressing queerness in the 60s” was shown in a multitude of ways throughout the show. She referenced the character Kathy, one of Bobby’s girlfriends, in a scene where she tells Bobby that she is no longer an option for her, saying that she wants something “real,” which in her eyes, was a husband. Cincotta reflected on how a lack of marriage or being perceived differently as a queer woman, is addressed, and that included reflecting on which characters would be “cool” with her queerness. Even after the show, Jessie Grimes ’29 commented that a scene was actually eliminated from this SLC’s version of the show. In the original Company the character Peter, the husband in one of the couples, actually offers Bobby a chance to sleep with him. Grimes speculated that this was because in SLC’s version this scene would have translated to a gay man asking a gay woman to sleep with him, the opposite of what Reinhard was trying to achieve in this performance.  

This performance of Company was truly spectacular. There is nothing like an SLC musical to bring you back from the stresses of college. Thank you to the amazing cast and crew for this performance and for a truly great evening. There was so much thought put into this show, from the incredible performances of the cast to the attention to detail on the set. This year’s musical performance of Company was the definition of success. Congratulations!