COMPANY
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In none of this, as barbed and bitter as George Furth’s script often gets, is there any questioning of the institution of marriage itself; even such alternatives as divorce and unofficial cohabitation are seen as minor variations on the real thing. As the exploratory 70s have passed into the retro-traditional 80s, Company’s conservatism seems as comfortably familiar as the all-American horniness of South Pacific or the good-natured bickering of Roseanne–and very much at home in the plush confines of the suburban Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace theater. That comfortableness, though, has not come without compromises.
Some of these compromises are bizarrely blatant: for instance, the alteration of a scene in which Robert and two friends, David and Jenny, hold their own private pot party. Apparently an audience that laughed tolerantly at scene after scene depicting destructive dependency on food, alcohol, tranquilizers, and cigarettes thought marijuana a bit much; the pot has been changed to tequila because the theater received numerous complaints during previews.
Yet Sivak and the singers need to address certain rhythmical problems. The men’s trio “Sorry, Grateful,” with its gentle tango figures, is particularly sloppy. Part of the trouble may be bad acoustics; Bill Wood’s sound levels were very inconsistent the night I attended.
