Stephen Sondheim’s Company (1970)
and D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company (1970) and Town Bloody Hall (1979)
In two previous posts, I’ve discussed music that might be grouped together in an “American Divorce Songbook.” The first was the poignant ex-spouses’ song “Thanks for the Memory,” which became Bob Hope’s theme song and was introduced to audiences by Hope and Shirley Ross in the movie The Big Broadcast of 1938. The second post pointed to the string of hit songs about divorce and relationship-failure written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David beginning in the early 1960s, and that were frequently used in movies too.
A third entry is Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company. Based on a disjointed group of unproduced one-acts by George Furth, Company was one of Sondheim’s first major Broadway productions as both lyricist and composer. Sondheim took Furth’s snapshots of various couples and then created a single character, the bachelor Robert, as the through-line who witnesses their relationship struggles while weighing his own fear of and capacity for marriage.
Sondheim has remarked on what he found the biggest challenge of the project:
I knew almost nothing about the primary subject. I had never married, or even been in a long-term relationship. Of course, I hadn’t known anything about 1929 Brooklyn or New York street gangs or ancient Rome either, but in those other shows [Saturday Night, West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum], I’d had scripts to guide me and plots to animate. Here was the unknown Kingdom of Marriage and I was stuck with making enough and varied comments on it to fill an evening, since there were neither stories to tell nor characters who needed fleshing out in song. How could I write about relationships (a buzzword in the sixties) without merely reiterating the received wisdom I’d gleaned from plays and movies and sitcoms?
Not only that, but Sondheim and Furth were both gay, with an outsider’s perspective on the “Kingdom of Marriage” that could at times offer detached insight, but just as easily devolve into cynicism. (Think of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Indeed, many have seen the character of Robert as a gay man moving through the straight world, something Sondheim repeatedly denied, though he acknowledged that the character “has often been accused by the show’s detractors of being a cypher, a void at the heart of the piece.”
To many critics, the resulting show felt static and heartless when it was first produced, and since. I’ve never seen the show staged, except for bits of the filmed 2011 Lincoln Hall production with Neil Patrick Harris as Robert (resurfacing the gay subtext) and an audience fawning loudly over the celebrity performers. What I saw confirmed for me that a dramatic stage production mostly distracts from what is by itself a small masterpiece of American songwriting, a song cycle that doesn’t need to be performed as a play.
Company generates its meaning and pathos not from any narrative or dramatic development, but from the intelligence and acerbity of Sondheim’s lyrics and music. Sondheim took the late 1960s sense of marriage’s collapse and wrung bittersweet pleasure from it:
It’s the little things you share together,
Swear together,
Wear together,
That make perfect relationships,
Neighbors you annoy together,
Children you destroy together,
That keep marriage intact.It’s not so hard to be married
When two maneuver as one.
It’s not so hard to be married,
And, Jesus Christ, is it fun.
Above: “The Little Things You Do Together” from D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company
Sondheim admitted that the show’s upbeat ending, in which all of Robert’s friends support his decision to enter into a relationship, was dictated by the need to avoid ending on a sad note, and that it ran the risk of being “unearned and pandering.” As it is, “Being Alive” is hardly a triumphal paean to the joy of marriage, but a ruthlessly realistic and hard-bitten acknowledgement that being human involves vulnerability and pain.
Reflecting on the musical, Sondheim quotes Chekhov: “If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.” Sondheim then writes: “Luckily, I didn’t come across that quote till long after Company had been produced. Chekhov said in seven words what it took George and me two years and two and a half hours to say less profoundly.”
Of course, this gutting of marriage does not make Company a divorce musical. What secures its place in the Great American Divorce Songbook is a movie made half a century later. Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) is a divorce film, with Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as splitting spouses, based in part on Baumbach’s own divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh. Marriage Story features two numbers from Company, “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” sung by Johansson, Julie Hagerty, and Merritt Wever, and the Sondheim finale “Being Alive,” sung by Driver:
Company was already connected with a different sort of film. The great documentarist D. A. Pennebaker observed the marathon recording of the original cast album and released his chronicle as the fifty-three minute movie Original Cast Album: Company. It is always interesting watching professionals at work, whatever the kind of work. Pennebaker’s documentary allows a look at the producers and technicians, the actors, and Sondheim as composer, as they create what really is the definitive version of the musical—confirming that it is primarily a work of song to be listened to, not a drama to be staged.
A vastly more consequential Pennebaker film for the subject of marriage and divorce and relations between men and women more generally is his extraordinary Town Bloody Hall, which was filmed in 1971 but released in 1979 with Pennebaker’s wife Chris Hegedus credited as co-director. This is a documentary recording of the so-called “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” a debate-cum-happening between Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling, Jill Johnston, and Jacqueline Ceballos held before a packed audience in New York City on April 30, 1971. Audience members who speak up during the Q & A at the end include Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, and Betty Friedan.
Mailer had just published “The Prisoner of Sex,” his antagonistic yet fascinated meditation on women’s liberation, in the Atlantic; it would soon appear as a book. The four female panelists were evidently intended to oversee a ritual dismemberment. The film captures the charged and giddy atmosphere in the hall. Heckling and walkouts occur from the start. Mailer is of course a swaggering and narcissistic monster, who alternately provokes the audience and complains of being misunderstood, and spits a “cunty” when someone from the audience gets loud.
And yet. What strikes one watching the film today is that Mailer, while a decidedly imperfect vessel, poses serious questions about feminism that were answered neither then nor five decades later. Mailer wants to know what what happens when a society-wide ideological renegotiation of sex and gender roles runs into the realities of biology. He asks what the world after the revolution will look like, and whether it will be more humane or less.
In truth, we have a glimpse of the answers already in the film. While Ceballos delivers fundraising boilerplate, Trilling tries to hold onto the strands of a liberal humanism, and Greer is a vamping Lenin who dismisses any hesitations about the righteousness of the revolution as irrelevant and reactionary, Johnston refuses to give up the podium when her stream-of-consciousness goes overtime and then, joined by two other women, starts rolling around on the stage in an impromptu lesbian love-in.
You can chalk it all up to counter-cultural antics, but we are still living today with their revolution.