How Bobby became Bobbie in the gender-reversed revival of ‘Company’
Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” has always had a bobby problem. the show’s protagonist, a noncommittal 35year-old, enjoys his solitary bachelorhood but wonders if it’s time to settle down and get married like all his friends who’ve taken the plunge. the character is often viewed as a cipher. who is this cynical guy really, and why should we care about his plight?
Indeed, tony Award winner marianne elliott at first scoffed at producing partner Chris Harper when he suggested she direct a revival of “Company.” “[bobby] is 35, and that’s young, and he’s got everything going for him — a nice flat in manhattan, lots of friends, a good job, and lots of girlfriends. i just don’t think that’s going to chime with many people nowadays,” elliott says over the phone from the united Kingdom.
So when Harper suggested sometime later that they turn the male protagonist into a female “bobbie,” her mind began swimming with all the possibilities. “it starts to really sing, because it’s then about a woman who is hitting her 35th birthday, and she knows on her birthday the body clock is starting to tick down, and everybody is going to think she should take quite seriously whether she settles down or not, because that affects whether she has children and a family. it becomes much more relevant. it felt vital.”
After persuading sondheim to agree to gender-switch bobby and tweak some of the lyrics, the resulting “Company” revival debuted in London’s west end in 2018 and premiered on broadway in 2021, where it captured five tony Awards, including best musical revival. now, the show’s national tour arrives at the Citizens Opera House April 2-14, presented by broadway in boston. britney Coleman, who was in “Company” on broadway and appeared in “beetlejuice” in boston, stars as bobbie, while Judy mcLane plays her imperious older friend Joanne, who sings the wry anthem to wealthy middle-aged women, “the Ladies who Lunch.”
A groundbreaking concept musical that debuted on broadway in 1970 (af ter a tryout in boston at the shubert), with music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by george furth, “Company” eschewed a conventional plot-driven narrative. instead the show is told in a series of vignettes that follow bobbie as she approaches her birthday party, dates a variety of men, and ping-pongs among her cosmopolitan group of married friends.
The gender-swapping idea struck producer Harper like a lightning bolt. His surrogate twins had just been born prematurely, and as he drove to the hospital every day to visit them in the neonatal intensive care unit, he listened to bobby’s anthem “being Alive” on a loop. the song — in which the character realizes that being alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that he wants to take a risk on love — resonated deeply for Harper at a fraught time. “it was a song that gave me the courage to get through some really scary days,” he says.
As he gazed at his daughter (the other twin is a boy), he wondered to himself: “who are you going to be when you grow up? And then i started thinking about my female friends who have social pressure on them and their own body clock telling them when they can and can’t have a child. it’s such a huge weight.” then the thought hit him: “wouldn’t it be much more interesting if bobby were a woman?”
Elliott, who directed “the Curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” “war Horse,” and the 2017 revival of “Angels in America” on broadway, was skeptical that they’d ever be able to persuade sondheim of such a drastic shift. but Harper was more optimistic. Sondheim wasn’t entirely convinced when they broached the subject with him, but elliott suggested they workshop it with a female bobbie and film it.
During the workshop performance, cameraman who shot the video raved about what he’d just seen and asked Harper, “is this a new musical?” Harper recalls telling him, “no, it’s nearly 50 years old, and it was originally written about a guy.”
“And the cameraman said, ‘Oh no, that would never work!’” Harper laughs at the recollection. when they shared that interaction with sondheim, “that was the moment that convinced him to let us do the show in London.”
For some of bobbie’s friends who are couples, elliott switched their genders so that the woman says lines originally written for the man, and vice versa. “suddenly it becomes much more modern as opposed to all the men being quite sanguine about marriage and having a mischievous attitude to life, and all the women being more conventional.”
The biggest alteration, besides the gender-swapped bobbie, came with changing the anxiety-ridden Amy to the neurotic Jamie for the rapid-fire classic “not getting married today.” with only a few wording changes, it’s now about a gay man having cold feet on his wedding day. during casting in London, elliott had struggled to find an Amy who felt right. so she asked her friend Jonathan bailey (“bridgerton,” “fellow travelers”) to come in and try the role as a gay man. “it was electrifying. we’d hit on something that felt true and fresh.”
But she feared that Sondheim would never agree. “so i wrote him an email and i said, ‘steve, i need you to sit down and go have a glass of wine while you’re reading this. i’ve got to tell you that i think we should make Amy into Jamie. Here’s the video of Johnny bailey, and this is why i think it works really well.’
“He wrote back almost immediately saying, ‘marianne, i need you to sit down and have a glass of wine while you’re reading this. i’m not watching the video … it’s a great idea.’ ”
Elliott acknowledges the pressures of working with such a celebrated composer. “i was a bit starstruck, i suppose, and intimidated by working with him. but what i found is that actually he was extraordinarily open and loved collaborating and coming up with new ideas.”
Sondheim died at 91 on nov. 26, 2021, two weeks before “Company” officially opened. but sondheim had attended the first preview performance earlier that month. “i did a speech that night and pointed him out in front of the audience, and there was this white followspot [light] that lit him up, like a beautiful angel. He was waving and he was so happy,” elliott recalls. “i remember hearing his laughter resounding through the theater. we kept that same seat empty for him on opening night.”
‘It starts to really sing, because it’s then about a woman who is hitting her 35th birthday, and she knows on her birthday the body clock is starting to tick down.’
MARIANNE ELLIOTT, Tony-winning director, on switching the main character’s gender in Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”