He was, after all, the man who wrote those feelings into a beautiful “Company” song — “Sorry-Grateful” — and, in so doing, introduced ambivalence at an almost cellular level to the American musical theater.
Sure, the score remains great, and there are a few perfectly etched performances in supporting roles, especially Patti LuPone’s as the undermining, pickled Joanne.
That woman — now Bobbie instead of Bobby, and played by the winsome Katrina Lenk — no longer hears the busy signal of missed emotional connections that pulsed through the songs in their original incarnation.
Instead, as if to prove that “Company” loves misery, this production drags her off the pedestal of her aloofness and into the mud of a long, dark night of the soul.
From the start, critics complained about a main character who seemed dangerously recessive, observing other people’s foibles in loosey-goosey comic sketches that barely added up.
In one of those sketches, the low-level friction between a husband and wife erupts in a jiu-jitsu match; in another, the apparently perfect shine of marital bliss turns out to be the glow of impending divorce.
Sarcasm warming into insight was the hallmark of the style, which borrowed the nonrepresentational techniques of midcentury drama and wed it to a psychological acuity rarely before seen in American musicals.
Though fascinating in theory, and worth considering as a way of reorienting the original’s outdated sexual politics, Elliott’s idea that the material could be regendered for a new era completely disrupts that consistency.
But when Bobbie takes advantage of Jamie’s jitters to suggest that he marry her instead of Paul, she doesn’t seem needy or wolfish, as Bobby did when propositioning Amy; she seems foolish and disrespectful.
Short of turning Joanne into a lesbian, which might have been more interesting, Elliott has little choice but to turn her into a pimp, goading Bobbie to “make it” with her husband, Larry.
Whether swinging her legs like a mischievous child or squatting on a toilet — yes, Elliott’s staging goes there — she brings her precision comedy and riveting charisma to every moment she’s onstage.
To be fair, Elliott’s staging, full of athletic busywork and “Alice in Wonderland” contortions of scale on Bunny Christie’s almost too-fascinating set, is quite a workout.
But in trying to disguise the show’s revue-like structure by centering the action in Bobbie’s mind, Elliott paradoxically causes her to recede even further than usual.
This was no mere bromide; Sondheim allowed a masterpiece like “Sweeney Todd” to be cut to ribbons for Tim Burton’s film and saw the cult flop “Merrily We Roll Along” through more surgeries than Frankenstein’s monster.
In that sense, this “Company” is perfectly in line with his intentions: It’s new.