Company

“As a composer and lyricist – and a genre unto himself – Sondheim challenges his audience. His greatest hits are not just simple tunes you hum, they are meditations on roads not taken, on wishes gone astray, on relationships so worn and dislocated that there is no other choice but to bring in the clowns. And yet, Stephen’s music is so beautiful, his lyrics so precise, that at the very moment he reveals the imperfections of daily life, he transcends them. And we transcend them. It’s very simple: Stephen reinvented the American musical*.” Barack Obama

On April 4, 1994, in the columns of New York Magazine, James Kaplan published an article dedicated to Stephen Sondheim. Titled “The Cult of Saint Stephen Sondheim”, cited countless times under an erroneous title, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” – this article still characterises the importance of the American author and composer in the history of musical theatre: inventor of a new form of theatrical dialogue, he not only offered new perspectives to the musical but also, quite simply, reinvented it. After training alongside Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1957 he became Leonard Bernstein’s lyricist for West Side Story. A little less than fifteen years later, on April 26, 1970, Stephen Sondheim premiered Company at the Alvin Theatre: it was his first masterpiece on Broadway. Awarded six Tony Awards, the author and composer immediately established himself on the New York and world stage. Associated with librettist George Furth and director Harold Prince, Stephen Sondheim produced the very first “concept musical”. Without big dance numbers, without a linear story, Company is a succession of vignettes that question the entry into adult life, based on a fragmented narrative. Song catalyses emotion and provokes reflection.