Company The Movie: Can Dr. Doogie and Stephen Colbert Sing Sondheim?

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Martha Plimpton and Stephen Colbert perform a song from "Company" on stage during the 65th Annual Tony Awards at the Beacon Theater in New York on June 12, 2011.

It seemed like a celebrity stunt: a Broadway classic revived in concert form for a few nights and featuring a cast of, eww, television stars. Neil Patrick Harris may be suited for blithe hosting chores on the Tony Awards, and the Emmy show and the Spike TV Video Games Awards and the TV Land Awards and the World Magic Awards, but he's no Raul Esparza. (Who? A gifted if occasionally strident stalwart of Broadway musicals.) Whatever ballast and uplift Jon Cryer and Christina Hendricks may lend to their Men shows — Two-and-a-Half and Mad — they can't be expected to Act and Sing at the same time. Martha Plimpton can play a wily rube on Raising Hope, but not a Manhattan sophisticate of the John Lindsay era. As for the first-ever collaboration of two legendary Stephens, Sondheim and Colbert, that promised little more than the musical-theater equivalent of truthiness.

When the New York Philharmonic presented Sondheim's Company for four sold-out April evenings at Lincoln Center, the guardians of official Broadway culture nearly drowned out the music with their muttering about the TV vandals of storming the Great White Way cathedral. At the New York Times, theater critic Charles Isherwood's nose went north in Olympian disdain. "Accomplished singing was all but absent," he sniffed in an opinion piece titled, "Are Musicals Losing Their Voices?" The how-dare-they? contempt was as strong and searing as if the Kardashians had come to Broadway in Three Sisters.

Now, for a week starting this evening, in more than 400 movie houses, the Company concert is on the big screen — undoubtedly with the same goal in mind: to sell tickets to fans of the TV stars. (Broadway got the message: the other night it lavished nine Tony awards on the South Park team's The Book of Mormon.) Primed by the Times, I expected an ordeal. Do you know the story about the woman who approached Igor Stravinsky after one of his concerts, saying, "The music was out of my depths," and Stravinsky replied, "No, dear, out of your shallows"? Well, that's where I thought Harris, Hendricks, Cryer, Plimpton and Colbert would be: neck deep in musical amateurism.

Instead, I found this Company to be one of the most satisfying visions of the show I've seen, dating back to the 1970 original. Conductor Paul Gemignani — whose work with Sondheim extends back to Follies in 1971, the year after Company — wields his baton with a magician's flair. More impressively, director Larry Price (who co-starred 30 years ago in Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along) has managed what Casey Nickolaw pulled off in his 2007 revival of Follies at City Centers Encores!: he infused a sustaining life into the libretto and made the show an organic whole, a play with music, not just a collection of the master's greatest hits.

George Furth's book is a series of sketches revealing the sour ironies of domestic life as seen by Robert, the 35-year-old bachelor friend of five married couples; the pieces might have been written for The Carol Burnett Show, but without the comforting climactic sentiment. This time the skits seemed heftier and sharper, thanks to the delivery of what turned out to be a splendidly chosen cast, Broadway and boob-tube veterans alike.

In a couple of ways, the show is a time-capsule period piece. Sondheim's score, the pop-musicaliest of his career, holds echoes of the jazzy rhythms of Burt Bacharach, whose Promises, Promises was in its second year on Broadway when Company opened. Furth's script is a comic portrait, etched in acid on velour, of a time when most folks who wanted to live together got married. In 1970 Furth could depict his upper-middle-class couples as engaging in overdrinking and illegal drugging, but he could not explain Robert's single status with the obvious answer: he's gay (as Sondheim is and Furth, who died in 2008, was). In the Lincoln Center revival, there's a moment when Craig Bierko, as Peter, asks the proudly uncloseted Harris, "Bob, have you ever had a homosexual experience?" And Harris, who in his opening number on Sunday's Tony show had drolly proclaimed that Broadway is "not just for gays anymore," shoots the audience a deadpan stare that prods a knowing, extratextual laugh.

But people, even today, get married and stay that way; and Company is as acute as ever in its ambivalence about matrimony. Most of the five couples get through life by picking little fights, ragging their spouses, raising the insult to a minor art form, and being, generally, miserable. (The only happy pair just got separated but still lives together.) "I have everything," Cryer's Davis says. "Except freedom. Which is everything." Yet when Joanne (Patti LuPone), the eldest, sourest wife, asks Robert, "Why get married?" he says, "For company?" Furth and Sondheim see desperation in both the single and the married state: solitary confinement vs. having someone, the same damn one, to share your cell in a life sentence where the only parole is divorce.

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