Company - PBS Great Performances

Believe it or not, there are times when a videotaped version of a Broadway show is, in some ways, preferable to the show itself. This is the case with the revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company, as dubiously directed by John Doyle, which premieres on PBS on February 20.

Doyle, you may recall, made a name for himself in the British regional theater, where, space and money being tight, he came up with the idea of mounting Sweeney Todd with the actors doubling as the orchestra. The gimmick was a success and he restaged it, with the same procedure, on Broadway.

But did it make sense here, what with money and space enough for a regular production? Well, it was a novelty, something audiences and some critics went for. I, too, was mildly impressed, mostly by the fact that performers could be found who could both act and play diverse instruments.

Sweeney Todd, being a weird show in itself, could digest a little supplemental weirdness. Was this, however, appropriate for Company, the archetypal New York show that, in its original production, had marvelous Boris Aronson scenery vividly evoking life in the high rises? What would the affairs of fast-living metropolitan apartment dwellers have to do with people playing instruments while pursuing their complicated social, marital and love lives?

Accordingly, Doyle opted for a stylized set, with one Corinthian column whose base seemed to be a circular radiator, a piano, a mobile cocktail table and glass cubes on casters for performers to perch on. By way of stylized action, Doyle even had the cast often parading this way and that while playing their instruments and delivering their lines. Once again, the bizarreness helped in some ways while hindering in others. The show ran for 34 previews and 246 regular performances, which nowadays is at best a succès d'estime.

[IMG:R]Now, in an actual theater performance shot for TV (and, one presumes, eventually DVD), under the savvy direction of Lonny Price, the thing somehow looks less off-putting. Little figures disporting themselves on glass cubes and running around hither and yon—a married couple even putting on a karate display with husband and wife gesticulating from opposite ends of the stage—looks comical rather than absurd, as it was when enacted by living, life-sized human beings.

Price knows when to come in for a close-up, when to back off for a long shot, when to catch a glimpse of the theatrical audience applauding, when to dwell tight and long on an actor's emoting face. We become more intimate with these tiny creatures in a cross between a movie and a puppet show, quaint in an endearing rather than alienating way.

And here still is that able cast led by the incomparable Raul Esparza, Barbara Walsh, Heather Laws and Angel Desai, surrounded by 10 equally gifted others, doing no less well instrumentally than histrionically. Plus, of course, the George Furth book and the Sondheim score, along with expert camera work, and—Doyle be damned—it works.

John Simon is the New York theater critic for Bloomberg News.