Original Cast Album - Company
by D.A. Pennebaker
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DVD details
Actor: Beth Howland, Charles Braswell, George Coe, George Furth, Thomas Z. ShepherdDirector: D.A. Pennebaker
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 58 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-01-02
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: New Video Group
DVD Reviews of Original Cast Album - Company
DVD Review: If You Like Broadway Musicals, You'll Probably Like This
Summary: 4 Stars
If you like Broadway, if you like Stephen Sondheim (or even if you don't), if you like behind-the-scenes looks at show business, you'll probaby like this DVD. It's a documentary of how the original cast recording of Company was put together a few days after the show opened in New York.
All one Sunday and through 4 a.m. Monday the tracks were rehearsed, changed, critiqued, redone until with one exception the record was finished. The exception was Elaine Stritch's recording of the big song from the show, "The Ladies Who Lunch." It's a dramatic show stopper, and Stritch just couldn't nail it. All the other cast members had been dismissed, so it was just Stritch, the orchestra, and the recording and creative teams. The more takes they took, the more flaccid her performance became and more tired her voice sounded. This section alone on the DVD is high drama. (They finally recorded the orchestra track and had her come back two days later--when she did nail it, to everyone's relief.)
The program takes less than an hour and there's no voice over (unless you access a fairly interesting interview made 30 years later by Stritch, Harold Prince, the show's Broadway director, and Pennebaker). You move from song to song seeing how adjustments were made, how help was given, how nuances became highly important. Interspersed are snippets of discussion by Sondheim and Prince of how the show came about.
Everyone was acutely aware that they were making the permanent recording of the show's score. The stress, no matter how professional the actors were, had to have been incredible. There's Dean Jones with a fairly brittle voice who was probably chosen for the lead because of his movie name recognition. He clearly looks uncomfortable throughout. At one point the recording supervisor, Thomas Z. Shephard, says to him, "You're very good and I don't want to spoil something that's potentially marvelous..." Uh oh. Pamela Meyers was a young singer in her first Broadway show with a big song to perform, "Another Hundred People." She looks a bit like Brigitte Jones. Sondheim works with her to get a single note where it should be. She is so serious listening to him and he takes the time to be gentle with her. And there's Stritch, an actress who seems unable to turn it off. She draws the center of attention to her just enough to be noticeable. Most things tend to be dramatic with her, and her struggle with "Ladies" is as much self-involved as it is her aiming for excellence.
I'm not one of those who thinks a great deal of Company as a show. I've seen it on Broadway and two or three times in rep. It's a musical about marriage and relationships and the inability to commit...or rather, it's a story about relationships and marriage amongst rather superficial upper-East Side New Yorkers. Those are easy targets and the point of view gets, for me, a little tiresome. But the songs are great, and the show was exciting and different when it opened.
As I said, if you like Broadway musicals, Steven Sondheim, and behind-the-scenes looks, you'll probably get a kick out of this.
Description of Original Cast Album - Company
Called a "monumental achievement" by the Los Angeles Times, Company is the extraordinary documentary capturing the explosive recording session for Stephen Sondheim?s landmark musical. On May 3, 1970, just a few days after its triumphant Broadway opening,While a proposed series of original cast recording sessions for documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back) never materialized, Original Cast Album: Company survives as the first and only entry, and it was fortuitous that its subject was the 1970 musical Company. Groundbreaking in its use of a series of vignettes rather than a conventional plot, it was also one of the earliest major works for composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the most important figure in musical theater over the last quarter-century. Unlike films, theater productions rarely have a permanent record, so a musical is preserved for posterity by the cast recording. This puts all the pressure on the recording session, as cast member Susan Browning explains during the recording of "You Could Drive a Person Crazy": a live performance can be imperfect, but "this is different. This is the definitive, it's the end-all and the be-all of this song, and... God, that could drive a person crazy!"
For this film, Pennebaker and his crew took three hand-held cameras into the studio and filmed the singers, the orchestra, and the control booth, then condensed the 18.5-hour recording session into a fast-moving 60 minutes. You can see the intensity and sheer enjoyment on the faces of the cast, and record producer Thomas Z. Shepard, show producer-director Harold Prince (both frequent Sondheim collaborators), and Sondheim (a notorious perfectionist) become alternately exhilarated and exasperated as they listen and try to solve various problems. Other interesting moments include an emphasis on the orchestra rather than the lead vocal in "Another Hundred People," and Elaine Stritch's exhausting take after take of "The Ladies Who Lunch." This is a rare look at an important moment in Broadway history, and obviously, it's highly recommended for Broadway fans. --David Horiuchi
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