Stephen Sondheim’s Gender-Swapped ‘Company’ Arrives at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre

The winner of five Tony Awards (including best revival of a musical), the latest production of Company arrives at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre on July 30, with Britney Coleman starring as Bobbie, 35 and single in a show about being single past your due date. It was only the second musical ever composed by Stephen Sondheim, who went on to win eight Tonys, eight Grammys, an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize over his illustrious career. He couldn’t have known when he wrote Company back in 1970 that it would be the last revival of his work he would see before his death in 2021. 

“I was at his house in upstate New York about three days before he died,” director Marianne Elliott tells The Hollywood Reporter, recalling an interview the two did for a newspaper about the revival. “He was so generous and on it, and so jolly and alive. One of the things he said I’m sure I will remember to my dying day. He said to the interviewer that the show was the most entertaining show he’d ever seen. I said, ‘What do you mean? Do you mean the most entertaining musical you’ve ever written?’ He said, ‘No, the most entertaining musical I’ve ever seen.’ I said, ‘Do you mean of your work?’ And he said, ‘No, Marianne, the most entertaining musical I’ve ever seen.’ It’s a huge compliment and it also shows his generosity.”

Elliott’s acclaimed West End production was originally slated for a Broadway opening on Sondheim’s 90th birthday, March 22, 2020, but was halted by the pandemic after only nine preview performances. When it finally opened in December 2021, it did so to great acclaim. 

“The first time he came to rehearsal to see a run through, that was a big, huge deal. That was thrilling,” says Coleman, who understudied Bobbie on Broadway. “I remember him at the end of the run-through thanking us, and we were like, ‘Why are you thanking us? We’re the ones thanking you!’ And he said how grateful he was to all of us for giving the show due diligence and making the show fresh and accessible to audiences today. He was really proud of it.”

The main thing that sets this revival apart from past revivals (besides Marianne Elliott’s consummate directing), is the gender switch from Bobby, a swinging sixties bachelor, to Bobbie, a less-swinging single whose biological time clock is getting louder. Driving the point home, the production restored a long-lost dance number called “Tick Tock”.

“I would say this is the most meta job I’ve ever had,” laughs Coleman. “In terms of the gender swap, I am thirty-five, there’s a biological factor, especially nowadays when contraception and women’s rights are something we talk about a lot these days. If you’re at this age and you don’t have kids already, you need to start thinking about freezing your eggs. Marianne has thrown in faint baby cries in some of the scenes, so it’s very much on the subconscious level. And I would say I don’t know if I have a lot of guy friends who are being asked, isn’t it time for you to settle down, versus a lot of my gal pals.”

About 10 years ago, Elliott and her producing partner Chris Harper were looking for a show with a female protagonist. Harper heard a recording of Bernadette Peters sing “Being Alive”, Bobby’s climactic aria, and wondered, what if Bobby became Bobbie?

Elliott didn’t think twice about it as she points out all the ways that not making the gender switch would be problematic. In the original, Bobby is a commitment-phobic bachelor with multiple girlfriends – racy in 1970, not so much today. 

“If you switch it to a woman, it immediately makes it now, cause women hitting their 35th birthday are suddenly aware of the body clock and suddenly aware that maybe they should settle down, and soon. It suddenly makes it more modern,” says Elliott, noting that the gender switch extends to some of the couples that make up Bobbie’s friends. One woman is now a breadwinner married to a stay-at-home dad. And a bride with cold feet is now a groom trying not to jilt his husband-to-be at the altar. 

Despite what seemed like obvious improvements, Sondheim remained unconvinced. Elliott persisted. “I said, ‘Give me a workshop. I know it probably won’t work, but you can watch the video and see what you think,’” she recalls, making Sondheim swear he would watch it with young people and women present. He did as instructed, phoned her and said, “Yeah, I think we can go to work.” 

Musically, the adjustment seems minor — Bobby goes from being a tenor to a soprano. But Coleman has her own thoughts on that. “The timbre of the male and the female voice is really different, and people tend to write differently for men and women. So, it’s more challenging than people think. The opening number starts with a high A. That range for a woman sits much higher than it does for a tenor. So, it’s a lot of vocal gymnastics.”

Elliott is oft considered the foremost English theater director of our time. The former artistic director of the National Theatre, she has four Tony Awards and three Oliviers to her credit for titles like War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the most recent revival of Angels in America.

But her exposure to musicals was limited, having directed only one and having never seen Company before the revival came to her.

“I’m a classic theater director and I’m very interested in the spoken word,” she says. “Sondheim taught me that music can be just as interrogative, as absolutely psychologically on the button as you can with a spoken line. I would say things like, ‘Why in that verse does she hold the note longer? Why does she go up?’ And he would have an answer, he would always know psychologically what the answer was to the question.” 

For her part, Coleman came from a musical family and studied musical theater at the University of Michigan in her home state. She began her career in the ensemble of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, then understudied in Sunset Boulevard with Glenn Close, followed by ensemble work in Tootsie. Regulars at the Pantages might recognize her as Barbara in last summer’s touring production of Beetlejuice. 

While understudying Bobbie on Broadway she not only got to work with Patti LuPone and rehearse with Elliott, but will never forget meeting Sondheim. After attending one of the post-pandemic previews, he hung out while they shut the theater down and the cast gathered at the lobby bar. 

“We knew where he was sitting on the aisle,” Coleman recalls the performance that took place about two weeks before he passed. “It was really special. They brought some lights up on him and the audience cheered him on, it was quite the extended applause for him.”

Company runs through August 18 at the Pantages in Hollywood.