Overview
When Marianne Elliott’s revival of Company officially opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on December 9, 2021, it demonstrated exactly why a revival can matter. The musical itself was more than fifty years old. Stephen Sondheim’s songs were still there. George Furth’s basic structure remained. The central questions about marriage, loneliness, friendship, and commitment remained recognizable. But one fundamental change transformed how audiences encountered all of them: Bobby became Bobbie. In the original 1970 production, Robert is a 35-year-old unmarried man surrounded by married friends who cannot understand why he has not settled down. In Elliott’s revival, Katrina Lenk played Bobbie, a 35-year-old unmarried woman living in contemporary New York. The change sounds simple. It was not. Once the protagonist became a woman, familiar lines acquired different social meanings. Questions about marriage became entangled with expectations surrounding women's age, motherhood, independence, and the idea of a biological clock. The revival did not replace Sondheim's central question. It demonstrated that the same question— “What does it mean to choose another person?” —could become different when asked by a different body in a different historical moment.
The Original Company
When Company premiered in 1970, it helped transform the American musical. Rather than following a conventional linear plot, the show unfolds through a series of scenes involving Bobby and five married couples. There is no single central romance driving toward marriage. Instead, marriage itself becomes the subject under examination. The original production, directed by Harold Prince, became one of the defining examples of the concept musical, in which a central idea or theme organizes the show more strongly than conventional narrative.
Songs including “Sorry-Grateful,” “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” “Getting Married Today,” “The Ladies Who Lunch,” and “Being Alive” present contradictory perspectives on intimacy. Marriage can be suffocating. Marriage can be comforting. Being alone can be liberating. Being alone can be unbearable. The musical refuses to resolve those contradictions neatly. That ambiguity is precisely what allowed Company to survive.
Why Revive Company? A conventional revival might have reconstructed 1970 New York. Marianne Elliott instead asked a more interesting question: What does Company mean now? The social expectations surrounding a 35-year-old unmarried man in 1970 are not identical to those surrounding a 35-year-old unmarried person in the twenty-first century. Changing Bobby into Bobbie allowed the production to make that historical difference visible. Bobbie's friends repeatedly question her romantic life. Her 35th birthday hangs over the story. Marriage, children, and time begin to intersect in ways they did not for the original male character. The production therefore demonstrates the difference between revival and reproduction. Reproduction asks: How can we recreate what audiences saw before? Revival asks: What can this work reveal to audiences now?
Bobby Becomes Bobbie
Gender-swapping the protagonist affected almost every relationship in the musical. Songs had to be reconsidered. Character dynamics changed. Some roles were adjusted to accommodate Bobbie's relationships with men. But Elliott and the creative team did not attempt to rewrite Company into an entirely different musical. Instead, they discovered how much meaning could change while much of the text remained recognizable. That is what makes the experiment historically interesting. When male Bobby avoids marriage, audiences may interpret him through familiar ideas about the bachelor who refuses to settle down. When female Bobbie does the same thing, another cultural history appears. Women have long encountered expectations that adulthood should progress toward marriage and motherhood, with age treated as a form of pressure. Bobbie's 35th birthday therefore becomes more than a convenient framing device. Time itself becomes part of the production's argument.
Jamie and “Getting Married Today” The revival's other major gender transformation occurs in “Getting Married Today.” In the original musical, Amy panics immediately before marrying Paul. In Elliott's production, Amy becomes Jamie, played by Matt Doyle, who is preparing to marry Paul. One of Sondheim's most famous comic songs therefore becomes a same-sex wedding panic attack. The brilliance of the change is that the scene does not become primarily about being gay. Jamie is terrified of marriage for many of the same irrational, contradictory, hilarious reasons Amy was. That normality is historically significant. A same-sex marriage can occupy the structural position once occupied by a heterosexual marriage without requiring the entire scene to explain or justify its existence.
The revival therefore reflects a social transformation that occurred outside the theater: same-sex marriage became legally recognized nationwide in the United States in 2015. A scene written in 1970 could now contain a relationship that the legal world of 1970 did not recognize.
The Apartment as a Psychological Space
Bunny Christie's scenic design transformed Bobbie's New York into a collection of box-like rooms. Apartments appeared, disappeared, expanded, contracted, and moved around her. Rather than functioning simply as realistic interiors, they became psychological spaces. Bobbie repeatedly enters other couples' apartments and observes their marriages. Each apartment becomes almost like a display case containing another possible version of adult life. Where does she fit? Which room belongs to her? Does she want what her friends have? The increasingly surreal physical world emphasizes that Bobbie is not simply traveling around Manhattan. She is moving through possible futures.
“Tick Tock” Reimagined The revival also radically reconsidered “Tick Tock,” originally created as a dance sequence for Donna McKechnie in the 1970 production. In Elliott's production, the sequence becomes a surreal exploration of Bobbie's anxiety about time, relationships, marriage, and possible motherhood. Multiple versions of Bobbie's imagined future appear. Domestic life becomes almost nightmarish in its repetition. The revival therefore takes a piece historically associated with choreography and turns it into something more explicitly psychological.
Again, the production does not merely preserve an iconic moment. It asks what function that moment can serve for this Bobbie.
Patti LuPone and Joanne
The revival's Joanne, played by Patti LuPone, provides another reinterpretation of a familiar character. “The Ladies Who Lunch” remains one of Sondheim's great portraits of wealth, cynicism, boredom, and self-awareness. But the most important change comes later. In the original musical, Joanne propositions Bobby. In the revival, the gender reversal forces the scene to function differently. Joanne instead offers Bobbie the possibility of sleeping with her husband, Larry. That shift alters Bobbie's realization. The question is no longer whether she will accept an older woman's sexual proposition. It becomes whether she will continue participating in relationships that allow her to remain emotionally protected from genuine commitment. The altered scene helps propel her toward “Being Alive.”
“Being Alive” After Fifty Years “Being Alive” has always been the emotional destination of Company. Bobby begins by seeing relationships largely through the problems they create. People interrupt you. Crowd you. Use you. Know you too well.
Make demands. By the end, those inconveniences become evidence of something he wants. The 2021 revival preserves that fundamental transformation for Bobbie. She does not suddenly decide that marriage is mandatory. The musical remains more complicated than that. Instead, she recognizes that genuine intimacy requires vulnerability. To have someone “sit in your chair” or “ruin your sleep” means allowing another person to disrupt the carefully controlled independence that protects you. For Bobbie, “Being Alive” becomes less about deciding to get married than deciding she wants to be capable of connection. That distinction makes the song work across generations.
A Revival Shaped by the Pandemic
The Broadway history of this Company revival gives it another layer of significance. The production had originally been scheduled to open on March 22, 2020. Broadway shut down because of COVID-19 on March 12. The production remained suspended until performances finally resumed in November 2021, officially opening the following month. That context inevitably changed the experience of watching Company. A musical obsessed with whether people need other people returned after an eighteen-month period defined by isolation, separation, closed theaters, and disrupted human contact. “Being Alive” could not sound exactly the same after that experience. This was not a reinterpretation the director could have planned. History had reinterpreted the musical for them.
Historical Significance
The revival received nine nominations at the 2022 Tony Awards and won five, including Best Revival of a Musical. Marianne Elliott won Best Direction of a Musical. Patti LuPone won Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Joanne. Matt Doyle won Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Jamie. Bunny Christie won Best Scenic Design of a Musical. Its success demonstrated that radical reinterpretation does not necessarily require abandoning the original work. Instead, changing one foundational assumption can reveal meanings that were always latent within it. That makes the production particularly important in the history of the Broadway revival.
Why This Revival Changed Broadway
The 2021 Company provides a model for revival as reinterpretation rather than preservation. It demonstrated that gender-conscious casting could operate at the structural center of a canonical musical. It showed that changing gender could expose assumptions embedded in dialogue audiences had heard for decades. It incorporated same-sex marriage without making queerness an exceptional subplot. And it demonstrated that even a canonical Sondheim musical could remain open to substantial reinterpretation. Most importantly, the revival did not argue that the 1970 Company had become obsolete. It argued almost the opposite. A classic survives because it contains enough complexity to withstand being questioned.
Why It Resonates With Me
What I find most compelling about this Company is that the revival does not change the central question—it changes who gets to answer it. Turning Bobby into Bobbie reveals how differently society can interpret the same choices depending on gender, age, and historical moment. And because the production returned after the pandemic shutdown, its final movement toward “Being Alive” acquired a meaning that no 1970 audience could have anticipated. For me, that captures exactly why revivals deserve their own gallery in My Broadway. A revival should not simply prove that an old musical can still be performed. The best revivals put the past and present into conversation—and allow us to discover that a work we thought we knew still has something new to say.
