Original Cast Album: Company (1970) have I got a film for you! (Review)

Before the end of the year, we at The Geek Show plan to take a little look back through some of the home releases we missed when they were released. All of them have their merits, but none have gained retrospective interest like Criterion UK’s release of D.A. Pennebaker’s 1970 documentary Original Cast Album: Company. On its release in September, it appealed for several reasons. For a start, it’s the first time this film – a cult classic from one of the most influential documentarians of all time – has been released in Britain. For another, the film itself – a document of Stephen Sondheim overseeing the recording of a soundtrack album for his then-new musical Company – has obvious historical value for musical theatre connoisseurs. It may have whetted the appetite, too, for Steven Spielberg’s imminent adaptation of West Side Story, the 1957 show that brought Sondheim to prominence.

Watching it now, it has to shoulder a new burden; that of being a memorial for Sondheim, who died on November 26th at the age of 91. After his death, Lin-Manuel Miranda wondered if future generations might spin conspiracy theories about Sondheim’s career, in the same way that people today choose to believe some dull aristocrat wrote Shakespeare’s plays: no way could one man write Gypsy and Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along and Sunday in the Park With George. The picture we get of Sondheim in Pennebaker’s film is very much in line with our current image of Shakespeare. He is the same restless, generous genius who never forgot the audience. When Elaine Stritch – of whom, more later – struggles to sing ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’ in key, Sondheim suggests transposing it a semitone or two to make it easier on her. For all his reputation as a perfectionist, he will sacrifice his ego gladly on the altar of making it work.

That said, the film doesn’t exactly undermine that perfectionist reputation. Original Cast Album: Company really does make Broadway stardom look like a pretty agonising job, a relentless rounds of takes and retakes performed to an exactingly high standard. In his opening credits message, Pennebaker says he assembled the film to show off what he thought were the most spectacular singing. When he held a screening, though, he was surprised to hear the film’s subjects picking innumerable flaws with their performances.

Based on the on-screen evidence, it’s easy to imagine this. It should be noted that Original Cast Album: Company isn’t Burden of Dreams; it doesn’t document an unusually disastrous creative process, everyone involved signed up to sing, and sing they do. Nobody involved is a diva, nobody is a bully, and Sondheim is full of praise after Beth Howland’s bravura assault on the musical’s most difficult number ‘Getting Married Today’. What it shows is that doing anything creative to a worthwhile standard can be exhausting, and it shows this most powerfully when Elaine Stritch is on screen. Stritch, whose vocal gifts are in no doubt, is nevertheless tired and stressed, frequently terminating unsatisfactory takes by barking “Shut up!” and “WRONG!” at herself. It’s hard to imagine many other artists releasing such a raw, unfiltered look at their creative process.

As Pennebaker’s opening statement reveals, Original Cast Album: Company was meant to be part of a series of films about musical performance. When the funding disappeared, it became a standalone film, albeit at a non-standard length of 53 minutes. It should feel like a DVD extra for a DVD that doesn’t exist, but a lot of the film’s fascination comes, perversely, from the sense that it is incomplete. Why is it so short? Why does it only cover the stressed-out, early-hours end of the recording process? Why was a film made of the recording sessions for a soundtrack album to a musical that, while it’s venerated today, wasn’t particularly successful at the time? Such questions engender the obsession upon which cult movies are made. As with Grey Gardens, one of Criterion’s first releases in the UK, there is a pervasive sense that every walk-on character, every off-hand reference, contains whole worlds to discover. And now, with this generous extras package, we can discover them.

The extras are fabulous even by Criterion standards. There are two commentary tracks, one of which – quite rightly – is dedicated solely to Sondheim in full flow. The other has Pennebaker, Stritch and legendary Broadway producer Hal Prince, which is so good that there’s actually a whole separate feature for the anecdotes that didn’t make the cut. There’s also a conversation between Sondheim and the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, moderated by the New York Times’s legendary former theatre critic Frank Rich, and – a particularly nice touch, this – an episode of Documentary Now! that lovingly parodies the film. In yet another additional feature about the making of the parody, co-writer John Mulaney said he reached out to Pennebaker and he had only one piece of advice: don’t be mean to Elaine Stritch. Sondheim, naturally, thought it was hilarious.

POP SCREEN IS ON ALL GOOD PODCAST APPS

THANK YOU FOR READING GRAHAM’S REVIEW OF ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY (1970)