Original Cast Album: “Company”: The Little Things You Do Together

The sense that everybody on camera has something to prove—Sondheim; the actors; Thomas Z. Shepard, the young, droll, ascot-wearing record producer whose skilled ear and acid tongue behind the control console give the room an air of slight menace—pervades Original Cast Album: “Company” and generates a remarkable level of suspense. What’s happening here matters—“This is the permanent recording, it’s important,” Sondheim reminds an actor at one point. But in the film, it’s not yet clear that all the hard work is going to pay off.

More than half a century later, Original Cast Album: “Company” is imbued with a poignancy it didn’t have when it was completed, primarily because those of us who watch it now are armed with an awareness of what was yet to come. We can differentiate the people for whom Company turned out to be one step along the road to even greater achievement, those for whom it was one job among many, and those for whom it would always stand as a career high point. The show itself—as is evident in the generous portions of songs we hear in the film—offers a vivid snapshot of a unique and evanescent moment in American cultural history, one in which the sexual revolution and bourgeois longings, women’s liberation and entrenched sexism, swinging and sadness, all seemed to reside in the same space at the same time. We can also register how different things were offstage in 1970—from the fact that the two women the camera spots in the string section of the large orchestra are anomalies in a sea of men to the seemingly thousands of cigarettes that are absolutely everywhere at all times. We can note the soft bellies and imperfect teeth of some members of the Company ensemble and transport ourselves back to a long-gone moment when things like that were permitted, even on Broadway.

And we can also clock what isn’t being said or talked about much at all, most notably when, in “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” we hear three young women, all bewildered by Bobby’s undecipherability, sing:

I could understand a person

If it’s not a person’s bag

I could understand a person

If a person was a fag

Sondheim, who felt that the word was “only faintly demeaning” in 1970, came to view that lyric as “not only offensive but old-fashioned”; he changed it twenty-five years later for the show’s first Broadway revival. But the time-capsule moment enshrined in the film serves as a vivid reminder of changing mores, and of the constraints under which Sondheim and book writer George Furth were still working. In the decades since Company opened, there has been a great deal of discussion about whether Bobby, who seems to stand far apart from the heterosexual domesticity of everyone he knows, is an encoded gay character. Sondheim himself has dismissed the notion that his protagonist’s cut-off quality was any kind of depiction of the closet, but in 2013, he was intrigued enough to workshop an alternate version of the show in which Bobby and several of the other characters were reconceived as out gay men. That, however, was decades away from the era Pennebaker captures, during which a New York Times profile of Sondheim that ran the week of the recording session could blandly explain that, like Bobby, he “is unmarried, and a much-invited guest.”

Sondheim was ready to take the world of musical theater somewhere it hadn’t been before, even if he had to drag it there single-handedly, which, in those years, he did. On the day of the recording session, the strain shows; you can feel how fast his motor is running, and how little gas is left in his tank. Getting a musical to Broadway is a staggering endeavor, and the man whom Pennebaker’s unintrusive but persistent cameras show us is wiped out. A pencil and a smoke seem to alternate residency between his fingers; there are rings under his eyes; and as he talks to Shepard or the actors, his hands often seem to find their way to his face, trying to rub exhaustion out of it, or perhaps to massage some inspiration into his brain.