Composer Stephen Sondheim, actress Cynthia Nixon and theatre critic Hilton Als discuss the character of Bobby, and how Sondheim’s own relationship to his heterosexual, married friends may have influenced the character.
Features
TRANSCRIPT
Bobby has always been a little problematic and everybody's always tried to solve Bobby.
Not like I'm avoiding marriage. It's avoiding me. If anything, I'm ready.
Actually, you are not.
I have no block, no problems. You know, I am ready to be married.
Then why aren't you? I've always had things to accomplish.
That's the main reason.
You know, what is it about this person that they're out of step with all their married friends? What's, what's different about them.
First, I had to finish school. Then I had to get started to get my career going.
You wait, you're gonna see a lot of changes in my life.
You know. What a show is about without having to state it.
Certainly it's true of all first rate works of literature. Anyway, that there's something going on that is not stated on the nose, but you say, I see this story is about that. Or, uh, what's behind this is that the minute you expose it to light it, flattens it out.
I think it's a beautiful piece of work where the disclosures in the music and in the performance.
I think clearly Steve could not have written company without having been in Bobby's position himself at some point in his life.
I think he's in everything that he did.
And I think some more explicitly than others, but this felt very explicit to me. I mean, it's sort of like trying to separate Tennessee Williams from Blanche DuBois.
I'm not saying that he's Blanche DuBois, but his understanding of Blanche DuBois is quite phenomenal.
So for Company, they were thinking about living a contemporary life in New York city in the seventies and being in Steve's case, a gay man, surrounded by a lot of heterosexual friends and everyone saying, 'How come you're not married?
When are you gonna get married?' That's the way life was back then.
My feeling about Company as a show has a lot to do with, um, being a gay man and how social convention doesn't really respect singleness.
And I think that Sondheim was writing out of that particular kind of knowledge and, and maybe sometimes frustration.
