Company
When: 30.03.2027 00:00
Where: 48.857614, 2.346758
Organizer: Admin
As a composer and lyricist—and the genre itself—Sondheim challenges his audience. His greatest successes are not simple melodies you can hum, but reflections on the roads we did not take, on distorted desires, on relationships so eroded and fragmented that all that remains is to let in the clowns. And yet Stephen’s music is so beautiful, his words so precise, that at the moment he reveals the imperfections of everyday life, he overcomes them. And we overcome them. It’s very simple: Stephen rethought the American musical.
Barack Obama,
On April 4, 1994, in the columns of New York Magazine, James Kaplan published an article devoted to Stephen Sondheim. Titled “The Cult of Saint Stephen Sondheim”, repeatedly cited under the erroneous headline “Is Stephen Sondheim God ?” — “Stephen Sondheim est‑il un dieu ?”, this article still characterizes the significance of the American writer‑composer in the history of the musical: the inventor of a new form of theatrical dialogue, he not only opened new perspectives for the musical but simply rethought it. After studying alongside Oscar Hammerstein II, he became a lyricist for Leonard Bernstein in West Side Story in 1957. Less than fifteen years later, on April 26, 1970, Stephen Sondheim created Company at the Alvin Theatre: it is his first masterful work on Broadway. Awarded six Tony Awards, the writer‑composer immediately cemented his position on the New York and world stage.
In collaboration with librettist George Furth and director Harold Prince, Stephen Sondheim created the first “concept musical”. Without large dance numbers, without a linear plot, Company is a series of scenes that raise questions about entering adulthood, using a fragmented narrative. The song catalyzes emotion and makes the audience contemplate the torments of the young man Bobby, who celebrates his thirty‑fifth birthday surrounded by already established friends. Lonely and frivolous, Bobby doubts marriage, and Stephen Sondheim plays on the complexity of this thirty‑five‑year‑old’s emotional state, while simultaneously exploring individualism, couples, and the presumed virtues of commitment.
As a sociological study, Company undoubtedly constitutes a subtle observation of urban bourgeois life in the United States at the turn of the sixties, but the work also serves as a pretext for a sensitive and intelligent look at friendship, love, and loneliness.
Tags: company, live music, concert
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/company-112225
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