TT: The man that got away

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two musicals, one in New York and one in Arlington, Virginia. The first, a stage version of Far From Heaven, is flawed but very interesting. The second, a revival of Company, is first-rate. Here’s an excerpt.
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Is it possible to make a good musical out of a bad movie? In the case of “Far From Heaven,” many people may wonder why I’m even asking, since Todd Haynes’ 2002 cinematic homage to the humid domestic tragedies of Douglas Sirk is much admired by film buffs. But I find it to be at least as preposterous as Sirk’s sudsy tearjerkers, and I came to Playwrights Horizons expecting to file a scorched-earth pan. Nothing doing. “Far From Heaven” is far from perfect, but it’s vastly superior to the film on which it’s based, and Kelli O’Hara’s performance as Cathy Whitaker, an apple-cheeked Connecticut housewife whose all-American husband (Steven Pasquale) dumps her for a male lover, is so persuasive that you’ll gladly overlook most of the residual problems….
What makes the stage version of “Far From Heaven” work is the score. Instead of ersatz Technicolor movie music, Scott Frankel has given us clean, crisp harmonies that drain away the melodrama, making it possible to take the Whitakers’ plight at face value. Michael Korie, Mr. Frankel’s collaborator, studiously avoids archness, and though his lyrics are never memorable in their own right, they articulate the plot efficiently.
Ms. O’Hara is the musical-theater counterpart of Donna Reed, and those who remember Ms. Reed from such wartime films as “From Here to Eternity” and “They Were Expendable” will recognize that as a high compliment….
To call a theatrical production “exemplary” may sound like suspiciously faint praise, but I don’t mean it that way in the case of Signature Theatre’s staging of “Company,” the 1970 musical in which Stephen Sondheim and George Furth cast a cold eye on marital bliss. This is the kind of show in which all the pieces fit together so tightly that you’ll be caught up in the action mere seconds after the conductor throws the downbeat.
Where John Doyle’s 2006 small-scale Broadway revival of “Company” was formidably, almost excessively imaginative, Eric Schaeffer, who knows as much about Mr. Sondheim’s more-bitter-than-sweet musicals as any director in America, has chosen to stick to the center of the road, letting the show make its own dramatic points. The only hint of a high concept is Daniel Conway’s glass-and-metal set, which looks as though it might be meant to suggest the décor of a 70’s TV variety show–a smart touch, since Mr. Furth’s book consists of a string of hard-edged comic sketches….
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for Company: