Even etched memorably in smoldering fire and defensive ice by Raul Esparza in John Doyle’s 2006 Broadway revival, Bobby was still hard to embrace or fully understand. No wonder his girlfriends said of him — in the great, close-harmony trio “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” — that “you impersonate a person better than a zombie should.”
Those lyrics are delivered (deliciously) by three men in Ms. Elliott’s version of “Company,” as a barbed valentine to the character now named Bobbie. Though you know where they’re coming from (Bobbie is as quick to send her one-night stands packing as the male version was), you’re unlikely to agree with them.
That’s because, as played by Ms. Craig, Bobbie wears her feelings on her face — and in her long-limbed question mark of a body, and in her tender, yearning voice — in a way that the audience can always read, even if her friends and lovers can’t. Like the Bobbys of yore, she’s amused and frightened by the perilously coupled partners around her.
That double-edged response, by the way, really makes sense when one of them is played, as she is here, by Patti LuPone (in fine, penetrating voice and glowering form as Joanne, the part immortalized by Elaine Stritch). But Ms. Craig’s Bobbie radiates a longing that turns wistfulness into something close to existential anguish. No wonder she drinks so eagerly, and so much.
This revival also underscores our awareness that being a woman at 35 is still different from being a man of the same age. Bobbie enjoys her independence and her solitude in a very female way. (She’s annoyed when her dates leave the toilet seat up.) She also has alarming fantasies of motherhood, in which she sees an assortment of overstressed alter-egos pregnant or tending, exhausted, to needy newborns.
And as designed by Bunny Christie — who collaborated to dazzling effect with Ms. Elliott on the Tony-winning “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” — the latter-day Manhattan of this “Company” bears a tickling resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Bobbi’s feelings of being odd woman out in the land the smugly married is externalized in rooms that keep changing shape and size — making her look grotesquely large, crushably small and even invisible.
That this “Company” is set, the program says, “in modern day New York” only occasionally begets anachronisms. Would a couple in the second decade of the 21st century really find smoking marijuana a forbidden novelty?
