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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
You're in bad company, 15 Dec 2003
I'm an absolute Sondheim nut and "Company" is one of my favourite scores. It's sad, then, that I want to pan this recording of the musical.To those of you who don't know the show - our everyman hero, Robert, is facing his 35th birthday and trying to figure out where his life his going. This leads him to fantasise about himself, his married friends and his on-off girlfriends, acting out his anxieties about love, marriage and commitment as a Broadway musical. I wish all therapy was this fun ... Frankly, this recording is not a patch on the original 1970 cast recording. The guy playing Bobby has - in my opinion - a thin, reedy voice, nowhere near the warmth and timbre of Dean Jones's original. Likewise, the actress playing Joanne is too over-the-top, too drunken and too tuneless (sure, Joanne should be all a little of all those things, but she takes it way too far) and just isn't in Elaine Stritch's league. It's not just the performers, though. This is a scaled-down version of the orchestration and it doesn't sound as good. The wonderful hammond organ mimicking of a 'busy' phone signal in the opening number has been completely lost, replaced by a rather weedy-sounding electric piano. If you really want to hear what the score can be, you should hear the 1970 recording, which Amazon isn't stocking, alas. The one saving grace of this album is "Marry Me a Little" - and I say that because the 1970 recording doesn't feature this superb song (originally an alternative to the final number "Being Alive") at all. But there are probably better versions of it out there than this one. If this is absolutely the only recording of the show you can find, get it - it's a great show. But I don't think you'll really appreciate, or even like, the music until you've heard the 1970 version.
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