Britney Coleman is the new star of the gender-switched Company
Britney Coleman aims to play up the bubbliness of Bobbie, the character she channels in the Stephen Sondheim musical comedy “Company.” But ebullience, Coleman knows, can be a kind of shield.
As the show’s 35-year-old unmarried protagonist, who’s surrounded by paired-up busybody friends, “if I stop laughing at some point, there are tears,” Coleman says. “I think that’s how my Bobbie deals with the pressures that are on her.”
Those pressures are particularly intense in director Marianne Elliott’s version of the 1970 musical, running at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House from March 12-31 as part of a North American tour. Winner of five 2022 Tony Awards, including best musical revival, during its Broadway run, the production pivots on a female Bobbie — a change from Sondheim and book writer George Furth’s original creation, built around a bachelor, Robert, a.k.a. Bobby.
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The gender switch raises the stakes for the central character, whose birthday party is more or less the sole plot point in the musical, which takes the form of vignettes that flare into exhilarating songs (“The Ladies Who Lunch,” “Being Alive”). “Company” depicts Bobbie/Bobby as dithering over relationships and commitment while hobnobbing with pals who have their own conflicted feelings about matrimony. It’s a scenario that is arguably more poignant with a female Bobbie, whose biological clock is surely ticking in the background.
“She’s only got a few years left if she does want to ever have a child,” Elliott says by phone from London. So the issue of getting hitched “becomes a much more searing question — and also one which we all can empathize with. If it’s a bloke, you know, whatever period it’s in, it doesn’t matter whether he settles down or not. Who cares?”
For Coleman, who identifies as biracial, another sobering consideration adds to Bobbie’s quandary. The actress believes her Bobbie would view starting a family as potentially medically risky, given racial disparities in pregnancy complications in this country. In her own offstage life, the 35-year-old Coleman says, that consideration “definitely is present on my mind, as far as if and when I want to have kids.”
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Notwithstanding those serious reverberations, “Company” remains a musical comedy. One set of married characters exorcise domestic frustrations through jujitsu.
“It’s forgotten a lot about ‘Company’ — just how entertaining it is,” Elliott says. “… Every line is funny.”
Elliott, who won best-director Tonys for “Company,” “War Horse” (co-directed with Tom Morris) and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” says that before proceeding with the idea of a female Bobbie, she wanted to be sure it would “intrinsically work, and not just be a gimmick.”
It worked: In addition to adding drama, centering “Company” on a woman, rather than a womanizing man, helped pare away gender-related datedness left over from the 1970s. When Bobbie beds a ditsy male flight attendant in what seems a casual relationship, the scene no longer verges on sexist clichés, as was the case when the genders were reversed in the original.
Elliott came up with other tweaks that also make the piece more contemporary — having it be gay fiancés, rather than a heterosexual couple, who experience pre-wedding butterflies, for instance.
Sondheim not only approved all the updates but essentially “became one of the collaborators,” the director says. The revered composer-lyricist saw Elliott’s “Company” before he died in 2021 and called it one of the most entertaining evenings he’d ever had in the theater.
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Following a U.K. edition that debuted in London’s West End in 2018, the Broadway iteration had its official opening in December 2021. When it came to casting the North American tour, the obvious right choice was Coleman, who had understudied Bobbie on Broadway, Elliott says.
Bobbie/Bobby as written “is quite mysterious, and never says what she is really thinking,” Elliott observes. As a result, “it’s quite hard to get ahold of the character.” For this reason, the director says, the actor must be an accessible performer who draws the audience in and clearly conveys emotion.
“There’s an infectious charm about Britney, which is really helpful,” Elliott says. Also, the director says, “those songs are not easy. And she blew me away with that beautiful voice.”
Coleman believes playing the union grievance-committee head Babe in Arena Stage’s 2017 “The Pajama Game” was good preparation for conveying Bobbie’s more rebellious side.
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She’s glad audiences will see “Company,” a beloved Sondheim work, through the lens of “a very quirky, kind of introverted, goofy woman of color, navigating life,” she says. Moreover, with its bubbliness and angst, this “Company” is a sweeping artistic experience, in Coleman’s view. “We really have some of the highest of highs and the deepest of deeps in this show.”
If you go
Company
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600. kennedy-center.org.
Dates: March 12-31.
Prices: $45-$169.
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