Company

“As a composer and lyricist – and a genre all on his own –, Sondheim issues a challenge to his audience.

His greatest successes are not mere tunes to hum; they are meditations on the roads not taken, on misdirected wishes, on relationships so worn and dislocated that there is no choice left but to bring in the clowns.

And yet Stephen’s music is so beautiful, his lyrics so precise, that at the very moment he reveals the imperfections of everyday life, he transcends them. And we transcend them with him.

” Barack Obama On 4 April 1994, in the pages of New York Magazine, James Kaplan published an article devoted to Stephen Sondheim.

”, the article still today captures the importance of the American author and composer in the history of the musical: inventor of a new form of theatrical dialogue, he not only opened new perspectives for the musical, but also, quite simply, reinvented it.

After learning his craft alongside Oscar Hammerstein II, he became, in 1957, the lyricist for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. A little under fifteen years later, on 26 April 1970, Stephen Sondheim premiered Company at the Alvin Theatre: his first masterpiece on Broadway.

Awarded six Tony Awards, the author and composer immediately established himself on the New York and world stage. Working with librettist George Furth and director Harold Prince, Stephen Sondheim produced the very first “concept musical”.

Without grand dance numbers, without a linear story, Company is a succession of sketches that question the entry into adult life, based on a fragmented narrative.