"Being Alive" for 45 Years -- TheaterMania Celebrates Sondheim's COMPANY

As we bid a fond farewell to April, it is worth noting that Company, the Stephen Sondheim/George Furth musical about marriage, commitment, friendship and growing up, celebrated its 45th birthday earlier this week. It has been 45 years since this fresh, funny show about a bachelor named Bobby (baby, bubby) opened on Broadway.

Bobby is a bit of an enigma, surrounded by well-meaning friends -- married couples all -- but unsure of why he isn't part of a couple himself. He dates. He is apparently a good friend, given how involved all the other couples are in his life. But Bobby... He has trouble figuring out whether sharing his life with another person is good, bad or indifferent. Is it better to let someone else move in, to hold you too close, hurt you too deep, sit in your chair, ruin your sleep? Or is being alone just being alone, not alive? That's what Bobby can't quite get past as his birthday looms.

In honor of Company's anniversary, TheaterMania has collected together a sampling of performances of "Being Alive," the stirring anthem that closes the show and asks all the questions listed above.

TheaterMania has Dean Jones, the original, Neil Patrick Harris, from the recent filmed New York Philharmonic concert version of Company, Raul Esparza, perhaps the most powerful Bobby, Adrian Lester, an English Bobby who acted the heck out of the role, Julian Ovenden, another Brit with a fabulous voice who performed it for the BBC Proms, divas Patti Lupone and Bernadette Peters, and John Barrowman, who offers one of the prettiest performances. It's a pretty fab collection strung together like that, even if it doesn't include one of my favorite interpretations of the song -- Norm Lewis's Sondheim on Sondheim "Being Alive."

You can listen to Lewis's version of "Being Alive" above or here on Youtube before you go off and buy the Sondheim on Sondheim cast album and then hunt down full versions of all those other "Being Alives." It just doesn't get better than that.

Blow out the candles, Robert. Make a wish!

SIX BY SONDHEIM: Tonight, Tonight Won't Be Just Any Night

The lyrics for "Tonight" from West Side Story -- all the lyrics from West Side Story, from "The Jet Song" to "Somewhere" and "Gee, Officer Krupke" -- are wonderful. And who wrote them? Stephen Sondheim. So when I put "Tonight, tonight won't be just any night" in the header, yes, I was quoting his lyrics. But mostly I was referring to the fact that there's a special documentary on HBO tonight. It won't be just any night. Tonight there will be Six by Sondheim!

If you've read Sondheim's first book about his lyrics, Finishing the Hat, you know that he wasn't completely in love with what he wrote for West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein, the composer, wanted "poetic" lyrics that Sondheim felt were at odds with Arthur Laurents' dialogue as well as how he felt a boy like Tony and a girl like Maria would really speak. I'm guessing that will be part of the discussion in Six by Sondheim, which is structured around six songs in the Sondheim ouevre.

The first song discussed is "Something's Coming" from West Side Story, a show early in Sondheim's career for which he did the lyrics but not the music. That came from Bernstein, as noted above. For that reason, it provides an entry point into Sondheim's work for James Lapine, who directed this documentary. Lapine is a frequent collaborator with Sondheim; Lapine wrote the book for and directed Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods and Passion, directed Merrily We Roll Along, and conceived and directed Sondheim on Sondheim, a biographical Broadway show that used video and music to look at his life and work.

Six by Sondheim performs that same function, using six seminal pieces and Sondheim's thoughts about how and why he created them to chart the different phases in his career. Larry Kert, the first Tony in West Side Story, performs "Something's Coming" in a clip from the 50s, followed by "Opening Doors," the jaunty number about what it is to start out as an adult in the world from Merrily We Roll Along. For Six by Sondheim, "Opening Doors" gets a fresh performance from Glee's Darren Criss, Ugly Betty's America Ferrara, and Smash and Newsies star Jeremy Jordan, with Jackie Hoffman from The Addams Family, Laura Osnes, currently starring in Cinderella, and Stephen Sondheim himself in the mix.

Husband and wife Broadway stars Will Swenson and Audra McDonald, who is fresh off her triumph as the Abbess in The Sound of Music, will sing Sondheim's biggest hit as a single, "Send in the Clowns" from A Little Night Music, after we get a chance to see video of some of the very different artists -- Glynis Johns, Frank Sinatra, Cher -- who performed it over the years.

And then it's "I'm Still Here," the wry Follies song about surviving "good times and bum times," "plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer..." Instead of giving it to the aging showgirl-turned-Hollywood-star described in Follies, Lapine turns the "I'm Still Here" segment over to director Todd Haynes, who has Jarvis Cocker of the rock band Pulp perform it in front of the kind of women it's about. A provocative choice, to be sure.

It's back to the vault for footage of Dean Jones trying to get "Being Alive" right, taken from the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about the recording of the cast album from the first Company. The evening ends with "Sunday," the soaring piece about how art can immortalize, as performed by Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin in the Broadway production, captured for television broadcast on American Playhouse. Ending with "Sunday"? Perfection.

I loved Sondheim on Sondheim. I loved the two volumes he wrote -- Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat -- that go into detail about his lyrics. You can never get enough Sondheim, after all. Which is why Six by Sondheim is a must-see, tonight at 8 Central time on HBO.