Culture

The Unstrung Power of Elaine Stritch in “Original Cast Album: Company”


D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Original Cast Album: Company,” which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel, has long been as widely revered as it was hard to find. As proof of its fame, the 1970 film was parodied in the 2019 season of “Documentary Now!,” although it wasn’t available to stream at the time; used DVDs of it were selling for nearly a hundred dollars. “Company,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth, has of course retained its centrality to modern musical theatre. (For example, Adam Driver’s performance of the climactic number, “Being Alive,” is one of the emotional tentpoles of Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story.”) But the cinematic transformation of “Company”—or, rather, of its songs—in Pennebaker’s documentary is an exhilaration. Staking out the jammed-up intersection of theatre, audio recording, and cinema, “Original Cast Album: Company” illuminates all three art forms simultaneously and thrillingly—and at the center of the movie and its thematic network is the singular artistry of Elaine Stritch.

Stritch played a supporting role in the Broadway show, yet she dominates the documentary of the cast album’s recording nearly from start to finish. Pennebaker and the crew made nearly the entire film in the confines of a recording studio; Columbia (now Sony) was recording the album under the aegis of the record producer Thomas Z. Shepard, joined by Sondheim himself. (There are only a pair of documentary sequences filmed elsewhere—one a lunch break midway through, the other showing the sunrise that the filmmakers found waiting for them after the recording session, which ran eighteen-plus hours and ended at 5:30 A.M.) The weighty technical apparatus and the administrative infrastructure that goes into recording the album are sketched lightly in the course of the action, giving rise to a brief prelude in which studio cables are plugged in, control-booth decisions are quickly made, members of the orchestra tune up, and the singers rehearse some passages. This elaborate context establishes, from the start, the special criteria that distinguish the singers’ artistry, as shown in the film, from an onstage performance of the songs.

Then Pennebaker leaps straight into the musical action. He films the ensemble title tune, “Company,” in a succession of extreme closeups of singers in front of dangling microphones—and the first shot is of Stritch. She launches into the song with ferocious energy and focussed intention, seen in her sharp nods of the head and possessed gazes, and her performance cuts through the crowd of singers like a spotlight. Her voice is no more prominent than any other singer’s, but, with her fierce concentration and starkly etched determination, she grabs and holds the camera’s eye.

That’s no knock on the other singers. In the next scene, a recording of “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” featuring a trio (Susan Browning, Pamela Myers, and Donna McKechnie), all three actresses—also seen mostly in closeups, which the filmmakers choreograph deftly in pan shots, zooms, and shifts in focus—blend passion and precision. Here, as throughout the film, the documentary shifts perspectives, from the performers at their microphones to the glassed-in and soundproofed control booth, where Shepard and Sondheim evaluate the performances (in unstinting terms that the actors don’t hear) and make decisions. This trio sequence gives rise to a comedic moment in which Myers, singing the phrase “Bobby bubi,” has trouble with the Yiddish word; Sondheim comes into the studio and works with her to pronounce the “u” as in “goody.” It also leads to a brief interview (several are lightly scattered through the film) with Browning, who drolly sets out the underlying stress of the occasion, saying that singing is easier onstage, because she’s dancing at the same time, so “everything goes together” and “the moment passes by,” whereas “this is the definitive, it’s the end-all and the be-all of this song, and, God, that could drive a person crazy.”

During a lunch break over mugs of beer, Shepard comes by and tells Sondheim, Stritch, and the director, Harold Prince, “I think we’ll finish roughly at four in the morning.” He proved optimistic. One of the songs recorded after the break, a rendition of “The Little Things You Do Together,” in which Stritch has the lead role among a host of others, again features her decisive, angular, precise gestures, which dominate the ensemble and possess the camera. The cinematography throughout is both agile and probing: the cameras keep physical distance from the performers, zooming in for closeups of a skin-tight proximity. (In Dean Jones’s performance of “Being Alive,” each time he launches into the latter word, the extreme closeups show off the details of his dental work.) The camera also pans deftly, refocussing on the fly without embarrassment. (The technical difficulty is built into the texture and the substance of the documentary.) The cinematographers even offer some smoothly roving shots that prowl around the singers with a feline grace. “Original Cast Album: Company” is a symphony of faces, a grand harmony of dramatic expressions and creative energy. When the image zooms out to reveal Stritch’s place among her fellow-singers, it’s clear that she’s the dramatic center even of numbers in which she doesn’t solo. The dominance of her gestures has both an expressive and a practical aspect—from within the chorus, she’s conducting.

Stritch’s solo number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” is saved for last. All the other singers are done for the night—and, some time after three in the morning, they head out, leaving Stritch and the orchestra behind, along with Shepard, Sondheim, and the technicians. Sondheim is concerned: Stritch’s voice, he knows, is tired, and he wants to transpose the song down a half tone. Stritch is reluctant: she dismisses her fatigue and, though willing to try a take his way, asks to be allowed two additional takes in the original key. She keeps her radiantly acerbic good humor, joking with Hastings as well as with Sondheim, who casually raises the tension, warning her that “this is the permanent recording, therefore it’s important.” Stritch’s first rendition is filmed in a single, uninterrupted four-and-a-half-minute take, and its intensity is almost unbearably great. Her fatigue is palpable, yet she blasts through it with a reckless power that fuses with her interpretation of the song. She’s hardly singing—rather, she’s declaiming the lyrics in a sort of sprechstimme. Her precise gestures grow unstrung, wild, possessed, and her voice turns raucous and furious, breaking with an astounding sob-like laugh on the word “surviving.” The camera work, so carefully attuned to her interpretive energies, is harrowingly intense: when the frame expands for her flailing outbursts, the image at times loses its own composure, lurching and shuddering along with them.

Bewilderingly, after this take, Shepard tells her, through the control-booth mike, that the performance lacks “tension” and is “flaccid.” Though Stritch and Sondheim agreed that they’d do two more, the count goes up to eight, leaving Sondheim shaking his head in dismay and burying it in his arms in despair. They listen to a playback with Stritch, and she reacts to herself with self-scourging fury, hearing her overtaxed voice and her now slapdash overemphasis, and roaring at herself, “Wrong!” and “Oh, shut up!” After yet another take, Sondheim suggests to Shepard that they call it a night—that they send Stritch home, record the orchestra backing (the cost of bringing the musicians in for another day would have been prohibitive), and bring Stritch back another day to record the song when her voice is fresh. Shepard conveys the request to her, and she agrees.



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