As a composer and a lyricist, and a genre unto himself, Sondheim challenges his audiences. His greatest hits aren’t tunes you can hum; they’re reflections on roads we didn’t take, and wishes gone wrong, relationships so frayed and fractured there’s nothing left to do but send in the clowns.
Yet Stephen’s music is so beautiful, his lyrics so precise, that even as he exposes the imperfections of everyday life, he transcends them. We transcend them. Put simply, Stephen reinvented the American musical.”
Barack Obama
On 4 April 1994, in the pages of New York Magazine, James Kaplan published an article devoted to Stephen Sondheim. Entitled The Cult of Saint Stephen Sondheim, and cited time and again under the erroneous title Is Stephen Sondheim God?, this article still serves to characterise the importance of the American author and composer in the history of the musical, as the inventor of a new form of theatrical dialogue, he not only opened up new perspectives for the genre, but quite simply reinvented it.
Having trained alongside Oscar Hammerstein II, he became, in 1957, the lyricist to Leonard Bernstein for West Side Story. A little less than fifteen years later, on 26 April 1970, Stephen Sondheim premiered Company at the Alvin Theater: it was his first masterpiece on Broadway. Awarded six Tony Awards, the author and composer at once established himself upon the New York stage and beyond.
In collaboration with the librettist George Furth and the director Harold Prince, Stephen Sondheim gave rise to the very first “concept musical”. Without grand dance numbers, without a linear narrative, Company unfolds as a succession of vignettes that explore the threshold of adulthood through a fragmented form.
Song becomes the catalyst for emotion and stirs reflection in the spectator upon the inner turmoil of a young man, Bobby, who celebrates his thirty-fifth birthday surrounded by friends, already settled in life. A bachelor and a philanderer, Bobby remains uncertain of marriage, and Stephen Sondheim plays upon the complexity of this thirty-something’s states of mind even as he probes individualism, the couple, and the supposed virtues of commitment.
In the manner of a social study, Company is indeed a finely wrought observation of bourgeois urban life in the United States at the close of the 1960s, yet the work also serves as a pretext for a sensitive and perceptive gaze upon friendship, love, and solitude.
Did you know you can make your visit an unforgettable and unique experience?
With our premium package, you’ll enjoy benefits reserved for the select few: a personalized welcome from a member of the Châtelet’s management team, a private backstage tour before the show begins, a reserved table at the bar during intermission with a glass of champagne and a tasting platter, as well as priority coat check and valet parking if needed.
Enjoy the magic of the show to the fullest—Le Châtelet takes care of the rest!
Price: €125 per person (in addition to the ticket price for the show)
The premium package will be offered to you after you add one or more Category 1 tickets to your cart for dates on which the premium package is available.
Secrets d’une œuvre
To learn more about Company, a presentation of the show will be held 45 minutes before the performance begins in the Salon Diaghilev, led by Aurélien Poidevin, the Châtelet’s editorial director, on Tuesday, March 30, and Thursday, April 8, 2027 (free admission, reserved for ticket holders for that day’s performance).
