Do Bobby Need to Be Openly Gay Stephen Sondheim’s Revised ‘Company’?

Contents:

• DO BOBBY NEED TO BE OPENLY GAY STEPHEN SONDHEIM’S REVISED ‘COMPANY’?
• THE 50 BT GAY SONGS TO CELEBRATE PRI ALL YEAR LONG
• HE'S SO GAY

DO BOBBY NEED TO BE OPENLY GAY STEPHEN SONDHEIM’S REVISED ‘COMPANY’?

Yterday afternoon was revealed that Stephen Sondheim (along wh director John Tiffany) has reworked his classic mil edy, Company, wh a major plot twist: Bobby, the central, sgle character, who spends the urse of the show alg wh his own abily to m, is gay. ” It’s an tertg revisn, as crics have long argued that Bobby was a closeted homosexual the first place. There’s not much the text that suggts Bobby is gay, although people have certaly wonred: why else uldn’t a handsome sgle man settle down?

THE 50 BT GAY SONGS TO CELEBRATE PRI ALL YEAR LONG

“We don’t al wh gay marriage as such, but this versn lets explore the issu of mment a h way. ”Perhaps that’s why Sondheim is on board wh this openly gay productn — which will see a readg at Roundabout Theater Company this week, featurg Daniel Evans, Bobby Steggert, Michael Urie, and Alan Cummg, who will liver Joanne’s famo 11 o’clock number. It’s promisg that this Company will be actually reworked to ment, possibly, on the gay experience; while marriage is an optn, ’s not the only optn, and generatns of men who were told was not a possibily have surely seen their social and romantic sensibili affected by what mastream society saw as the norm.

HE'S SO GAY

To be homosexual surely meant somethg different 1970 than do today, too, which cric Jam Jorn poted out when he reviewed the New York Philharmonic’s all-star stagg of the mil 2011 (Neil Patrick Harris starred as Bobby) for Capal New York. When discsg a major lyril change the song “You Can Drive a Person Crazy, ” sung by Bobby’s three jilted lovers — “I uld unrstand a person if a person was a fag” turned to “I uld unrstand a person if he happened to be gay” when Roundabout revived the show 1995 — Jorn suggts that Bobby, who very well might be homosexual, wouldn’t be seen as such bee of the many layers of stigma attached to beg queer:Back the 1960s, the nventnal wisdom was that some men had sex wh other men ocsnally, and other men maybe fantasized om time to time about same-sex actn, but none of the guys were what you would ll homosexual. A homosexual, on the other hand, was seen as a pletely different breed, a “boy the band” hairdrser or an terr signer or an opera queen wh some sort of twisted secret sire to be a woman, or at least to be treated like a woman by some big, butch (preferably workg-class) straight du.

That kd of homosexual was a “fag, ” a mp joke, and a woman chasg after such a creature was obvly ridiculo, bee, the words of an early Sondheim lyric, “his troers [are] vern…. But the revisn “happened to be gay” isn’t really a joke bee ’s non-judgmental.