It seemed like a celebrity stunt: a Broadway classic revived in concert form for a few nights and featuring a cast of, eww, television stars. Neil Patrick Harris may be suited for blithe hosting chores on the Tony Awards, and the Emmy show and the Spike TV Video Games Awards and the TV Land Awards and the World Magic Awards, but he’s no Raul Esparza. Whatever ballast and uplift Jon Cryer and Christina Hendricks may lend to their Men shows — Two-and-a-Half and Mad — they can’t be expected to Act and Sing at the same time. Martha Plimpton can play a wily rube on Raising Hope, but not a Manhattan sophisticate of the John Lindsay era. As for the first-ever collaboration of two legendary Stephens, Sondheim and Colbert, that promised little more than the musical-theater equivalent of truthiness.
When the New York Philharmonic presented Sondheim’s Company for four sold-out April evenings at Lincoln Center, the guardians of official Broadway culture nearly drowned out the music with their muttering about the TV vandals of storming the Great White Way cathedral. At the New York Times, theater critic Charles Isherwood’s nose went north in Olympian disdain. “Accomplished singing was all but absent,” he sniffed in an opinion piece titled, “Are Musicals Losing Their Voices?” The how-dare-they? contempt was as strong and searing as if the Kardashians had come to Broadway in Three Sisters.
Now, for a week starting this evening, in more than 400 movie houses, the Company concert is on the big screen — undoubtedly with the same goal in mind: to sell tickets to fans of the TV stars.
