Company (Gielgud Theatre) JohnnyFox October 18, 2018 Musicals, Reviews, Theatre Over the weekend I’ll write a longer and more personal reflection on Company. For now, here’s my Londonist review: UNLIMITED : COMPANY @ Gielgud Theatre W1 Marianne Elliott’s imaginative and expansive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company switches the gender of its 35-year old singleton surrounded by married friends. It’s an electrifying modernization of what was already a pretty ground-breaking musical, but it‘s also now Sex and the City with songs. Rosalie Craig is smart and likeable as Bobbie, but the rest of the characters are nightmares, propelled on a grand-scale rolling stock set by Bunny Christie and studded with motifs from Alice in Wonderland which add a surreal layer to Bobbie’s fears and dreams about marriage. Maybe there’s too much scenery for such a plotless show, but there’s definitely a succession of ‘star turns’ from Jonathan Bailey’s hyper-neurotic gay groom, camply and emphatically updating ‘Getting Married Today’, a delicious ‘Barcelona’ with Richard Fleeshman as a gauche but muscular flight attendant, waking from a one-night stand, to Broadway’s resident snapping turtle Patti LuPone hammering ‘Here’s to the Ladies Who Lunch’ into the plaster cherubs on the front of the balcony. But there’s subtlety, too: Gavin Spokes gets closest to the realistic and emotional heart of Sondheim’s original, leading the husbands in ‘Sorry–Grateful’ a tender expression of loving endurance in long relationships, And then ‘Another Hundred People’ got up and applauded Patti LuPone. booking until 30 March 2019