Maverick British director John Doyle, a 2006 Tony Award winner, enjoyed a surprise Broadway hit last year with his radical reworking of Sweeney Todd. He dispensed with the pit orchestra and handed all the instruments over to his on-stage performers, who doubled as musicians in between their turns acting and singing. Doyle has taken a similarly unorthodox approach to his revival of another Stephen Sondheim classic, the revered yet notoriously difficult to stage Company. As with Sweeney Todd, the results of this theatre-as-concert have entranced both critics and audiences. Linda Winer of Newsday called it "the very best revival that Broadway has ever seen of Stephen Sondheim's landmark 1970 musical."Variety described it as "striking, revelatory and thoroughly compelling." For Sondheim fans, the recorded score to Company has long been as much an object of adoration as the six-time Tony-winning play itself. Company on disc functions as a deeply moving song cycle, even apart from George Furth's libretto, about the vicissitudes of marriage and the joys and trials of the single life, seen through the eyes of the coolly dispassionate Manhattan bachelor Bobby on the occasion of his 35th birthday. This is truly the stuff of sex and the city - wry, sophisticated, painfully honest and deeply melancholy, even in a comic seducing-the-stewardess duet like "Barcelona." As with Sweeney Todd, which featured a bravura performance from lead actor Michael Cerveris, Doyle has found in rising star Raúl Esparza (Cabaret, Taboo, The Normal Heart) an extraordinary singer and actor who, in the words of the New York Times' Ben Brantley, gives Company "the most compelling center it has probably ever had." "Mr. Doyle and his invaluable music supervisor and orchestrator, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, have shaped Company into a sort of oratorio for the church of the lonely," says Brantley. He also praises the work of the entire ensemble - playing five married couples, three single women and one deeply ambivalent, unmarried man: "It's their work as a team that sounds new depths in Company in ways that get under your skin without your knowing it." Variety's David Rooney concurs: "Angel Desai's `Another Hundred People' nails that quintessential New York song; Heather Laws lands every laugh in the mile-a-minute `Getting Married Today' with amazing speed and clarity; and Barbara Walsh is bone-dry as brittle, world-weary Joanne. She reveals the emotional hunger beneath the character's hard shell and adds fresh nuances to `The Ladies Who Lunch,' a song indelibly associated with Elaine Stritch." As Time Out New York put it, "Sondheim's expert musical etchings, his acid craftsmanship, remain unmatched." Sondheim fans will note that this new version of Company, to be released by Nonesuch and PS Classics, restores the original act one closer, "Marry Me A Little," which was dropped from the show before its 1970 Broadway debut; the song has since taken on a life of its own as an orphaned Sondheim gem. The Company cast album is produced by PS Classics co-founder Tommy Krasker (Sondheim's The Frogs, Saturday Night, Assassins, and Sweeney Todd, among others). Along with Company, Nonesuch has also released the original cast album to Doyle's 2006 production of Sweeney Todd and the Tony-nominated A Light in the Piazza, which features a score by Nonesuch artist Adam Guettel.

Pacific Overtures is in some ways the quintessential Stephen Sondheim musical. Developed out of a play by librettist John Weidman about the opening of Japan by Admiral Perry in 1853, it has a highly unusual subject matter for a Broadway show. And it treats that subject matter in a highly unusual way: its music owes much to traditional Japanese styles, and it tells its story largely from the point of view of the Japanese. The attempt to break new ground for the Broadway musical is a hallmark of Sondheim's method, and the show's reception is also typical; it was a succès d'estime, much respected by theater lovers but not actually financially successful, with an initial run in 1976 of a mere 193 performances, followed by only occasional revivals, none of them a full-blown Broadway production. But in 2000, Amon Miyamoto directed a version in Japan, performed in Japanese, that was seen by Sondheim and Weidman, who worked to bring it to the U.S. That production did have American performances, but the 2004 Broadway revival mounted as a limited run by the subscription-based Roundabout Theatre Company and again directed by Miyamoto is back in English and features American actors such as B.D. Wong, a Broadway veteran, who stars as the Reciter. On-stage, the revival is much different in appearance from the 1976 version, with the kabuki elements abandoned and a spare stage set. On disc, the differences are less noticeable. The cast album is an excellent rendition of the score, and it is longer than the original, with much dialogue included, which gives a better sense of the storyline. An added treat is "Prayers," a cut song performed by Sondheim and original director Hal Prince during the run-up to the original production, that has been included as a bonus. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Amazon.com Pacific Overtures is one of Stephen Sondheim's most rewarding but least-appreciated works. Part of the reason is it's been one of the least-staged Sondheim shows due to its unusual requirements: following the conventions of the Japanese Noh play, it uses an all-Asian, all-male cast, and authentic instruments such as the shamisen. As a slice of history, John Weidman's book is fascinating: In 1853, Japan's borders were closed to all foreigners until the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry forced the opening of trade relations. Sondheim's score captures the delicacy of Japanese verse ("Poems"), a blackly humorous scene of the emperor's refusal to acknowledge the American ships ("Chrysanthemum Tea"), Gilbert & Sullivan-esque patter ("Please Hello"), and the most beautiful song ever written about prostitution (the lyric men's trio "Pretty Lady"). Worthy of special mention is the song Sondheim has often claimed as his best ever, "Someone in a Tree," which describes the crucial meeting in the treaty house from the perspective of different characters on the outside. Over a quarter century after its 1976 Broadway debut, Pacific Overtures began to enjoy increased attention from theater companies, culminating in a Broadway revival in 2004. --David Horiuchi