If ever you needed a reminder that theater and television are not the same thing, tonight's "Great Performances" broadcast of "Company" (at 9 on Channel 2) is it.
The British director John Doyle staged his Tony-winning revival of the 1970 Stephen Sondheim/George Furth musical with admirable simplicity and directness. As directed for TV by Lonny Price, however, the broadcast version cuts senselessly from close-up to aerial view to obstructed medium shot, imposes multiple images of a single character on the screen, and otherwise uses the miracle of modern technology to shatter our experience of the show into a thousand fragments. In short, for anyone who longs to get a taste of a great live performance, this "Great Performance" may prove as frustrating as it is rewarding.
Nevertheless, the rewards are there. It is possible, despite the distracting camera angles and frenetic editing, to glimpse the lean energy and focused passion of Doyle's vision. As he did in "Sweeney Todd," which toured here earlier this season, Doyle in "Company" takes what could be a gimmick - having the actors accompany themselves on musical instruments - and uses it to pare down Sondheim's music to its mordant, just barely hopeful heart.
The distilled intensity of Doyle's approach gives fresh vigor to the 1970 story of bachelor Bobby and his flock of married friends. And the slightly surreal impression we get from watching characters play a scene, then lift up a tuba or a piccolo, both underscores the surreality of Furth's book and lets us accept it more easily. We quickly move on from noticing that "Company" is taking place in some weird plane between New York City and Bobby's head, and we're free just to focus on appreciating its deeper truths.
Thanks to Sondheim's brilliant score, those truths remain as double-edged and bittersweet as ever. "Sorry-Grateful," "Marry Me a Little," "Barcelona" - song after song illuminates a facet of our complicated, contradictory desires to be at once utterly free and utterly safe. The idea of a "swinging bachelor" like Bobby may feel dated, but the reality of a human struggling to figure out how to live among other humans remains touching and timeless.
When the cameras let us catch a glimpse of it, Raúl Esparza's performance as Bobby is subtle, layered, and irresistible. Of course that makes it all the more frustrating that we're rarely given a chance just to watch him. But if all else fails, you can close your eyes and hear how richly he builds the character through voice alone. (The same is true of Barbara Walsh's throaty Joanne, particularly in her furious rendition of "The Ladies Who Lunch.") And occasionally, as in his duet with Elizabeth Stanley on "Barcelona," the camera settles down enough to let us catch the song.
No doubt the busy editing is meant to "liven up" what television producers fear is a static picture, just some people standing on a stage singing. But the irony is that much of Doyle's staging, especially in the numbers that feature the whole company, is so fluid and carefully focused that it doesn't seem static at all. It's too bad that the television people didn't trust the stage people to do what they do best: focus our attention through their own presence and skill, and keep us watching simply by making it impossible to look away.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
