When WA Academy of Performing Arts graduate Sonya Suares previously returned to her alma mater to direct the current student cohort — like she did for 2023 Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd — she relished walking the same carpeted hallways of her formative career years.
The Melbourne-based creative’s return this semester to direct third-year music theatre students in another Tony Award-winning Sondheim musical, Company, sees her instead navigating the future of performing arts training at WAAPA’s new ECU City Campus.
“It’s quite the Back To The Future Part II experience and just extraordinary to see this very futuristic, shiny building,” says Suares, the founder and first artistic director of Australian Sondheim repertory company Watch This.
“Everything’s brand spanking new and the walls are sparkling clean, although I’m sure, over time, it will absorb the sweat and history of many, many generations of artists.”
Company: A Concept Musical for the Ages
Making its Broadway debut in 1970, with an acclaimed Broadway revival in 2021, Company is a concept musical of fast-paced vignettes following single New Yorker Bobby as he nears his 35th birthday, surrounded by multiple married couple friends.
“He lives kind of vicariously through them, puzzling out what it is to be in a couple, and they all live a kind of vicarious single life through him,” Suares explains.
“He simultaneously has three girlfriends on the hop but can’t quite commit to them. It’s not because he’s not a romantic type. It’s like there’s some sort of cling wrap over his heart, or a barrier that he’s not quite able to pierce through.
“We’re not watching Bobby on a journey through time with a beginning, middle and end that’s linear as we would understand it. The kind of operating logic is an existential inquiry. He keeps going in and out of different moments with his friends as he puzzles through the idea of what it is to be in a committed relationship with another human being.”
Exploring Relationships Through a Modern Lens
Suares says the production is about someone at a very thorny point in their existence, even though the work is playful and about love and relationships, with a wonderfully bold, brassy and percussive score featuring songs such as The Ladies Who Lunch, You Could Drive A Person Crazy, The Little Things You Do Together and Being Alive.
“It’s much lighter to hold that space with young people than, say, doing a gothic horror (like Sweeney Todd),” she adds.
“But for Bobby, and for all of us who’ve been there through heartache, that’s no small thing.”
Despite Sondheim being a queer man himself, Company is a product of the time it was written, when only heteronormative relationships were shown on stage, and Suares says it would be reductive to consider the musical was only about whether or not to get married.
“That would be like saying Macbeth is about whether or not to stab a king — it’s too simplistic,” she says.
“Sometimes with students, when they’re looking at work from a different generation, that’s the most dominant thing that they’re seeing, that there’s no other representation.
“Yes, the frame is heteronormative because that was the acceptable frame at the time . . . My interest in the work is to look at what is transferable or parallel in these relationships, in all relationships, that is being explored.”
Company is at State Theatre Centre of WA’s Studio Underground, June 6 to 11, tickets at artsculturetrust.wa.gov.au.
