A Return to Company

Stephen Sondheim and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick revisit the making of the iconic cast album—and Elaine Stritch’s beautiful meltdown.

- By Frank Rich

Hollywood has a long history of making beloved movies about the backstage machinations of Broadway. A short list would include films as various as Warner Bros.’ Depression-era fable 42nd Street, Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon, Mel Brooks’s The Producers, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, and, at the head of the class, Joseph Mankiewicz’s acid-tinged valentine to Broadway’s postwar golden age, All About Eve. They were mostly made in Los Angeles. But some of the best films about the Broadway theater are documentaries made in New York and not nearly as well known as they should be, in part because they have been only sporadically available (if at all) on commercial video. They were the work of D.A. Pennebaker, the groundbreaking filmmaker who died at 94 in 2019 and whose eclectic subjects spanned from Bob Dylan in the late ’60s (Don’t Look Back) to the first Bill Clinton presidential campaign (The War Room).

Two of his exemplary Broadway films, Jane (1962) and Moon Over Broadway (1997, co-directed with Chris Hegedus), chronicle productions from their hopeful geneses to their disillusioning opening nights. They have been overshadowed by Original Cast Album: Company (1970), Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall account of the marathon making of the Columbia recording of the musical that rebooted Stephen Sondheim’s career six years after his previous Broadway musical as composer-lyricist, Anyone Can Whistle, had flamed out in a week. Despite often falling out-of-print over the past half-century, this 53-minute film has survived as a semi-underground classic and as recently as 2019 inspired a