LOS ANGELES — “Look at that Mojito!” Matt Rodin announced as the ornate virgin passionfruit drink was placed in front of his castmate, Britney Coleman.
The drinks may have been mocktails, but the conversation around the table at the Ivy Restaurant in West Hollywood was very real as a trio of actors from the tour of Broadway’s "Company" had their own “Ladies who Lunch” moment.
Three is a magic number for this show in which Coleman plays the perpetual third wheel.
The musical, by Stephen Sondheim with a book by George Furth, opened on Broadway in 1970 and centers on Bobby, a single man surrounded by married friends. Half a century later, this gender-swapped revival casts Bobbie as a woman — a big change, although Coleman, who plays the role, said they didn’t actually alter all that much.
“We haven't changed most of the script except for the pronouns, and it's really the human experience," she explained. "So it's a very easy switch, and it feels really relevant today.”
Maybe even more so now than when this version premiered on London’s West End in 2018. With a national conversation focused on marriage and families and memes about childless cat women, the cast had a lot to discuss over salads and shrimp tacos.
“It doesn't mean I don't care about the planet just because I don't have children that live on it,” Judy McLane said. As the acerbic Joanne, she’s seen on stage downing vodka zingers, but at lunch on a show day, stuck to coffee.
“You get couples with kids and you get couples without kids,” Rodin said about the characters in the show. “And what family means and what it means to be in a relationship with other people and seeing them as whole and enough.”
Rodin plays Jamie, the production’s other gender swapped role, formerly called Amy. Jamie is having cold feet on his wedding day, singing Sondheim’s epic and vocally acrobatic “(Not) Getting Married Today.” Rodin had his final callback for the role on his own actual wedding day, singing the song at the audition hours after exchanging vows.
“The relevance is just so present for me,” he admitted. “I had so many fears around getting married and making that commitment and so embodying this role, this character… yeah. The emotions is not farfetched for me at all.”
“But,” he added with a smile, “it’s a really fun gift that I get to kind of relive a part of my wedding day eight times a week.”
He loves the way Jamie and Paul’s relationship is depicted on stage and is grateful he gets to bring their queer love story to stages across the country where they may be reaching a new audience.
“I feel like so often we're kind of either getting a caricature, you know, that sort of Modern Family gay, or we're getting a Call Me By Your Name…highly traumatized gay story,” Rodin explained. “And this feels somewhere in between. It's nuanced. It's honest.”
It’s also in no one singled out from the other couples who populate Bobbie’s world.
“They're just another couple,” Rodin said. “When we talk about equality, like that's what we mean. We don't want any kind of special treatment. We just want to feel like we're a part of the group.”
For Coleman, this role in this show is a major meta moment. She turned 35 during the tour — “on a show night!” Rodin announced — reaching the same milestone her character is celebrating. With 35s appearing all over the set, from the number on her apartment door to the massive balloons that overpower the stage, it adds a biological clock factor to the story that a male Bobby doesn’t experience. This Bobbie hears it ticking as she studies the marriages around her. She may not always know what she wants, Coleman said, but she knows what she wants to avoid becoming.
“The Trad Wife, that phrase that's being thrown around,” Coleman said. “The traditional kind of, you know, one family, have your white picket fence, have all the kids, all that stuff.”
“It’s the acceptance of all different types of relationships,” McLane added, pointing to the song “Marry Me a Little.” “I don’t necessarily want that traditional thing. You want something a little different and that I think is a huge reflection of right now.”
So what exactly does Bobbie wish for as she blows out her candles? That, Coleman said, is for the audience to decide.
“The beauty of Sondheim is that he doesn't spoon feed the audience on how to feel,” she said as lunch was wrapping up. “It's kind of up to the audience to kind of take away what they think she's come to by the end of the show.”
In that way this show is a gift, an untraditional exploration of life’s myriad of possible choices and the nuances that exist in relationships. As they sing in the opening song, “That’s what it’s really about, isn’t it?”