D.A. Pennebaker – Original Cast Album: Company (1970)
Synopsis
Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Company” opened on Broadway in the Spring of 1970, and tradition dictates that the cast recording is done on the first Sunday after opening night. D.A. Pennebaker, the now-legendary documentarian, filmed the production of the original cast recording, the back and forth between Sondheim and the performers, and the dynamic of trying to record live performance. The film climaxes with Elaine Stritch’s performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch”. The show won 6 Tony Awards including “Best Musical” and ran for two years on Broadway.
The making of the original cast recording was captured by award-winning documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker shortly after the show opened on Broadway as a pilot for a TV series highlighting the different ways a cast-album recording session could be conducted. However, a week after the original screening, all the original producers for the proposed series were hired to go out to Hollywood and head up production at MGM. As nobody was left in New York to spearhead the project, the series was therefore scrapped. Only this lone pilot film remains of an idea never brought to fruition.
The 1970 film Original Cast Album: Company is filled with behind the scenes footage of the recording process, complete with much of the musical direction from and insight of Sondheim himself. Several of the show’s numbers are captured in the film—including “Another Hundred People”, “Getting Married Today”, and “Being Alive”—all recorded with a live orchestra, done in multiple takes over the course of several hours. Eventually only “The Ladies Who Lunch” remains to be recorded. It is now well past midnight, and Stritch, Sondheim, and the orchestra are all clearly suffering from the effects of the day’s marathon recording session. Stritch struggles repeatedly to record a satisfactory version of the song, even going so far as to slightly drop the key for a few takes in the hopes of producing a satisfactory take. Her voice and performance continue to degrade. As she struggles, some conflict is seen between Stritch, the producer Thomas Z. Shepard, and Sondheim.
As dawn breaks over the Columbia Records Big Church recording studio on 30th and 3rd, everyone agrees to call it a night. They record one last take of the orchestra by themselves and agree to have Stritch come back the following afternoon and record the vocal over the previously recorded orchestra bed. The finale of the film features a revitalized Stritch, still in makeup from a matinee performance of the show, successfully performing “The Ladies Who Lunch” in one take, as the sun sets over Kips Bay.
Original.Cast.Album.Company.1970.720p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 53mn 0s
Size: 2.53 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 960x720
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 6 552 Kbps
BPP: 0.395
Audio
#1: English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 154 Kbps
#2: English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 62.7 Kbps (Commentary by director D. A. Pennebaker, actor Elaine Stritch, and broadway producer Harold Prince)
#3: English 1.0ch AAC LC @ 64.7 Kbps (Commentary by composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim)
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English
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