in the musical, a prostitute named Elsie. Elsie gave Sally Bowles
this number and then achieved her place in memory when she
died and was laid out on her bier, “the happiest corpse I’d ever
seen.” Both times Sally Bowles sings this climactic number, the
chorus of cabaret performers who are with her disappears into
darkness, and she is left alone on the stage. Ensembles do not
hold together for Sally Bowles. They are for Nazis. In her title
number, Sally Bowles ends up singing alone, in memory of a
dead prostitute. The reversal this musical gives to the Rodgers
and Hammerstein format is rigorous and exact.
Sondheim’s Company(1970) challenges the ensemble ten-
dency by seeming to be about urban loneliness. Bobby, the
hero, does not do ensemble at all well. His friends, who do, are
all married. They think Bobby should get married, although
the husbands also think he is lucky in his freedom and the
wives think he should be attracted to women like themselves.
The climactic number, “Being Alive,” declares that Bobby is
ready to end his isolation through some sort of long-term rela-
tionship, but in fact no such relationship develops, and he sings
most of “Being Alive” alone. Earlier in the number the married
friends do some of the singing, as though this were an ensem-
ble piece in the making, but the song does not take shape until
the married friends turn silent and Bobby is free to sing the
entire tune through on his own.^14 This is hardly an example
of ensemble performance. The orchestration (by Jonathan Tu-
nick) even tucks the “Company” theme into the accompani-
ment to “Being Alive.” This is the ensemble tune with which
the musical began. Now there is no ensemble, and their tune
has been absorbed into Bobby’s solo.
There follows a book scene in which Bobby refuses to ap-
pear at his birthday party, and the friends are left with nothing
to do. So they leave, and Bobby comes along to blow out his
birthday candles by himself. As often happens in a Sondheim
96 CHAPTER FOUR
(^14) It does not take shape because the B section of the AABA song form does
not fully occur until Bobby sings alone. See Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Mu-
sicals, pp. 169–72, for a good discussion of the ambiguities and contradictions
in “Being Alive.”