PROJECT #1 FABLE

The Company Fable

It’s Roberts 35^th birthday and his closest friends, all of whom are married, throw him a surprise birthday party.

After the candles have been blown out the next scene begins which is in the house of Sarah and Harry, one who is a prolific magazine reader and the other a drinker who to prove a point to himself has stopped drinking. The scene escalates when harry taunts Sarah into demonstrating her skills of karate, this is the start of the song the little things you do together sung by Joanne, more on her closer to the end of the play, this song is a basic illustration of what makes up a relationship, more specifically a marriage.

At the end of the scene, when Sarah goes up to bed Robert asks harry if he’s ever sorry he got married. Harry responds with a simple and beautiful song, sorry-grateful, which clarifies his and all the other husbands’ ideas of marriage and what it takes and what it means to promise fidelity forever.

The next scene that follows is another night with Robert where he meets up with his two friends David and Jenny, also a married couple. The scene begins with the group of them all in the midst of smoking a joint. They go into how it makes them feel and the wife has a breakthrough when she finds herself able to say things she usually holds back, cursing, for example.

This scene is followed by a song by the three lovers of Robert; April, Marta and Kathy called you could drive a person crazy in which the women list their complaints about dating a man who expects to give nothing in return.

Next scene, the loft of two more of his friends, they have a view of the east river from their balcony. The scene is short, a quick story and the revealing to Robert that they are getting a divorce.

Next is one of the strongest songs in all of Sondheims creations, another hundred people. This is sung by Marta, one of Roberts three love interest. A wonderfully colorful song portraying new York city as never seen before. As a place where people come and go. Dispersed throughout the song are the two dates with Amy and Kathy. Amy tells about her dreams to move to radio city in new York only to find that it is in fact a theatre and not an actual city. She claims she is very dumb. The next date is with Kathy which takes place in central park in the evening. She tells Robert that she is moving back to cape cod and is getting married. As the song ends the scene moves onto the date with marta who is unlike anyone in the play. She is free spirited and loves new York city in her own unique way. It is in this scene that we really discover a lot about Robert and his life in the city. We realize that Robert is more of a wasp that originally expected and he admits to mostly meeting people like himself.


Now to the polar opposite of that, we find ourselves at a wedding, or at least the moments before the wedding is to take place. This is a wedding between Amy and her soon to be husband Paul. Paul is overjoyed at the idea of matrimony but Amy finds herself with cold feet and begins her rant about why she can’t go through with it. She rants in the form of a patter song called not getting married today in which she asks the members and guests of the wedding to go home. At the end of the song Amy asks Robert what she just did, sensing Amys apprehension to her marriage with Paul he tells her that she did what she had to do and with that he asks Amy to marry him instead. She finds his proposal funny and through this decides to marry Paul once again, now excited at the idea of being with someone as wonderful as Paul.

The following song is a song between the sleeping husbands and the worried wives, poor baby. In this number the women voice their worries about their friend Robert and state how much he needs a wife so he won’t be sitting evening after evening by the telephone.

This is followed by one of the highest strung scenes in the play and to raise the stakes even higher, the three of them are drunk. Robert, Joanne and ….. are out on the town. Drunkenly joanne yells at some women nearby launching her into a tirade of upper class wives, this tirade has become one of the most famous songs of this show, the ladies who lunch. it is after this song that we find Joannes intentions to have an affair with Robert when her husband is at work. He declines.

Robert discovers his longing for someone to take care of, some one to hold him too close, someone to hurt him too deep, someone to make him feel alive. The climax of Robert is the final song being alive.