On a recent Friday night, a fashionable Madrid crowd jumped to their feet at the end of a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” The audience applauded the 40 actors and musicians on stage, but the most enthusiastic ovations were reserved for Antonio Banderas, the director and star of the production. For the past nearly three hours, the Spanish actor had been singing, singing and spinning his way through the first Spanish-language production of the groundbreaking 1970 musical.
Banderas’ “Company” began a little over a year ago in Málaga, the actor’s hometown in southern Spain, where he founded a musical theater company, Teatro del Soho, in 2019. After a stop in Barcelona earlier this year, the production is ending its run in Madrid, where it plays until February 14, 2023, at the Teatro Albéniz.
“I’m actually an actor because of musical theater and musical films,” Banderas, 62, said in an interview the next day. He explained that as an adolescent in 1970s Malaga, he grew up with the great musicals of the time, including ‘Hair’, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ and ‘Godspell’.
That early love was the inspiration behind Teatro del Soho, a non-profit organization that compared Banderas to New York’s Public Theater, which aims to bring musicals other than blockbuster Broadway fare to Hispanic theatergoers. (The company’s most recent production is “Godspell” by Stephen Schwartz.)
Over the past two decades, Madrid has emerged as the musical theater capital of the Spanish world. Among the 14 shows that run there are “Tina”, “Mamma Mia!”, “We Will Rock You” and “The Lion King” (“El Rey León”). Now Banderas is trying to push the boundaries with serious, complex works little known here – and “Company” has had Banderas in mind for a long time.
In 2003, Banderas starred in the Broadway musical “Nine”, playing Guido, a filmmaker facing a creative crisis. Banderas recalled that Sondheim visited his dressing room during the run and noticed similarities between Guido and Bobby, the protagonist of ‘Company’. He also told Banderas that there was more about that show that stood out: “I like doing plays with riddles,” the actor recalls Sondheim saying.
After the meeting, Banderas said he dug into Sondheim’s catalog. ‘Company’ in particular became something of an obsession.
When “Company” premiered in 1970, it was like nothing else on Broadway: formally bold and laced with irony, it’s often described as a “concept musical” and has little plot to talk about. Instead, Sondheim and George Furth, who wrote the book, serve up a series of loosely connected scenes about a bachelor with a fear of commitment and his friends.
Banderas’ main change in the book is an age change for Bobby — the part he plays — from 35 to 50. The composer-lyricist signed off on that before his death in 2021 at age 91, Banderas said.
Everything about his production came from having an older Bobby, Banderas said. The show’s vignettes are like hallucinatory episodes as Bobby sifts through childhood memories and dreams; regret takes on a terrifying dimension because of “the proximity of death,” Banderas added.
“It was always very shocking to me how much everything was focused on Bobby,” said Banderas. “Bobby is a charismatic character, but he’s also a selfish coward.”
In the staging of Banderas, Bobby sometimes takes center stage while the large cast revolves around him. Behind them, the skyline of New York City looms majestically. “I made a glittering universe and it’s in the center, just like the sun,” Banderas said.
Banderas has cast most of the other parts of the show with local performers. “Twenty years ago you couldn’t find so many actors and actresses in Spain,” he said for musical theatre. He also insisted on using the show’s original orchestration. “I have 26 musicians here, which is not profitable,” he said, but added, “I like that sound.” (By comparison, the 2021 Broadway revival of “Company” used a 14-person band.)
To craft a compelling Spanish-language version, Banderas turned to Roser Batalla and Ignacio García May, a duo who had previously collaborated on “A Chorus Line.”
“Each Sondheim is a challenge,” says Batalla, a translator and actress from Barcelona who starred in a Catalan-language production of “Company” there 25 years ago. The lyrics and music are so closely linked in the show and indeed in all of Sondheim’s work, she added.
“You not only have to keep the rhymes and syllables and the cadence of the music, but also give the information at the right time,” says Batalla, who has translated other Sondheim shows into Spanish and Catalan.
She recalled meeting Sondheim in Barcelona in 1995 at a performance of “Sweeney Todd,” which she had translated into Catalan. “He said, ‘As long as all the ideas get to the public, I’m fine with it.’ He never asked us for the back translation of any of the shows,” she said.
“Business” poses some thorny issues for translators. Batalla pointed to “Getting Married Today,” a punitive, rapid-fire song for a hyperventilating bride—and a highlight in most performances—as a particular challenge. “It’s very fast and it needs to be understood,” she said. Spanish had relatively few monosyllabic words to mimic the song’s patter, she added, but the language’s flexible syntax helped offset the difficulty.
She left behind some culturally and geographically specific references to 1970s New York, Batalla said: Because American culture is so dominant, it still resonates with Hispanic audiences. “We’ve seen Woody Allen movies all our lives,” she said.
May, a well-known Spanish playwright, said the biggest challenge in translating the dialogue was finding a “high quality Spanish” that matched the book’s punchy, urban tone. He weighed “every word, every verb, every nuance so it could be as close to English as possible,” he said.
Critics here are largely convinced: El País daily praised the production as “one of the best musicals ever seen in Spain.” For Banderas, the reception is a confirmation of his passion and commitment.
“When we put Teatro del Soho together, it was to do the musicals that don’t actually come to Spain,” he said. In addition to his work there, Banderas recently teamed up with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create Amigos Para Siempre, a joint venture to license, produce and develop theatrical work for the Hispanic markets of the world.
Banderas called it an opportunity to “create a platform of Broadway in Spanish for the world.” “But it will take time,” he added.
Company
Until February 14, 2023 at the Teatro Albéniz in Madrid; companyelmusical.es.