Two theatre companies open their season

The Lyric Stage has opened their 2016-7 with a hit! Company, book by George Furth and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, opened on Broadway in 1970. While some of the references are a bit dated, the concept of marriage and relationships is as fresh as ever. The basic plot, if it can be called that, revolves around Bobby, a single 30-something in New York, all of whose friends are married and want to get him married. The play explores the marriages of his friends through short vignettes, as well as Bobby’s angst at his status. The cast includes many of the Boston theatre scene regulars, and are uniformly strong. The singing is top-notch and the dance numbers clever. Among the funnier scenes are the barely-controlled karate bout between Sarah (Kerri Wilson) and Harry (Davron Monroe) and Amy’s (Erica Spyres) bad case of cold feet just before her wedding to her long-term boyfriend, Paul (Tyler Simahk). The opening play at the New Rep, Regular Singing, is more of a mixed bag. The fourth and final play by Richard Nelson in his Apple Family Plays takes place over a single evening. The personae are four adult siblings, three sisters and a brother, gathered in the family home where the ex-husband of one of the sisters is dying upstairs. Apparently a visiting afternoon for friends has concluded and the siblings, along with one sister’s husband, are talking. They are joined by an uncle, a once-famous actor now in the early stages of dementia. The family dynamics are explored in more detail than we really care about, and since the evening occurs on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, references to that event are dragged in. The cast is a strong one, and some of the dialog is witty, but it is hard to care too much about the characters.