Next year the New York Philharmonic will stage concerts of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company with Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby. Lonny Price is directing. No other casting has been announced yet. To go with the announcement, there’s an article about Harris’s casting on the Time Out blog. An extract:
Adam Feldman wrote:
The relevant question raised by this casting is not — pace the absurd uproar earlier this year about Sean Hayes in Promises, Promises — whether an openly gay actor like Harris can play a womanizing character like Bobby…. Rather, the question is whether Bobby can be effectively embodied by an actor who isn’t gay….To be clear, it’s not a question for me of Bobby, the character, being secretly queer — if his commitment problems with women could be so easily explained, the show would crumble — but rather of the entire show being, in some sense, a product of the closet.
The explication of these points is pretty interesting to read. Thoughts?
Musical Cyberspace 
OH MY GOODNESS. I have to see this!
P.S. Who says that Neil Patrick Harris (uh, who I will not allow to be gay… 😉 ) can’t play a womanizer?! Have they not seen How I Met Your Mother?!
Nobody said so. Indeed, the Feldman is very positive about Harris’s potential in the role.
Sounds promising.
I apologize. I misread the quote. For the record, I wholeheartedly agree with the second paragraph of the quote, in which he mentioned the problem with Bobby being “queer.”
I think this casting is an excellent idea. Neil Patrick Harris is truly an excellent actor, and he really does have a lovely voice. I think he’ll bring a lot to the character. I would love to see him in this role.
I feel like they could have found a different word there.
Hope there is some sort of recording of this! Would love to see how he plays the role! 🙂
I disagree – they’re not using “queer” in its use as a pejorative synonym for gay, they’re using it in its sociological/academic meaning, being “any nonstandard nonbinary sexuality.” Queer theory encompasses just about everything between “a hundred per cent straight, vanilla sex” to “one hundred percent gay, vanilla sex.” Anything in between- bisexuality of any kind, cross dressing, bondage of gay or straight varieties, and many fetishes, falls into “queer theory,” the concept that sexuality has more than two flavors, with everything else being either misunderstood or ignored completely by the mainstream.
Jon Cryer and CHRISTINA HENDRICKS just joined the cast. Anyone know if this will be televised or recorded in some way? CHRISTINA HENDRICKS is in it! Yeah, CHRISTINA HENDRICKS’S name deserves to be in all-cap.
Christina Hendricks is going to be in this? Talk about “waiting for the girls upstairs”…..