THE COMPANY OF WOMEN - by Noel Katz



"Marry Me" - Featured in A STAGE KINDLY presents "Debut", "Encore", and "Bravo".


The Company of Women is somewhat like Sex and the City-only with far more diversity and no obsession with shoes. It's a hilarious look at female friendships: Six women who differ in age, ethnicity, income level and sexuality, meet at a gym and a bar and help each other out with various travails. Amber is a young entrepreneur who finds herself attracted to Maj, a wise-cracking journalist. Carolyn's husband walks out on her and her son. Dina combats maternal pressure to marry her live-in boyfriend, and then gives in. Betsy, recently widowed, enters the workforce for the first time and Julie, an attorney, commences an affair with a married co-worker despite the condemnation of the others. Their lives intersect in boardrooms and bedrooms, at dreary showers and on New Year's Eve. One song from the score, "Marry Me" has been featured in two high-profile concerts in New York. At the 2003 Bound For Broadway evening at Merkin Hall, the song received a more enthusiastic response than songs from Avenue Q and The Musical of Musicals. In 2008, Aaron Ramey and Deborah S. Craig brought down the house at York Theatre's annual NEO concert. The Company of Women underwent an unusual development process: for three months, twelve actresses met, talked about their lives, and improvised scenes based on things that had actually happened to them. Two writers attended, and each wrote vastly different stage-works inspired by what they'd seen. Hopefully, this led to more verisimilitude than most musicals contain.