"Company" is quite simply in a league by itself. Artistry, excitement, intelligence and professionalism have been so long gone from Broadway that it's almost easy to forget when the musical theatre held the promise of greatness, and yet that was only as long ago as the last work of Leonard Bernstein ("West Side Story"), Jerome Robbins ("Fiddler On The Roof") and Stephen Sondheim ("Anyone Can Whistle"). Sondheim's new musical … is a tremendous piece of work, thrilling and chilling, glittering bright, really funny (and not so funny), exceedingly adult, gorgeous to look at and filled with brilliant music….

The theme of "Company" is bachelorhood in the New York of clever, successful, alcoholic, partying, sexually promiscuous, divorce-ridden people in their mid-30s—the New York of Fire Island and the Hamptons, of discotheques and beautiful clothes and money. The central character—Robert—is given a surprise 35th birthday party by the five couples who are his friends. George Furth's book then flashes back and forward to each of these couples…. They all have unattractive marriages but insist that the marriages may be wrong but not marriage itself. Robert feels pressure to get married and they all want to marry him off though, to him, marriage seems to be just to ward off loneliness (just for company) and makes one dull, cranky, bored (and boring), old and fat. In the end, he concludes that friends (company) are no substitute for love….

"Company" is brutally unsentimental and sometimes unemotional, mostly because it is so grown-up and frightfully honest….

The general excitement, though, grows from Sondheim's music. It is at once intricate and simple, serious and theatrical. Sondheim has been influenced by Bernstein, who was influenced by [Aaron] Copland, who was influenced by [Igor] Stravinsky, which isn't a genealogy to sneeze at, but he can hardly be called unoriginal (though one song is definitely in the [George] Gershwin mode). He is the most exciting, stimulating, theatreminded composer at work today. His freedom from standard forms, his meters, harmonies, modulations, long-lined constructions (which braid in and out of the action), dissonances and plain music are so superior to what we hear in the theatre that comparisons are absurd.

The lyrics he wrote for himself combine absolute craft with a content that matches the show's and, in patter songs, they are in a class with W. S. Gilbert himself.