[The hero in "Company," Bobby,] wants no part of marriage or, as a song says, of "The Little Things You Do Together," ("Neighbors you annoy together, children you destroy together"), but he's willing to listen to—he cannot escape—the finger-wagging advice, in buzzing overlapping rhythms, of his matchmaking friends. Only trouble is, when he asks how any of them feels about being married, he gets an at best ambiguous and at worst despairing answer. "You're always sorry, you're always grateful," a trio of furrowed-brow husbands carols to him (in quite a nice little lazy-beat song), ending with a dying "you're always alone."

The mood is misanthropic, the view from the peephole jaundiced, the attitude middle-aged mean. That, of course, is a highly original stance for a Broadway musical to be taking….

Stephen Sondheim has never written a more sophisticated, more pertinent, or—this is the surprising thing in the circumstances—more melodious score; and the lyrics are every bit as good ("You'll always be what you were / Which has nothing to do with—all to do with—her")….

All of this is exemplary. Now ask me if I liked the show. I didn't like the show. I admired it, or admired vast portions of it, but that is another matter. Admiration stirs in the head; liking sends out its signals somewhere lower in the anatomy, the pit of the stomach maybe, and gradually lets you know that you are happy to have been born, or to have been lucky enough to have come tonight. I left "Company" feeling rather cool and queasy, whatever splendors my head may have been reminding me of, and there is a plain reason for that. At root, I didn't take to [Bobby's] … married friends any more than he did. I agreed with him.

"One is lonely and two is boring" is, in short, [Bobby's] … summary of his own experience, and the evening occupies itself with justifying his conviction. That doesn't make the evening boring: It makes it, between musical shots in the arm, overinsistent and lemony. Perhaps the whole thing is just too single-minded, like Alceste. In any event, its aura as well as its aftertaste is a middling one, somewhere between arid and energetic, dyspeptic and dynamic, farewell and hail. Personally, I'm sorry-grateful. (p. 264)