[In the following favorable review, Lahr discusses the original production of Company, calling it revolutionary and focusing on the Sondheim's examination of the ambiguity of emotion and the fear of loss of self in marriage. Lahr also offers a comparison of the original and revival productions.]

Company was a watershed event in the history of the musical. When it arrived on Broadway, in April, 1970, the American conscience was reeling from two jolts: Vietnam and the sexual revolution. The nation had lost both its sense of blessing and its sense of sin; the musical, which had traditionally made a myth of well-being, suddenly found itself with nothing to celebrate. Company, engineered by the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the playwright George Furth, the director Harold Prince, the choreographer Michael Bennett, and a terrific ensemble led by Elaine Stritch, proclaimed the nation's newest abundance: emptiness. Instead of providing the backbeat of promise, Company, with its sour dissection of five marriages in Manhattan, put words to the collective numbness. Exhaustion, not energy, was its theme. Once a call to action, the musical was now a hymn to impotence. At the finale, the hero of the show—the passive, charming, and unmarried Robert—pleads for life instead of inspiring it:

Somebody need me too much,
Somebody know me too well,
Somebody pull me up short
And put me through hell and give me
  support
For being alive, make me alive,
Make me alive.

At a stroke, loss had found its Broadway laureate, and experiment had found its new champion, who, with Company, began to do away with plot and take the musical in new expressive directions.

George Furth's script was adapted from a series of eleven one-act plays he had written for the actress Kim Stanley. “George writes the kind of people who do not sing,” Sondheim told Craig Zadan, the author of Sondheim & Company. “To spend time exploring the characters was wrong, because they were primarily presented in vignettes. All the songs had to be used, I'm sorry to say, in a Brechtian way as comment and counterpoint. And as such, next to Forum, it was the hardest score I ever had to write.” As its terrific title implies, Company is an ensemble piece: it inhabits that slippery emotional zone between not quite intimacy and not quite isolation—a gray area that is well suited to the composer's paradoxical sensibility. Sondheim abjures the old illusion, of romance, only to establish a new illusion, of skepticism. He boldly accentuates the negative. “We wanted a show where the audience would sit for two hours screaming their heads off with laughter,” Sondheim said, “and then go home and not be able to sleep.”

Company’s first revival on Broadway, directed by Scott Ellis, at the Roundabout Theatre, is a problematic production, but it does provide the pleasure of reëxperiencing the songs: “The Little Things You Do Together,” “Sorry-Grateful,” “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” “Another Hundred People,” “Getting Married Today,” “Side by Side by Side,” and “The Ladies Who Lunch.” It's an imposing lineup. While the god of casting does not shine on this production, nothing can dim the brilliance of a score whose themes of fear, loneliness, and anxiety in relationships have, if anything, become more urgent as the battle between the sexes has intensified over the decades.

The musical is set on Robert's thirty-eighth birthday, at a surprise party that serves as a linchpin for the show's an ecdotal structure. At the party, Robert (Boyd Gaines) blows out the candles on his cake. “Actually, I didn't wish for anything,” he says. Robert doesn't know what he wants or what he feels. He needs connection, but he doesn't have the will to sustain it. He has no identifiable work, just a narcissistic problem. He won't give of himself, because, really, he has no self to give. He is a shell of a man, who plays at feelings. Still, Robert's boyish, tortured aloofness gives Sondheim a way to speak about the paralyzed heart, a subject that is both his strength and his limitation. When I saw the original production, I was a newly married man of twenty-eight; twenty-five years later, with a grown son and a new partner, and poised somewhere between regret and hope, I find that certain songs resonate with more power. “Sorry-Grateful,” an astute love song that honors the ambiguity of emotions, now seems an extraordinary accomplishment. Robert asks his alcoholic friend Harry (Robert Westenberg) if he's sorry to be married, and gets this eloquent reply:

You're always sorry,
You're always grateful,
You're always wondering what might
  have been.
Then she walks in.
And still you're sorry,
And still you're grateful,
And still you wonder and still you doubt,
And she goes out.

This is not to say that Company dramatizes maturity. Although the characters sing about loss, none of them accept the notion of it as the basis of maturity. The consequences of commitment—you choose and you lose—keep Robert from taking action. He can't accept loss, and therefore won't surrender to another. Even at their most caustic moments, Sondheim's songs remain tangled in a particularly American state of mind, an adolescent attitude that insists on having everything all the time. “Marry Me a Little,” which was cut from the original score and is restored here at the end of Act I, makes the point. Robert sings:

Marry me a little,
Love me just enough. …
Keep a tender distance,
So we'll both be free
That's the way it ought to be.

From this production's first beats, Company bristles with Robert's fear of engulfment. With the rest of the cast of fourteen ranged around Tony Walton's suitably austere black-and-chrome set, Robert stands center stage, and the ensemble, archly choreographed by Rob Marshall, goes through its semaphore of possessiveness—hands grope, wave, and plead for his presence, and the theatre resounds with the predatory chorus “Bobby Bobby / Bobby Baby / Bobby Bubi”—an effect vulgarly overstated by the projection of Bobby's name in different typefaces on the cyclorama behind them all. Robert and his friends are a symbiotic network, a group of lost souls distracting each other from their emptiness. Robert goes through the motions of affection and sex, but nothing penetrates him. “You impersonate a person better than a zombie should,” his three frustrated girlfriends sing in “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” And, of course, they're right: deadness (Sweeney Todd, Passion, Assassins) is Sondheim's dominion, and terror is his most eloquent emotion. In “Getting Married Today,” Veanne Cox, as the would-be bride, Amy, gives fear its most delightful outing, in the show's best-written scene. With her bandy legs and bony hands shaking, she works herself into a tizzy on the morning of her wedding. Pale and bug-eyed, she's a whirlwind of self-loathing who knocks the audience dead when she crawls across the stage and sings:

We'll both be losing our identities—
I telephoned my analyst about it
But he said to see him Monday,
And by Monday I'll be floating
In the Hudson with the other garbage.

She tells her fiancé, Paul (the sad-eyed, convincing Danny Burstein), that she can't go through with it. Before Paul stalks out, he asks her, “Do you know if other people did to you what you do to yourself, they could be put in jail?” Robert, standing by as Paul's prospective best man, witnesses the quarrel. When Paul leaves, Robert abruptly asks Amy to marry him. Amy's comeback is an admonishment: “You have to want to marry somebody, not just somebody.” Robert tosses Amy the bouquet, and she catches it at the threshold. “I'm the next bride,” she tells him, and she exits in search of Paul.

In the original production, the orchestration was for twenty or so; here, it is for nine. And the orchestra is not the only sound that's attenuated. The air is full of miked, thin voices. Boyd Gaines, who had been suffering from laryngitis, strains in the higher registers, and, I'm sorry to report, goes flat in the big ballads; this diminishes the impact of “Marry Me a Little” and virtually snuffs out “Being Alive.” Debra Monk, as the foulmouthed, slouch-shouldered dipsomaniac Joanne, gives two boffo songs, “The Little Things You Do Together” and “The Ladies Who Lunch,” plenty of attitude. She doesn't so much sing as blare “Ladies,” but when her voice cracks, the stridency works for the boozy broad she plays. Monk knows how to deliver a punch line, and her rendition of the song zeroes in on the impasse that her drunken mockery represents:

Another chance to disapprove,
Another brilliant zinger,
Another reason not to move,
Another vodka Stinger—
Aaah—I'll drink to that.

La Chanze, who plays Marta, one of Robert's beleaguered squeezes, has the voice but not the attitude. her rendition of “Another Hundred People,” a dark, jaded report on “a city of strangers,” becomes merely a Broadway “numba,” all teeth and smiles but no texture. Why is she smiling? It's a secret between her and the director and is lost on the audience, which, in any case, can't hear the best lines of the song, because of her poor diction.

At the end of the show, Robert decides not to walk through the door into his birthday party. It may come as a surprise to some theatregoers—it was to me—that the past two and a half hours have been flashbacks of Robert's past, and that he has been poised at the threshold throughout. (Scott Ellis never properly prepares the audience for this chronological trick.) Along with Robert's friends, we've been stiffed. By the logic that only a Broadway musical can sustain, the finale proposes that Robert has made a choice to love—or, at least, to be open to the possibility of involvement. But his first gesture is to cut himself off from his community of friends. Growth is shown as isolation. The implications of this are even more unsatisfactory than the romantic tosh that Sondheim is rebelling against: it is the forced victory of the failed heart over the full heart. The lameness of this finale foreshadows the pretentiousness and aridity of many of Sondheim's later shows: a new path that is really a dead end. Yet in Company, the first product of the composer's most prolific period, Sondheim's skepticism is still rooted in a recognizably real world, where feelings are not postures, and doubts have not ossified into nihilism. I suppose I'll always have my quarrels with Sondheim, and with the direction in which he has taken the musical. But when he is good, he's great. Even the Roundabout's lacklustre production can't keep the show's daring from coming through. So let's call Company a triumph, and the hell with it.