[In the following favorable review, Simon compares the 1970 original production to a 1995 revival of Company, citing some disparity between the presentations.]

How nice to have Company, on its silver anniversary, keeping us company again. Stephen Sondheim's New York diptych (Follies is the other panel) is still the best work he has done, even if it pulls its punches in the end. This is the story of Bobby, a not-quite-so-young-anymore bachelor who serves to liven up the humdrum lives of five married couples, who, in turn, provide him with their clucking friendship. The musical, as Sondheim and Harold Prince conceived it from some playlets by George Furth, shows the bachelor both deploring and envying these labile couples, even as they both yearn for and feel superior to his footlooseness. A standoff: Neither singleness nor coupledness, despite certain advantages, is a total solution, and the grass will remain forever greener on the other side of the fence.

In this spirit, Sondheim originally ended the show with the sardonic song “Happily Ever After,” which left the already puzzled Boston audiences of 1970 with a decidedly bitter aftertaste: Whether the song was for or against marriage, it surely wasn't cheerful. Prince, as director, recognized the need for a more upbeat ending, so he made Sondheim write “Being Alive,” which incorporates some of the marital drawbacks from the earlier song, but with a rather more affirmative ambiguity. Yet as an unprepared-for semi-happy ending, it is in its way as fishy as the standard Hollywood climax. The honest conclusion was deferred to the next Prince-Sondheim show, Follies, which duly paid the price of honesty: failure.

Had Scott Ellis really wanted to be daring with his revival of Company for the Roundabout, he would have restored that “Happily Ever After”—perhaps, just perhaps, today's audience could have lived with a bit of unsugarcoated skepticism. Instead, Ellis reinstated at the end of Act One “Marry Me a Little,” a charming song but rightly cut from the original version for making Bobby too receptive to marriage too early in the game.

But think: Company was the first concept musical, essentially plotless, with the cast of fourteen doing all the singing and dancing (there was to be sure, a backup quartet, the Vocal Minority, now dropped). The show introduced a new subtlety: no underlined points, simple explanations, neat resolutions. For the first time, the set, the steel-and-glass vertical labyrinths of Manhattan, played a central alienating role. Spoken dialogue and songs were innovatively interwoven, each commenting on the other, and even the time frame was left teasingly, non-naturalistically vague: Did it all take place during several surprise parties or just one? And was Bobby present at his party or did he fail to show up? What was reality, what fantasy?

Alas, Roundabout's limited space and budget cannot reproduce Boris Aronson's history-making original set: a giant Cubist-and-constructivist Manhattan with steel girders, glass façades, louvers, two elevators taking the characters up and down for climactic moments, 600 projections onto this set or behind it. That gave us a sense of suprahuman immensity, constantly changing and yet congealed in its iciness, a Tatlinesque city of glittering cages in which movement, though frantic, remains meaningless. With the help of Wendall K. Harrington's amusing projections, Peter Kaczorowski's bold lighting, and William Ivey Long's snappy costumes, Tony Walton does his considerable best to create something equally suggestive without slavish imitation. However, on a modest scale, it simply can't be done; awesome imaginativeness is reduced to winsome ingenuity. The show also needs a full-size orchestra right in front of it, not a small one seeping in discreetly from behind. And Jonathan Tunick's undernourished new orchestrations fall well short of his original, more muscular ones.

Ellis's direction becomes too strenuous at times, and Rob Marshall's decent choreography is not up to Michael Bennett's groundbreaking original work. The cast, too, is a letdown, starting with the able Boyd Gaines, who turns Bobby into an attractive innocent instead of a rudimentary roué; couldn't one have got someone like Michael Rupert for the role? Among the others, Jane Krakowski and La Chanze (despite somewhat sloppy elocution) manage nicely, and Charlotte d'Amboise dances compellingly; but only Veanne Cox, as the confused Amy, turns in a spellbinding performance rich in disturbing detail, sharply etched and enunciated. And though no one in the cast is bad, Debra Monk is cruelly miscast in a role where a Kelly Bishop is needed.

Is, with all these strictures, Company, still worth catching? You bet! Compare it with any recently seen musical, and you will be struck by its unfaded originality, intelligence, and wit in word and music. It provides sophisticated pleasures and—so rare in a musical—food for thought.