[In the following review, Phillips offers a positive assessment of a revival of Company.]

For those unlucky enough to have missed the original 1970 staging, the January 23, 1993, abridged version of Company—titled Company: The Original Cast in Concert—had to suffice for this lifetime. Which it did. Produced and directed by Barry Brown at California's Long Beach Civic Light Opera, the concert combined elements of a reunion (of all but two of the original Broadway cast members), a party, and a tribute to the talents involved, both living and deceased. It also veered occasionally and astonishingly into a musical-theater time warp. During “Side by Side by Side,” the spoken line about how bachelor Robert stays pretty much the same while everyone else gets older garnered an added laugh: Dean Jones hasn't changed in twenty-three years.

Strong whiffs of the original were everywhere. George Martin's musical staging borrowed heavily from Michael Bennett's original choreography, especially in the tug-of-war with Robert and his friends in “Side by Side,” and in the simplified essentials of Donna McKechnie's “Tick, Tock” solo dance. If anything, Elaine Stritch has gotten more aggressively Stritchian; no one barks and sloshes through “The Ladies Who Lunch” like she does.

The evening was dedicated to the memory of Bennett, Larry Kert (who took over for Jones shortly after the Broadway opening), and the show's original production stage manager, Fritz Holt. Unlike the New York Philharmonic's 1985 Follies in Concert, which paid much-needed homage to Sondheim's 1971 score for Follies (badly mangled and abbreviated on the original cast album), Company in Concert wasn't a corrective or an all-star affair. It was simply an evening with the originals.

As such, it carried an element of suspense: Can they still do it? The songs certainly can; too many of them have been excerpted and reviewed for comfort, but they remain bright, sharp gems. In Long Beach, Beth Howland couldn't quite spit out “Getting Married Today,” and Stritch didn't always know when to call out “Robbo.” But these were small things, inevitable, perhaps. To answer other pertinent questions: Yes, Barbara Barrie can still do a cartwheel; McKechnie, Susan Browning, and Pamela Myers were vocally so secure on “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” it was as if a day hadn't passed; the supple Jonathan Tunick orchestrations were beautifully negotiated by musical director John McDaniel, who managed to downplay the now-dated synthesizer flourishes while warming up the string section.

Director Harold Prince and his colleagues cast this show very shrewdly back then, and Angela Lansbury, the concert's emcee, was right: That same cast made for a “magnificent, wonderful evening” in 1993, too.