[The following review presents a positive assessment of a revival of Company, yet condemns the production's orchestration, its sluggish commencement, and the choreography.]

Few musicals have captured their times as perfectly as Company, Three bars of Jonathan Tunick's guitar-accented orchestrations, a line from “Another Hundred People” and you can be nowhere else but New York City, 1970. Awaiting the Roundabout Theater Company's much-anticipated revival, one held one's breath. How would Company hold up? Would the Roundabout be up to the challenge? The answer to the first question is, just fine; to the second, a qualified yes.

After a shaky start, the show builds, expanding, finally, to greatness. The show needs some time to settle down, and for Boyd Gaines to fully recover his voice. But a transfer to a larger Broadway house seems inevitable, because a lot of people are going to want to see this show, and they won't be disappointed.

As with the Roundabout's recent revival of She Loves Me (with whom the present show shares a director, choreographer, star and set designer) Company recreates a period piece without reinventing it, trusting the material. In the present case, the material developed from a series of plays written by actor George Furth and later transformed by Sondheim, at the instigation of director/producer Harold Prince, into a musical.

It's impossible to re-experience exactly the feeling one had, seeing Company for the first time 25 years ago at what is now the Neil Simon Theater, knowing that the musical theater would never be the same; indeed, that one's own life would never be the same. The Beatles had broken up, and for the rest of America, the Me Decade would be defined, at least in pop music terms, by James Taylor and Jackson Browne. But on Broadway, on the musical-theater stage, the revolution was evolving differently, and here was Company, to lead the way: A grown-up show that cast the era's personal obsessions—“space,” “commitment,” “compromise,” “fulfillment”—in a mature, not to say skeptical, light.

Company had no plot, only a concept: 38-year-old Bobby (Gaines) lives a freewheeling life as an adorable single man, juggling girlfriends while being pampered by a pentad of married couples. They wish to see him paired off so that he, too, may partake of the daily terrors and comforts offered by wedded bliss.

Bobby is surely the musical theater's most passive leading man: He observes these couples with a mixture of bemusement and envy, noting the passion—along with the compromises and lies—that go into making a marriage work, best captured early on in “The Little Things You Do Together,” sung by Joanne (Debra Monk) and the company. Is it worth it? Bobby wonders. Well, it's a matter of always being “Sorry-Grateful,” his men friends respond, with grateful tipping the scale.

Bobby cherishes his friendships in the songs “Company” and “Side by Side,” even as he witnesses such shattering scenes as “Getting Married Today,” in which Amy (newcomer Veanne Cox) confronts her doubts about marriage to the wonderful man she's been living with for years (Danny Burstein), while the wedding guests wait.

The number—a patter song on methedrine delivered by Cox with exquisite pathos—is brilliantly undermined by the dramatic scene that follows, in which Amy finally negotiates a convoluted way to go ahead with the wedding, only after showing a determination to break up the relationship.

The dark secret of Company, of course, is that for all the lip service paid to the idea of wedded bliss, Bobby's not really interested, as is apparent in the show's most revealing song, “Barcelona.” After an athletic night in bed with a brainless stewardess (the entirely adorable Jane Krakowski) whose name he can't remember, his phony enticements to make her stay actually succeed—to his horror—and he can only lie back in bed and mutter, “Oh, God!”

The neat resolution that soon follows—the anthem “Being Alive” suggesting Bobby's having come around—still never quite convinces. (In its Boston tryout, the final song was a renunciation of couplehood so bitter it scared off even Prince.)

For the original Company, Prince brought in Michael Bennett to stage the musical numbers. The revival represents the best staging Scott Ellis has ever done. But Rob Marshall's choreography—which includes movement for the entire company as well as the solo “Tick Tock,” originally staged by Bennett for Donna McKechnie and performed here by the talented Charlotte d'Amboise—more closely resembles calisthenics than dance. You get really tired of seeing actors thrusting their arms heavenward, and you soon wonder whether Marshall has any interesting ideas in his head.

That's not the only reason Company takes some time taking off. Gaines, afflicted by a throat ailment, is clearly not up to speed, though just as clearly, he will get there. Moreover, the stripped-down, synthesizer-dependent (and guitarless!) orchestra sounds thin and, at the top of the show, was frequently out of synch with the singers.

But the minute La Chanze launched into “Another Hundred People” about two-thirds of the way through the first act, Company was off and never stopped running, from Cox's febrile, heartbreaking “Getting Married Today,” to the great ensemble number “Side by Side,” to Monk's bruising, rafter-raising “Ladies Who Lunch.”