Fabulous

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

--Dr. Johnson

If Company had a text, that would be it. This is a musical that one wants to rave about first and talk about later. To say that it is the finest musical of the '69-'70 season would be true, but a little bit like praising a candle flame in a blackout. To place Company in the perspective of exciting excellence that it occupies, one must call it a landmark musical, one of those few shows that enter the permanent lore of the theater by altering the vocabulary of dramatic possibilities.

The clue to an outstanding musical is one grand guiding metaphor. Company makes Manhattan a metaphor for marriage. Manhattan is an island of anguish and delight; so is marriage. Manhattan is an incessant roar of competitive egos; marriage is a subdued echo of the same. Manhattan is a meeting of strangers; marriage is a mating of strangers. Manhattan is a war of nerves; marriage is a ferocious pillow-fight battle of the sexes. The links do not stop there. The tempo of Manhattan is a kind of running fever; modern marriage runs a fever, and the partners are always taking its temperature. It simply is not the placid old heaven-ordained, till-death-do-us-part, for-better-for-worse institution it used to be.

Making Out in Paradise. Company tells all of this and tells it with an undeviating honesty that some playgoers will find acrid. The five couples involved in Company are in their 30s and 40s, too young for resignation and too old to swing, except self-consciously. All the couples play show-and-tell before their favorite friend Robert (Dean Jones), a bachelor of 35. Some of the dilemmas they act out for Robert are common: a drink problem, smoking too much, trying to lose weight--except that New Yorkers have an uncanny flair for self-dramatizing such issues. Some are symbolic: the wife who can karate-chop hell out of her husband. Some are wistfully funny attempts to recapture the old magic: the couple who get stoned on pot but find that marijuana is not really their kick.

The husbands half envy Robert, their wives like to picture him pining away in unrequited loneliness. Far from it. In the bachelor's make-out paradise of New York, Robert is making out. A hilarious and deftly convincing seduction scene finds him in bed with a loquacious airline stewardess whose final act of disrobing is to doff her bellboy-style hat. As she stirs to leave the bed after a discreet blackout, Robert asks the girl where she is going. "Barcelona," she replies for one of the dozens of explosive one-word and one-line laughs that punctuate the show. It is not a cop-out but a truism that in the end Robert discovers that these casual liaisons are a paradise of emptiness that leave him less than alive. His married friends have been his substitute for life, and he decides he had better enter wedlock with all its unholy terrors.

Urban Junglegym. The people who put together Company belong on a royal honors' list. At the top stands Stephen Sondheim, composer and lyricist. Many recent Broadway scores have sounded as if they were composed by a Waring Blender. Sondheim is a man with an inventive musical mind; his lyrics have a spartan simplicity, yet they are witty, incisive and playful. Of George Furth, who wrote the libretto, one can only say: Hosanna, finally a book with intelligence. Producer-Director Harold Prince surpasses himself in staging this show and invests each scene with an electric tingle of surprise, delight and authority.

The set is a conversation piece all by itself. Manhattanites spend more time each day traveling vertically than any other people in the world. Designer Boris Aronson has embodied this in a kind of skyscraper-without-walls, a giant urban Junglegym with rising and descending elevators and the metallic, glassy feel of the megalopolis. Choreographer Michael Bennett won a Tony nomination for his dances in Coco. If Company had opened in time for consideration, he might have taken a Tony home.

To salute one member of the cast is to risk slighting another. The stylishness of the performers is a rarity in the U.S. theater. Dean Jones has just the right low-keyed charm as the hero. Pamela Myers puts the audience under house arrest with a number called Another Hundred People. Beth Howland is hilarious as the wife who is too loving as she burns the toast. When it comes to Elaine Stritch and a wickedly caustic song called The Ladies Who Lunch, you just know that she has swallowed the cocktail glasses along with the martinis. They are all marvelous, and the pleasure of their Company awaits hundreds of thousands of people.

In the months to come, as those playgoers troop out of the Alvin Theater, punctured with laughter and a little pensive with an added wisdom of life, they may be looking for one word to describe this show. It's a breathless New York In word--one that New Yorkers haven't had much cause to use recently--fabulous.

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