A Splendid, Timeless Piece

‘Company” is a difficult musical to like, much less love as I do. There is no traditional story or plot, and George Furth’s script is a rickety, skeletal structure on which hang Stephen Sondheim’s 14 wonderfully observant, wise songs. It was the first show for which he wrote both lyrics and music, the show that made his reputation and pointed musical theater in an entirely new direction.

In “Company,” Sondheim, a gay man before gay marriage was imagined, was observing the foibles and contradictions of his married friends and associates in the heady days of 1970, when the counterculture challenged all assumptions about marriage and relationships. It is a thoroughly New York show, just as astringent, brittle and self-absorbed as the city itself.

Bobby, turning 35 and wondering whether he should finally get married, is offered contradictory advice from several couples for whom he is both a friend and a specimen bachelor whose freedom they secretly envy. (In Julianne Boyd’s colorful, energetic production, now drawing sellout audiences to Barrington Stage, platforms are tiered against a curving brick wall; friends and sex partners look down on Bobby like Romans watching their favorite gladiator.)

But these friends are just as confused as Bobby. As we see them try what younger people are doing — karate, disco dancing, pot, psychoanalysis, divorce while still living together, even a tentative attempt at male homosexuality — they seem to be floundering in a strange new world. They cling to Bobby as central to their lives, an avatar of the new freedom, the new chic. In fact, he is detached, an observer of his friends as much as they are of him. 

Bobby, as played by TV and Broadway heartthrob Aaron Tveit, is more detached than usual in Boyd’s production. While others in the cast wear the bellbottoms and garish colors of 1970, Bobby sports a subdued blue Norfolk suit with its pleated front and half-belted jacket. (Of course he does strip to his briefs for the “Barcelona” seduction scene.) Tveit never really relates to the rest of the cast, nor does he seem very bothered by his own dilemma: to marry or not. That is until he sings.

In “Marry Me a Little,” Tveit lays out Bobby’s expectations for marriage: togetherness, but not too much. In “Side by Side by Side,” the explosive number that opens Act 2, Bobby and the couples comment on his always being the single man in their world. And in the climatic “Being Alive,” Tveit brings a paradoxical wonder to realizing that only with another person can he experience a full life. It is a stunning showstopper. 

Boyd has surrounded Tveit with a first-rate cast of strong voices. Nora Schell gives “Another Hundred People,” the propulsive energy of the city where every day “some come to stay … some go away.” Lauren Marcus’ Amy is so terrified by marriage that she is delightfully unhinged in her sensational version of “Getting Married Today.” Three husbands — Lawrence Street, James Ludwig and Peter Reardon — make “Sorry/Grateful” a bittersweet catalogue of the sweet and bitter of marriage. Mara Davi plays an airline stewardess dressed in a shamrock green uniform as perhaps too dumb, but she charmingly reminds us that “Barcelona” is the best one-night stand song ever written. 

If you know the show, you’ll wonder about Joanne’s “The Ladies Who Lunch,” the song that Elaine Stritch made forever hers. Ellen Harvey catches Joanne’s self-loathing, but she is more angry than resigned, more bitter than boozy. The forgiveness in Stritch’s command to “rise” and toast these ladies who have wasted their lives is not there. But Harvey’s version is powerful.

“Company” may seem a period piece to some. But it is a work of musical genius, of perceptive lyrics and brilliant wordplay, always with penetrating meaning. And as Boyd’s splendid production reminds us, it is timeless, too.

“Company” has been extended at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., through Sept. 10. For tickets, call 413-236-8888 or go to www.barringtonstageco.org.