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.