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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.