SOUR BALL.(Theater review)

When Stephen Sondheim's "Company" debuted, in 1970, it was immediately acknowledged as a kind of musical watershed: no characters, no linear story, no happy ending. In the late fifties, Sondheim had written about everything coming up roses; now his fleurs were more or less mal. Full of lucid doubt, songs such as "The Little Things You Do Together," "Marry Me a Little," and "Sorry-Grateful" opened up a whole Pandora's box of ambivalence. The show, Sondheim's first collaboration with the director Harold Prince, which revolved around Bobby, a commitment-averse thirty-five-year-old bachelor, and his married friends, portrayed marriage as a particularly perilous adventure: "The concerts you enjoy together / Neighbors you annoy together / Children you destroy together / That keep marriage intact."

"What happened to the good-time musical?" Ethan Mordden asked rhetorically in his book "Broadway Babies." Vietnam is what happened. The culture had lost faith in both its goodness and its gladness. Sondheim's revolution was one not just of style but of soul. With this brilliantly innovative show, he replaced the American musical's gleeful sense of life with a gleeful sense of death. Behind the restless pursuit of pleasure and of distraction in "Company" was the sure knowledge that, as Sondheim observed in the song "The Ladies Who Lunch," "everybody dies." Resonating with the spiritual fallout of the war, "Company" expressed not America's big heart but its numbed one; it brought the musical up to the minute.

John Doyle's slick revival (at the Barrymore) allows a new generation of theatregoers to experience some of the show's original chilling wallop. The combination of fear and entropy that marked the Vietnam years has, if anything, been compounded by recent political events, and the shellac of Sondheim's cynicism doesn't seem dated. Here the back wall of the theatre is painted black--an effect that emphasizes the sound, not the Manhattan locale, and makes the musical feel more abstract. A Steinway is positioned at stage right; a vase of white calla lilies on top of it echoes the huge white Doric column that rises from the center of the stage like a phallic assertion of the music's potency. But the real landscape of the show is the instruments, which the actors play as they sing, and which are perched, at the opening, on revolving chairs and glass boxes.

Doyle used the same musician-performer trope last year in his thrilling revival of "Sweeney Todd." There it brought out the strength of the musical's libretto; here, despite the superb staging, it only underscores the weakness of George Furth's book. Doyle's production provides no semblance of a naturalistic environment, and the actors have little plot and no place to give them dimension. As a result, novelty stands in for personality, and "Company" is exposed as the song cycle that it really is--albeit a spectacular one. The songs themselves, which are built like mini-plays, become the scenes, which has the benefit of allowing the audience to appreciate the dramatic sinew of their structure. In "Barcelona," for instance, Sondheim conjures in terse strokes the melancholy vacancy of Bobby's sexual games. After bedding a dim stewardess named April (Elizabeth Stanley), Bobby (the excellent Raul Esparza) feigns irritation at her having to leave for the airport; he insists that she "stay a minute," telling her, "You're a very special girl, not just overnight." Bobby's palaver is meant to convince both him and her of his decency. So, when the worm turns, it's a moment that is at once hilarious and heartbreaking:

APRIL: That's not to say, That if I had my way . . ., Oh well, I guess O.K., BOBBY: What?, APRIL: I'll stay., BOBBY: But . . . Oh, God.

Sondheim's tour de force of reversal and revelation is "Getting Married Today," in which Bobby, the best man at a wedding, looks on while the bride-to-be, Amy (Heather Laws), has an astonishing, perfectly pitched hysterical meltdown. "Go, can't you go? / Look, you know / I adore you all, / But why watch me die / Like Eliza on the ice," she ...