[The hero in "Company," Bobby,] wants no part of marriage or, as a song says, of "The Little Things You Do Together," ("Neighbors you annoy together, children you destroy together"), but he's willing to listen to—he cannot escape—the finger-wagging advice, in buzzing overlapping rhythms, of his matchmaking friends. Only trouble is, when he asks how any of them feels about being married, he gets an at best ambiguous and at worst despairing answer. "You're always sorry, you're always grateful," a trio of furrowed-brow husbands carols to him (in quite a nice little lazy-beat song), ending with a dying "you're always alone."

The mood is misanthropic, the view from the peephole jaundiced, the attitude middle-aged mean. That, of course, is a highly original stance for a Broadway musical to be taking….

Stephen Sondheim has never written a more sophisticated, more pertinent, or—this is the surprising thing...