TIME SHIFT

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

IT'S ONE OF LIFE'S CHOICE IRONIES that (in the realm of art, anyway) what is gentle and equivocal often outlasts what is tough and brazen. When in 1970 Company first opened--music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by George Furth--it was celebrated for its punch. Here was an innovative, hard-hitting musical that trafficked in booze and pot, bile and cynicism, promiscuity and adultery. Yet these are the aspects of Company that seem most dated a quarter-century later in a revival that has just come to Broadway, starring Boyd Gaines as Robert, the bachelor of many nicknames (Bobby, Robby, Bubby) who can't quite sort out whom he wants to be among the women in his life.

What works best in this new version of Company, as Robert wanders among his married friends examining one marriage after another, is the tender moments. Veanne Cox is delightful as a bride balking at the church door. With wildly wobbling knees but a dizzyingly sure tongue, she rattles off an ever accelerating catalog of reasons why she shouldn't walk down the aisle. And Robert Westenberg, contemplating Robert's inquiry, "You ever sorry you got married?" offers a splendid version of that bittersweet hymn to ambivalence Sorry--Grateful. Westenberg vindicates the suspicion of those who (overlooking the cheesy arrangement of the original-cast recording) have long viewed this as one of Sondheim's most touching songs.

Sondheim was 40 when Company premiered. Anyone Can Whistle and the lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story were behind him; A Little Night Music and Follies were soon to come. This revival provides a useful vantage for surveying the second half of a venturesome, glittering career. Among those American artists today whose livelihood is linked to words and wordplay, Sondheim holds a unique preeminence. There's no contemporary novelist, poet or essayist who is so indisputably at the top of his or her field as Sondheim is of his. As a song lyricist, he has no plausible peer.

And as a one-man team--both lyricist and composer--he's likewise a nonpareil. More than the other great Broadway composers, he produces songs that are both detachable and undetachable from the shows they appear in. Detachable because his lyrics are, in their wit and dexterity, satisfyingly autonomous; they appear in anthologies of light verse and books of contemporary poetry. Undetachable because his songs, usually integrated tightly into the plot line, often lose resonance on their own. It's no accident that Sondheim has originated only one tune--Send in the Clowns--that can be sure of raising a roar of recognition when its opening bars waft through any cocktail lounge in the country.

Boyd Gaines' Robert similarly embodies a curious split. Is he living in the '70s or the '90s? The production uneasily straddles the two eras. These days Robert's dissatisfied juggling of the women he dates looks a little smug and patronizing. Evidently he doesn't realize he's suffering from Peter Pan syndrome--and a dozen other pop-psychological maladies illuminated on post-'70s talk shows. No wonder Company's director, Scott Ellis, so often has Gaines peering handsomely but dazedly into the spotlights. What's to become of him? He blinks with uncertainty--unlike his creator. After Company, Sondheim would move on to the even finer musicals--Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods--on which his reputation more securely rests.