Company, by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, directed by Marianne Elliott, and starring Rosalie Craig

On 4 December, 2018, two long-married couples went to see Stephen Sondheim's musical comedy about marriage, Company, performed at London's Gielgud Theatre. Chris and Pamela had seen the original production back in the 1970s when it was first produced in London, and still have the original cast recording on LP picked up back then at the sale price of 50 pence. Phil and Carolyn saw a version by the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley California (at the time a hotbed of the sexual revolution) around the same period of time. So now, about four decades later, with us four decades older, we enjoyed the evening so much we decided to write about it together.

We were very aware that since the premiere in 1970, the social context of marriage has undergone a remarkable shift, which is graphically illustrated by changes from the original version to the current one. In 1970, Company was about unmarried Bobby on his thirty-fifth birthday, thinking about and observing his close friends—five heterosexual married or about-to-be married White couples. In 2018, the version of Company we saw features Bobbie on her thirty-fifth birthday, thinking about and observing her close friends—five married or about-to-be married couples, including one mixed race African-American/White couple, and one gay male couple on their wedding day. Despite cultural shifts in attitudes about diversity (by many but not all), there is a fundamental point made by Sondheim's music and lyrics, and in the book by George Furth, almost identical in both versions: Sondheim wrote in a collection of all his lyrics along with his acerbic comments about his own shows, that years after writing Company, he read Chekov's quote: “If you're afraid of loneliness, don't marry”—which Sondheim believed summed up the essence of his own message.

Even back then, Sondheim was struggling with his own ambivalence as well as the jaundiced view of marriage emerging from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In his collected lyrics in the bo