Marriage is complicated – and so is Company. When Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s landmark musical debuted in 1970, it was a definitive moment in Broadway history. Showcasing the messy realities behind wedding vows, it was a startlingly modern show that shone a spotlight on emotional ambivalence and the particular kind of urban loneliness that emerged as the twentieth century sped along towards its final quarter. Over five decades later, Company remains a cornerstone of the musical theatre canon. Even though some of its ideas have aged gracefully, others creak under the weight of changing times. To celebrate the anniversary of its opening on Broadway, we’re proposing five reasons Company still says “I do” to its audiences — and another five that might just see it headed for divorce court.

1. Divorce Court: Marriage as a Default Life Goal Feels Outdated

Once upon a time, people viewed turning 30 without a spouse as a minor tragedy. In 1970, the crisis of Bobby being single at 35 was culturally resonant. At the time, people were, on average, 22 when they got married; a half-century later, the average age is 29. Perhaps this statistic makes things seem like they haven’t changed much — but numbers are one thing and attitudes, another. Today, marriage is an option, not a mandate, with some people delaying it or skipping it entirely. Indeed, Bobby’s words earlier in the show, viewed then as an excuse, now feel more authentic as a reason for not getting married than some of the reasons presented to him in the show as reasons for tying the knot.

JENNY: Do you think, just maybe I mean subconsciously you might be resisting it?

ROBERT: No. Negative. Absolutely not! I have no block, no resistance. I am ready to be married.

JENNY: (Quietly) Then why aren’t you?

(Pause)

ROBERT: I’ve always had things to accomplish. That’s the main reason. First I had to finish school. Then I wanted to get started, to get some kind of security. And, uh-just things I wanted to do before I could even begin to think in terms of marriage. Oh, I know that can sound like rationalization, but it’s not.

From a twenty-first-century perspective, the neuroses running throughout the show about Bobby being unmarried feel more like a period artefact than a universal heartbeat.

2. I Do: Emotional Honesty About Connection Still Hits Home

While marriage may be where it’s been, but not where it’s at. Bobby’s deeper anxieties — his fear of vulnerability, longing for connection and self-protective detachment — are timeless. Everyone wrestles with the messy tension between needing love and fearing it. In Company. Bobby’s friends illustrate various consequences of putting yourself out there, some deeply affirming and others more searing. “The Little Things You Do Together” starts out innocently enough —

It’s the little things you do together,
Do together,
Do together,
That make perfect relationships…

— soon take a cynical, even violent, turn:

It’s people that you hate together,
Bait together,
Date together,
That make marriage a joy.
It’s things like using force together,
Shouting till you’re hoarse together,
Getting a divorce together,
That make perfect relationships.

Whether we’re considering our longing for romantic love or deep friendship, or simply to be truly seen by another person, Bobby’s fears and hopes speak to anyone choosing intimacy over isolation.

3. Divorce Court: Some Gender Roles Feel… Terribly 1970s

The depiction of women in Company — the kooky stewardess, the bossy wife, the crazy bride — risks feeling dated today. Truth be told, the cringe is felt in Furth’s book rather than in Sondheim’s songs; as is often the case with comedy, and particularly the sit-com style comic stylings of Company, it reflects (on) the norms of its time very specifically. Take this character-defining speech of April’s, for instance.

APRIL: I didn’t come right to New York. I went to Northwestern University for two years but it was a pitiful mistake. I was on probation the whole two years. I was getting ready to go back to Shaker Heights when I decided where I really wanted to live more than any other place was — Radio City. I thought it was a wonderful little city near New York. So I came here. I’m very dumb.

It’s left to the brilliant performances we often see in Company to renegotiate material that occasionally pigeonholes its female characters into stereotypes that modern audiences, with decades more of feminism under their belts, find harder to swallow without side-eye.

4. I Do: Sondheim’s Lyrics Still Sparkle with Psychological Truth

No matter how the social backdrop changes, Sondheim’s lyrics cut straight to the bone. Take the tough emotional truths so precisely expressed by David to Bobby in “Sorry-Grateful” as an example.

You’re always sorry,
You’re always grateful,
You hold her, thinking, “I’m not alone.”
You’re still alone.

This paves the way for the safe, boundaried yearning Bobby begins to harbour in the once-cut, then re-interpolated “Marry Me a Little.”

Marry me a little,
Body, heart and soul,
Passionate as hell
But always in control.

Contrast this with Joanne’s savage wit of “The Ladies Who Lunch.”

So here’s to the girls on the go —
Everybody tries.
Look into their eyes
And you’ll see what they know:
Everybody dies.

A toast to that invincible bunch,
The dinosaurs surviving the crunch —
Let’s hear it for the ladies who lunch!
Everybody rise!

None of these is a quaint period piece. Sondheim’s lyrics are living emotional x-rays, as revealing today as ever.

5. Divorce Court: Furth’s Book Locks It to Its Era

Audiences and critics felt that George Furth’s original book for Company was charming, funny and daring in its day. While some parts are just as effective today, other elements sometimes make the show feel like a sociological time capsule, and many people will argue this is the raison d’être for some works of art once they’ve reached a certain age. Focusing the show’s structure on ideas rather than a narrative throughline reflects a moment in musical theatre history. As cutting edge as it was, it may well be the show’s conceptual nature that makes people feel it is dated. If Company had a more traditional narrative that showed its ideas rather than a structure that expressed them, audiences might be able to experience its relevance more keenly, with greater power to make meaning of the show themselves in true post-modern fashion. As things are, without creative reinterpretation, the vignettes can feel a little museum-like.

6. I Do: The Concept Musical Structure Still Feels Radical

Musical theatre has caught up to Company, but hasn’t left it behind. Its fragmented structure, prioritising thematic cohesion over linear storytelling, still feels bold and influential. Shows like Come From Away and A Strange Loop build on foundations laid in Company, which in turn owed something to earlier shows like Lady in the Dark and Allegro. Sondheim himself acknowledged:

‘Somebody said to me once, ‘Your whole life has been fixing Allegro. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been trying to fix Allegro all my life.”

7. Divorce Court: Cultural Assumptions Are Frozen in Time

The idea that marriage equals fulfilment and that failing to marry means someone is caught is some kind of existential crisis feels very much like a 1970s anxiety. Modern audiences, accustomed to chosen families, more fluid relationship models and diverse pathways through life, may find Bobby’s existential dread and his friends’ complicity in it a little narrow. In Bobby’s world, the worst possible fate is solitude; in today’s world, we recognise that solitude can be a conscious and fulfilling choice. The show rarely imagines models of life outside traditional coupling, the scene between Robert and Peter in which they skim over the topic of men who love men being one rare case.

PETER: Robert, did you ever have a homosexual experience?

ROBERT: I beg your pardon?

PETER: Oh, I don’t mean as a kid. I mean, since you’ve been adult. Have you ever?

ROBERT: Well, yes, actually, yes, I have.

PETER: You’re not gay, are you?

ROBERT: No, no. Are you?

PETER: No, no, for crissake. But I’ve done it more than once though.

ROBERT: Is that a fact?

PETER: Oh, I think sometimes you meet somebody and you just love the crap out of them. Y’know?

ROBERT: Oh, absolutely, I’m sure that’s true.

PETER: And sometimes you just want to manifest that love,that’s all.

ROBERT: Yes, I understand. Absolutely.

PETER: I think that sometimes you can even know someone for, oh, a long, long time and then suddenly, out of nowhere, you just want to have them — I mean, even an old friend.
You just, all of a sudden, desire that intimacy. That closeness.

ROBERT: Probably.

PETER: Oh, I’m convinced that two men really would, if it wasn’t for society and all the conventions and all that crap, just go off and ball and be better off for it, closer, deeper, don’t you think?

ROBERT: Well, I — I don’t know.

PETER: I mean like us, for example. Do you think that you and I could ever have anything like that?

ROBERT: (Looks at him for a long and uncomfortable moment. Then a big smile.) Oh, I get it. You’re putting me on. Man, you really had me going there, you son of a gun.

(Laughing, Robert points at Peter and exits. Peter, alone, opens his mouth to call after him but doesn’t. Peter exits. Blackout.)

While moments like this seem to widen the scope of what Company has to say, it is also a reminder of the debate about whether Bobby’s issue with marriage is that the character is actually gay, which Furth and Sondheim refute absolutely. This recalls a perceptive observation made by Adam Feldman in Time Out ahead of the New York Philharmonic’s staged concert of the show.

It’s not a question for me of Bobby, the character, being secretly queer — if his commitment problems with women could be so easily explained, the show would crumble — but rather of the entire show being, in some sense, a product of the closet.

The effect of a scene like the one quoted above is counterintuitive. It reminded us that the show is narrower than the expansive landscape of relationships we recognise today. This narrowing of possibilities heightens Bobby’s paralysis: he is trapped not just by fear of growing close to someone else, but by a limited vision of what love and relationship, whether romantic, platonic or communal, has the potential to look like.

8. I Do: Songs Like “Being Alive” Still Stop the Heart

Some musical theatre songs live beyond the context of the show in which they originate, and “Being Alive” is one of them. Its plea, not just for companionship, but for change, discomfort and growth, remains gut-wrenchingly immediate. Lyrics like these make a song like “Being Alive” feel as fresh today as it did in 1970.

Somebody hold me too close,
Somebody hurt me too deep,
Somebody sit in my chair and ruin my sleep
And make me aware of being alive, being alive.

“Being Alive” doesn’t belong exclusively to a single generation; it belongs to anyone who chooses to share the adventure of being alive with another person. Its urgency changes as we do: I felt its rawness when I was twenty, its heartache at thirty-five, and I imagine its bittersweet quality will feel even greater when I’m seventy. It’s a song that grows alongside the lives we lead. It doesn’t matter whether you’re single, married, divorced or happily complicated: that desperate hope for a bond with someone else never gets old.

9. Divorce Court: Urban Alienation Has Mutated

Company captures a world of urban isolation, with crowded parties where you feel alone and empty apartments interrupted by the ringing of late-night phone calls. The specifics of connection and disconnection have changed, and Company sometimes feels like a vintage snapshot, as in these lyrics which are a bit of a mystery for modern day audiences.

Did you get my message, ’cause I looked in vain?
Can we see each other Tuesday if it doesn’t rain?
Look, I’ll call you in the morning or my service’ll explain…

We get it, I think, even though we don’t recognise it. That said, today’s loneliness looks different. We feel it on dating apps, in response to ghosted text messages and as we doomscroll social media feeds.

10. I Do: Company’s Capacity for Reinvention Proves Its Genius

Despite the passage of time, Company endures. From Dean Jones’s Bobby through Katrina Lenk’s Bobbie, the show has proven over and over again that it can adapt, transform and speak to new audiences. By changing the lens through which it sees the world — shifting the protagonist’s gender, for example, or adjusting the social framing — new productions of Company can show us that it’s not just a product of the 1970s. We still live and love today, so it’s all about finding a way to use the show as a key to unlock reflections on what it means to live and love over time. Twice in the show, we hear a kind of mantra for which the show has become famous:

AMY: It’s just that you have to want to marry somebody, not just somebody.

Which later becomes:

AMY: Blow out your candles, Robert, and make a wish. Want something, Robert, want something.

Together with Bobby’s friends’ other encouragements, these words form a thesis that enables Company to be a vital commentary on connection, risk, and hope.

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company may carry the trademarks of the era that birthed it on Broadway, but its emotional truths still shine through. Each revival reconsiders these ideas, who we are alone and who we are together, as new generations expand our collective human experience. In that sense, Company evolves with the times. It remains a thrilling, aching, fiercely funny portrait of human need — a musical that celebrates people who, despite the odds, still choose to say “I do” to being alive.