Is he or isn't he?

Company

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim * Book by George Furth * Directed by John Doyle * Starring Raul Esparza * Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York City (open-ended run)

Halfway through the second act of Stephen Sondheim's Company, the protagonist, Bobby, is asked by a married friend, "Have you ever had a homosexual experience?" The two men confess that they've fooled around with other guys--more than once. They talk about how understandable, how normal it is. They deny that they're gay. One of them sort of makes a pass.

Audiences have been riveted by the scene, which wasn't in the legendary 1970 original Broadway production but was added when the show was staged at London's Donmar Warehouse in 1995. We're titillated despite--or because of--all the recent headlines about married men coming out. And many people seeing the Broadway revival will have read the remarkably frank New York Times interview with the play's star, Raul Esparza. In the piece, the talented and handsome 36-year-old agonized about his life as a bisexual, discussing his male lover-mentor at New York University, the woman he married (and from who he had separated), his mothers critical nature, and his new boyfriend.

All of that serves to unearth the subtext that gay viewers have sensed in Company since the day it premiered. The musical revolves around Bobby's 35th birthday party and his relationships with his friends and girlfriends, all of whom wonder when he's going to get married. This is a guy who decorated his own apartment, drinks heavily, habitually deflects attention by asking questions, and beds women but never talks about commitment. Hello?

Of course, in 1970 no musical would feature an openly gay leading character. At that time closet cases were still known by the psychological term "latent homosexual," and homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Homophobia was so socially acceptable that Sondheim could accurately have a character speculate about Bobby's bachelor status by saying "I could understand a person if a person was a fag."

That line has been revised now, but in the 1970s it reflected life so well that Truman Capote was quoted as saying, "A fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room."

So today, the "Is he or isn't he?" question gets to float much closer to the surface in Company. But the heat that aspect of the show generates is only part of what makes the new Broadway production brilliant. As he did with the superb 2005-2006 revival of Sweeney Todd, director John Doyle has the actors double as orchestra. Mary Mitchell Campbell's gorgeous, imaginative, scaled-down arrangements rescue some of Sondheim's best-known songs from the brassy, dated orchestrations that make the original cast album unlistenable today. And Doyle's directorial concept of having all the characters except Bobby make music together theatricalizes his emotional dilemma. When he finally sits down and plays piano for his closing number, "Being Alive" takes on a new layer of cathartic power.