show, a basic convention of the musical is being turned around.
The final episode of Companyputs the ensemble out of the pic-
ture and gives us the individual instead. In the sense that the
“company” involved means providing friendship for a lonely
bachelor, which is what Bobby’s married friends think they
are doing, the show is funny and cynical about the relation-
ships. The friends either imagine Bobby becoming one of them
through getting married or warn Bobby that he is better off
not becoming one of them. In either case the married couples
merely refer Bobby to their own situation, and this is not
friendship.
But Sondheim shows also have a tendency to solidify the
very convention that is being turned inside out. The ensemble
has a grip in Company(as the name of the show would imply)—
not so much in the book or the lyrics, but in the performance
of the numbers. That tune to “Company” that Jonathan Tu-
nick worked into the accompaniment to Bobby’s solo has a
vivid history in this show. It was the number that dramatized
the emergence of the six married couples out of the sensational
set Boris Aronson designed for the original production. The
set was a chrome-and-glass abstraction with different compart-
ments and levels. It separated the members of the company at
the beginning, as a metaphor for isolation involved in Manhat-
tan apartment dwelling. But Sondheim timed the opening
number to reach a climax just as the singers reached the stage
via the elevators that Aronson had built into the set.^15 The
blocking brought the singers to where they could become an
ensemble at the climax of the number, moving out of the isola-
tion of the set and reaching the stage where a “company” could
take shape.
Bobby cannot fit into the ensemble. This is a sign of the limit
he would like to overcome. At the opening of act 2, in “Side by
Side,” he tries to join the series of tap breaks performed by the
married couples and finds that he has no partner. He comes up
short in the performance sense. That the final number is a solo
THE ENSEMBLE EFFECT 97
(^15) Secrest, Stephen Sondheim, p. 195.