This ‘Company’ accepted

You’ve come a long way, Bobby-baby.

The 1970 premiere of “Company” represented a full-scale assault on two venerable American institutions, marriage and the musical theater -- a hardly coincidental pairing, since the conventional musical-comedy plot has always been essentially an elaborate ritual designed to unite boy and girl. With “Company,” librettist George Furth and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim dropped not only the curtain clinch but the very crutch of a plot altogether.

The show is now nearly as old as its central figure, and from Massachusetts to “Urinetown,” neither marriage nor the musical is what it was.

Singlehood has changed its stripes too: Today a tasteful, urbane, eligible 35-year-old man wouldn’t be an emotional cripple, pitied and envied by his married friends, as is Bobby. He’d be a jet-setting metrosexual who’d give the “Queer Eye” crew a run for its money.

Director David Lee’s bright, uneven new staging for Reprise! Broadway’s Best plays the show straight, as if it’s still headline news rather than a bona fide period piece. It uses updates from Sam Mendes’ 1995 London production, also employed by Scott Ellis for the Broadway revival of the same year, which incorporate such modern marvels as answering machines and cordless phones but retain dialogue about swingers versus “squares.”

That may be why the unabashedly groovy approach of last year’s excellent production at L.A.’s 99-seat Knightsbridge Theatre, complete with bell bottoms and puka shells, somehow made “Company” seem fresher than this half-update.

Lee’s version does have the considerable asset of music director Gerald Sternbach’s snappy 24-piece onstage orchestra knocking Sondheim’s score out of the park.

And Lee has an ensemble, artfully cast by Bruce H. Newberg, to step up with a series of generous star turns and occasionally to function as a real company, giving the show’s frequent grouped scenes an engaging pseudo-amateur abandon in Kay Cole’s goofy choreography.

Still, this feels less like a true revival, in the sense of bringing new life to a classic, than a reasonably noteworthy rendition.

Glossing the show’s age is not the only slightly off-key choice that brings this “Company” short of triumph. As the indecisive protagonist Bobby, whose single status annoys and animates his married friends, the handsome, supple-voiced Christopher Sieber gives a particularly dark, despairing reading.

This is partly a danger that comes with the territory -- the role contains more than its share of show-stopping soliloquies and interior monologues -- and partly a case of overselling Bobby’s denial.

Sieber doesn’t sketch a carefree bachelor who gradually wakes up to the emptiness of his life as a perpetual third wheel; he’s feeling it from the word go, as his friends and lovers assemble to beseech en masse, “Bobby, come on over for dinner,” and to remind him, “We loooooooove you.” Sieber never quite looks like he returns the sentiment.

The show’s second-act opener, the ironically showbizzy “Side by Side by Side,” essentially repeats this image of mass, hectoring codependence but with an inspired difference: Bobby’s taken a drug, so his friends’ escalating entreaties take the shape of a kind of vaudeville nightmare.

It’s this sunny phantasm that conveys the show’s signature brand of brittle fun most convincingly, with Cole’s choreography hitting the right mix of soft-shoe sheen and talent-show moxie. And it’s Sieber’s most relaxed, amused and therefore dashing moment.

The actors are mostly great where it counts. As Amy, the reluctant bride whose breathless song “Getting Married Today” is one of theater’s great mad scenes, Jean Louisa Kelly nails the character’s neurotic flicker.

Judith Light makes a light meal of the acerbic Joanne before sinking her teeth into a ferocious rendition of the bitter cocktail “The Ladies Who Lunch.”

The show’s other bravura moment is its antic ode to big-city transience, “Another Hundred People,” which Deborah Gibson lends a commandingly brassy sound. And Sieber gives the finale, the quasi-affirmation “Being Alive,” the dramatic arc his overall performance misses.

The show does have another big solo, often wisely cut but unfortunately restored here: the erotic “Tick-Tock” dance, for which the gamely flailing Cady Huffman lacks only a pole.

Amy Pietz sweetly underplays ditzy April; Sharon Lawrence and Scott Waara make a recognizably competitive couple; Josh Radnor is affecting as Amy’s fiance, Paul; Richard Kline is a droll foil for Joanne’s acidic barbs; and Anastasia Barzee has a lovely coloratura.

But the actor who gives the show its most authentic moments is chubby, impassive Kevin Chamberlin, as a husband who tries to explain to Bobby his married contentment. “Marriage gives you ... what?” he says, staring off into space. Chamberlin gives that pause an eloquent blankness.

He’s also the character who must call his wife a “square,” which not even Chamberlin can sell. It’s not that the insights of “Company” into the fraught fragility of human relationships aren’t universal, even timeless; it’s just that putting a slightly dated show in ill-fitting contemporary drag only distracts us from those insights.

As a chance to hear one of the theater’s most accomplished scores, peppered with some of its more incisively witty writing, this “Company” makes fine company for the evening. We’ll leave it to another revival to know us too well and ruin our sleep.

*

‘Company’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Westwood

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: June 6

Price: $55-$65

Contact: (310) 825-2101

Running Time: 2 hours, 40 minutes

Christopher Sieber...Robert

Sharon Lawrence...Sarah

Scott Waara...Harry

Kathryn Blake...Susan

John Scherer...Peter

Anastasia Barzee...Jenny

Kevin Chamberlin...David

Jean Louisa Kelly...Amy

Josh Radnor...Paul

Judith Light...Joanne

Richard Kline...Larry

Deborah Gibson...Marta

Cady Huffman...Kathy

Amy Pietz...April

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by George Furth. Directed by David Lee. Choreographed by Kay Cole. Musical director Gerald Sternbach. Sets by Bradley Kaye. Costumes by Randy Gardell. Lighting by Rom Ruzika. Sound by Philip G. Allen. Stage manager Jill Gold.