LA Times 'Night Music' plays again, beautifully
www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-et-night18sep18,0,4703382.story
A dexterous cast revives the 1973 Tony-winning Sondheim-Wheeler musical at South Coast Repertory.
By Sean Mitchell, Special to The Times
For any theatergoer who has never seen Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," reason enough would be to discover the context for the composer's most famous song, "Send in the Clowns." But there are many more reasons to see the current production at South Coast Repertory, which has mounted a thoroughly entertaining, beautifully realized version of this musical that won 1973 Tony Awards for best musical, book and score but remains perhaps lesser known than Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd," "Sunday in the Park with George" and "Into the Woods."
Directed with precision and an abiding sense of delight by Stefan Novinski, the show waltzes (literally) through a tangle of Swedish turn-of-the-last-century romantic misalliances that must be set straight by evening's end, touching high notes of farce and feeling packed into a libretto so witty and dense, it begs to be taken home and read at one's leisure. (Hugh Wheeler wrote the book.)
Stephanie Zimbalist, while hardly a newcomer to the stage, is something of a revelation as Desiree, the middle-age actress whose long-ago affair with the lawyer Fredrik Egerman (Mark Jacoby) is rekindled when her latest theatrical tour comes to town. Zimbalist, in her first appearance at SCR, brings heft and authority to a role that demands an actress release some of her vanity while summoning a good comedian's timing, and she manages to do both.
Jacoby makes a fine partner for her, playing the silly yet sly lawyer whose latest marriage to a woman young enough to be his daughter is not going well. With a voice big enough to have sung the title role in "The Phantom of the Opera" on a national tour, Jacoby reins it in here to deliver lyric after wry lyric with effortless charm.
You know it's a good cast when even the maid (Misty Cotton) can sing, as she demonstrates in Act 2 announcing her plans to marry "The Miller's Son," amid the romantic tomfoolery of the upper class.
Surely Sondheim would admire the level of artistry attained by musical director Dennis Castellano, who plays keyboards while conducting a chamber orchestra seated upstage, supplying the singers with the delicate contours they must traverse in the operetta-like score.
Based on Ingmar Bergman's film "Smiles of a Summer's Night," "A Little Night Music" shows off Sondheim's mordant humor on the subject of love while acknowledging its undeniable power. "I'm afraid marriage is not one of the easier relationships," Fredrik says tellingly to the Countess Charlotte Malcolm (Amanda Naughton), whose husband, the vainglorious Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Damon Kirsche), is Desiree's latest lover and therefore rival to the re-smitten Fredrik.
Fredrik's wife, Anne (Carolann Sanita), is, in fact, in love with her stepson Henrik (Joe Farrell), a dour divinity student who wants to return her interest but is beset with guilt. Underscoring his role by practicing gloomy riffs on the cello, Farrell has great fun with the character without digressing into a Scandinavian cartoon.
The same goes for Naughton in the mock lugubrious role of a woman whose affirmation for life is summed up in the song "Every Day a Little Death," which contains the memorable couplet "Men are stupid, men are vain, love's disgusting, love's insane" sung in a duet with Sanita, her operatic counterpart in marital disappointment.
Act 1 set variously in Fredrik's home, at the theater and Desiree's dressing room, closes with Desiree persuading her crusty old mother, Madame Armfeldt (Teri Ralston), former lover to counts and kings, to invite the several unhappy couples to her country home for "A Weekend in the Country," as the cast sings in an ensemble number.
In Act 2, the setting shifts to nature as depicted by Sibyl Wickersheimer's airy backdrop of a forest holding Madame Armfeldt's house. Here, a drunken party sends the mismatched couples into realignment.
When Fredrik ventures to Desiree's room to share his reawakened emotion for her and reflect on the impossibility of his situation, she responds with "Send in the Clowns," an unambiguously poignant departure from the evening's frothy sendups, its lyrics comparing middle-age romantic disappointment to a tragic accident in the circus. The song was made famous in versions by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins, but it was written during the show's original rehearsals for Glynis Johns, a fine actress and limited singer.
Elizabeth Taylor and Judi Dench have sung it on earlier occasions, and Zimbalist carries it off effectively, not blowing us away with her pipes yet finding a satisfying range that conveys the tenderness of the scene without hitting a false note. When she gets to reprise the song in a later duet with Jacoby, the melody doubles in strength, and their delayed pairing seems undeniably right.
It's worth noting that Ralston appeared in the original Broadway production as a member of the chorus -- a group that comes and goes providing preface and punctuation in song to the late-night Swedish summer madness. At SCR, she proves to be a crowd-pleaser, issuing Madame Armfeldt's caustic proclamations with whiplash force while seated in a wheelchair.
She is just one of an array of crowd-pleasers in this stirring revival.
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Variety: 'A Little Night Music'
www.variety.com/review/VE1117934746.html?categoryid=1265&cs=1A Little Night Music
(Segerstrom Stage; 507 seats; $70 top)
By BOB VERINI
Stephanie Zimbalist, Mark Jacoby, Damon Kirsche and Amanda Naughton star in South Coast Rep's production of the Stephen Sondheim tuner.
More than one option
A South Coast Repertory presentation of a musical in two acts with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler, suggested by Ingmar Bergman's film "Smiles of a Summer Night." Directed by Stefan Novinski. Choreography, Ken Roht. Musical direction, Dennis Castellano.
Desiree Armfeldt - Stephanie Zimbalist
Fredrik Egerman - Mark Jacoby
Anne Egerman - Carolann Sanita
Countess Charlotte
Malcolm - Amanda Naughton
Count Carl-Magnus
Malcolm - Damon Kirsche
Henrik Egerman - Joe Farrell
Mme. Leonora Armfeldt - Teri Ralston
Petra - Misty Cotton
"A Little Night Music" is arguably Stephen Sondheim's most perfect show, if not his most adventurous, but it loses some luster at South Coast Rep through half-baked directorial decisions. Questionable casting, staging and (especially) design choices will leave aficionados to decide whether several delicious performances and the tastiness of the basic material compensate for the curdled dishes in this smorgasbord.
The act-one setting suggests that helmer Stefan Novinski and designer Sibyl Wickersheimer have been studying the wrong Ingmar Bergman movies -- the later ones obsessed with soullessness and repression. They place the action on a bare wooden floor, backed up by plain beige walls and windows. This setting is too obviously symbolic of the characters' emotional sterility and deprives us of the fun of seeing their follies gradually revealed amid colorful splendor. (An upstage-right birdcage filled with vines -- la cage aux foliage? -- periodically casts a shadow symbolizing passion breaking out of its prison.)
But if act one's self-conscious spareness requires us to conjure up elegance, act two's visual chaos renders elegance impossible. Portions of the interior set incongruously remain among cutout trees painted a color that can only be described as merde brown, with the orchestra shoved into the upper-left corner as light bulbs hanging from wan wires evoke a neighborhood block party.
Shigeru Yagi's costumes are up to South Coast's typically eye-popping standard but are less impressive when set against a backdrop reminiscent of a high school production. Even assuming that the clunky entrances and exits of rolling platforms are finally worked out, "A Little Night Music" cannot thrive in an atmosphere of clutter, especially as supplemented by the muddiness and inconsistency of Christopher Akerlind's moody lighting. (Why should an indoor dinner party look as if it's al fresco at twilight?)
Setting aside the physical production, the most important of tuner's six interconnected romantic triangles -- stuffy lawyer Egerman (Mark Jacoby), his much younger wedded-but-not-bedded Anne (a lovely Carolann Sanita) and old flame Desiree (Stephanie Zimbalist) -- comes through in an admirable mixture of life-and-death seriousness and amused self-awareness.
Assured Broadway vet Jacoby is totally winning in a role for which sympathy is difficult to come by, while Zimbalist's admirable lack of vanity in her tough-old-broad interpretation intensifies the heartbreak of her rendition of "Send in the Clowns," the ovation for which is (for once) completely earned. Equally centered is Joe Farrell as Fredrik's anguished son Henrik, using his cello to work out his unspoken passion for stepmother Anne like Jacob wrestling with the angel.
Other performances suffer from misdirection or miscasting. Anne's maid Petra (Misty Cotton) is too angular and lacks the voluptuousness to embody the Life Force, as this character must. With no trace of a once-famous courtesan's continental allure, Teri Ralston's Mme. Armfeldt is an unrelievedly contemptuous scold, a take that sucks out much of show's warmth. Amanda Naughton makes Charlotte a doe-eyed soubrette, lofting laugh lines into the audience but totally missing the sorrow and self-loathing of a humiliated wife acting as cat's paw in her husband's betrayals.
With an essentially nondance show like "Night Music," responsibility for musical staging is difficult to pinpoint, but there's enough opprobrium for Novinski and choreographer Ken Roht to share. Despite the vast stage expanses, waltzes are crabbed and cramped, while "The Glamorous Life" and "Now" are crippled by excessive physical business.
"It Would Have Been Wonderful," the twin soliloquies between Fredrik and the buffoonish dragoon Carl-Magnus (an amusingly crisp Damon Kirsche), would have been wonderful if its movement had been less random and more attuned to the give-and-take in the lyrics.
Most disappointing of all is "A Weekend in the Country," the complex, rousing act-one closer. Forcing the ensemble into unison corny gestures ("the panting and the yawns"; finger to cheek on "delightfully droll"; wrist flicks on "playing croquet") transforms the six separate narratives into just one more ho-hum number that looks like "Born to Hand Jive." At least they resist inserting a kick line.
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The Orange County Register" 'Night Music' needs more light
www.ocregister.com/entertainment/fredrik-sondheim-desire-1846207-night-oldReview: Playful tone in Sondheim's frothiest work nowhere to be found.
By PAUL HODGINS
"If I were perfect for you, wouldn't you tire of me?" asks Anne, the
beautiful, virginal and very young wife of middle-aged lawyer Fredrik
Egerman, early in "A Little Night Music." Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Hugh Wheeler (book) spend the next two-and-a-half hours answering that question in no uncertain terms. Fans of Sondheim's lengthy and often dark-hued oeuvre know exactly where he stands on the issue.
In so many of his musicals, from "West Side Story" to "Company," "Sunday in the Park With George" to "Passion," he tells us, over and over, that love ain't easy; true love isn't supposed to be. The hard work in "Night Music" lies in trying to disentangle love from lust.
South Coast Repertory's 2007-08 season opened Friday with a somewhat bloodless production of Sondheim's sexiest and frothiest work. It's slickly staged by director Stefan Novinski, boasts a solid cast that includes bona fide Sondheim star Teri Ralston (who was in the original 1973 Broadway production), and looks great, thanks largely to Shigeru Yaji's costumes, which dramatically recreate the stiff decorum and sly sexuality that characterized the early 20th-century Swedish bourgeoisie.
But the sense of playfulness that infused Ingmar Bergman's 1955 version of this story (called "Smiles of a Summer Night") and the recent Los Angeles Opera production are not as evident here. And while there are some sterling singing voices among the leads, the crucial ensemble numbers, while ably led by musical director Dennis Castellano and an onstage band, are frequently marred by vocal uncertainty.
Fredrik's dissatisfaction with his teenage trophy wife forms the
backbone of "Night Music's" plot. The trouble starts when they attend a play that stars Fredrik's old flame, Desirée Armfeldt. Sparks between Fredrik and Desirée are rekindled, prodded along by Anne's refusal to submit in the bedroom.
A potentially lethal love triangle develops when Desirée's lover,
haughty Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm, discovers her dalliance with Fredrik. Meanwhile, Fredrik's son Henrik, a pious divinity student with a major case of sexual frustration, realizes he's in love with Anne. And Malcolm's wife Charlotte determines to improve her lot in life by trying a little strategic adultery of her own.
Everything comes to a head during a summer weekend at the country home of Madame Armfeldt, Desirée's mother, a worldly and cynical old woman who spends her time reminiscing about her many notorious affairs and planning her own funeral, to the fascination of Desirée's daughter Fredrika, left by her mother to be raised by crusty old grandma. The dizzy sexual roundelay takes a long time to start – we don't get to Madame Armfeldt's place until the second act – but when it finally kicks in, "A Little Night Music" comes alive.
Along the way, though, there are problems in the SCR staging. Sibyl
Wickersheimer's sets don't do a very good job of distinguishing between locales – a perpetual challenge with this book, which toggles between the Armfeldt and Egerman homes and Desirée's dressing room. And the re-ignited romance between Fredrik and Desirée is undermined by an absence of sexual chemistry between the performers in those roles, Mark Jacoby and Stephanie Zimbalist.
Vocally, this production is a mixed bag. The chorus, as mentioned, has issues. Among the leads, lovely Carolann Sanita as Anne and Damon Kirsche as the Count own the most impressive singing voices by far. (Kirsche is fun to watch, though not subtle – he acts as though he owns the franchise for ruling-class hauteur.)
Ralston, old pro that she is, oozes tight-lipped fatalism and wry humor without belaboring those traits. Zimbalist gets to sing Sondheim's most famous song, "Send in the Clowns," and she delivers it with a world-weary tristesse worthy of its most celebrated interpreter, Glynis Johns.
It's this Sondheim quality – the somber, death-obsessed side – that
Novinski's production captures best. But Sondheim tried hard in "Night Music" to balance mournfulness and frivolity on a knife edge. And it's the lightness that we miss. Novinski needs to plumb the inherent humor in the age-old maxim that there's no fool like an old fool.
