A Little Night Music
By Michael Van Duzer
There can be few summer treats more seductive than a strong production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s incandescent A Little Night Music. Based on the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, this bittersweet roundelay of wrong-headed lovers floats some of the wittiest lyrics in the musical theatre canon on a gently insistent score that pulsates in three-quarter time. Choosing to present this show as their first summer production, Los Angeles Opera should have a success on its hands.
Over the past decade or so, opera companies have explored expanding their repertoire to include classic musicals. (L.A. Opera flirted with it far less successfully with Oklahoma! some years ago.) And, although there is little artistic value in an opera company reviving The Pajama Game (as NYCO has), shows with musical complexity from composers like Sondheim, Loewe, Blitzstein, Weill, and Bernstein may find homes more easily in an opera house than on today’s Broadway stages. The trick is finding the proper balance between musical theatre and operatic styles of performance.
Los Angeles Opera has gone about this the right way by choosing Broadway director Scott Ellis, who previously helmed the show for New York City Opera. Ellis, in turn, has cast his principals from Broadway veterans and his Liedersingers from the opera world. (One hopes that as more of these productions occur there will be a cleaner mix between these not-so-very-disparate disciplines that will strengthen and inform both.) Night Music is a deceptively difficult piece to direct, as several leaden revivals can attest. Filled with subtle humor and nuance, it is a soufflé that can easily deflate. Ellis has done an admirable job of blending the humor with the pathos while keeping the complicated plot elements clear and the action energized and vital.
As Fredrik Egerman, the lawyer frustrated after eleven unconsummated months of marriage to the teenaged Anne, Victor Garber comes to the production with the longest Sondheim pedigree. Having been an original member of the New York casts of Sweeney Todd and Assassins, Garber is very familiar with what makes Sondheim work. And, if his voice lacks the sonorous authority of Len Cariou’s original, he offers a sensitive reading of the score and realistic portrait of a man’s very public mid-life crisis. As Desiree Armfeldt, the glamorous actress and ex-lover of Fredrik who abruptly re-enters his life, Judith Ivey is on much safer musical ground than her Sally in Sondheim’s Follies on Broadway a couple of seasons ago. She easily convinces as the glamorous actress who’s decided that there might be something more important in life than the theatre. Bright, lively, and poised, she is a siren who can believably bring men under her spell, and her rendition of the show’s big hit, “Send in the Clowns,” is heartfelt and moving. Zoe Caldwell, who last played Maria Callas a few hundred feet away at the Taper, returns to L.A. in the role of Madame Armfeldt. She effortlessly steals every scene she is in regardless of the fact that she is confined to a wheel chair by the script.
Laura Benanti is a pert and silvery-voiced Anne, while Danny Gurwin conquers Henrik’s tricky music with ease and manages to be believably angst-ridden without losing the laughs. Marc Kudisch (fresh from the Broadway revival of Assassins) brings his glorious voice and his best preening peacock attitude to the role of Carl-Magnus. Michelle Pawk plays his long-suffering wife with hilarious acidity. The one disappointment is Jessica Boevers’ Petra. Her solo moment, “The Miller’s Son,” falls rather flat. It seems that neither director nor actress have found a way to integrate this number with the rest of the show.
Visiting from Opera Pacific, John DeMain conducts the show with the same care he would lavish on Mozart, and the results are delightful. Susan Stroman’s choreography adds literal waltzes to the swirl of the score, and Jeff Nellis’ lighting is appropriately magical. Unfortunately, Michael Anania’s sets seems a bit too streamlined for the cavernous stage of the Chandler, resulting in very little change from the interior city settings of the first act to the expansive countryside of the second.
That said, this is the best local production of the show since the original and should be seen by opera-goers and musical theatre fans alike. And, though Los Angeles Opera has been halted in its plans to present Sweeney Todd next season, one hopes the success of Night Music will bring the possibility of more classic musicals done as adjuncts to the regular opera season.
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion: July 7-July 31, 2004 (213) 365-3500 www.LosAngelesOpera.com
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