A Little Magic For Winter Nights

Daily Express ****

"This is the first project Trevor Nunn has directed since ……………………………… I can only predict that this will garner praise.

Nunn’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s bittersweet musical of romantic entanglements works beautifully in the Menier’s intimate theatre, making the emotions on display – love, lust and sexual frustration – almost tangible without causing them to be overblown and allowing the audience to pick up every facial expression and nuance to sometimes comic, sometimes wistful, effect.

Adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles Of A Summer Night, A Little Night Music is set in Sweden but contains more than a whiff of a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Mismatched couples finally come together during a balmy evening and are drawn to their rightful pairings in a satisfyingly predictable conclusion, the use of dry ice lending the proceedings a dream-like quality and evoking the night-long twilight. And while Nunn has already attracted some notice by casting a younger actress than is usual for the female lead, Hannah Waddingham is a triumph as the captivating actress Desiree.

The glamorous Waddingham may be only 34 but she plays the role with an emotional maturity, as a woman who has perfected a polished (and heavily made-up) veneer of smiles. Her concealed catty asides in You Must Meet My Wife are wickedly funny and when she opens her heart to her former lover, Fredrik, in the elegiac Send In The Clowns, the slipping of her composed mask is genuinely touching.

In fact the entire ensemble appears both perfectly cast and in fine voice, delivering Sondheim’s wonderfully light, typical waltz-time numbers with feeling and charm.

Alexander Hanson provides a strong, likeable, manly Fredrik and if Jessie Buckley, the runner-up in the BBC show I’d Do Anything, appears to slightly strain in her opening number, she creates an endearing image of naïve innocence.

Gabriel Vick is frustratedly indignant as Fredrik’s student son Henrik, while Kaisa Hammarlund is full of playful vim and vigour as the lascivious-minded maid Petra.

Alistair Robins puffs with buffoonish pomposity as Count Carl-Magnus, while Kelly Price as his cheated-upon wife Charlotte is contained in her ever-trickling pain and Maureen Lipman tops it all off as a suitably imperious Madame Armfeldt.

In short, a little night music delivers a good deal of winter magic."

Thanks go to Mr and Mrs Tanner for kindly typing up this review since it didn't appear on the newspapers website.