My Favourite Review To Date

What with it being only a week until 'A Little Night Music' takes to the stage for the last night of it's short but sweet West End run I thought it would be nice to post a final review. Having read (too?) many reviews over the past months this one by Huntley Dent is undoubtedly my favourite as it captures brilliantly everything that is remarkable, poignant and special about this musical. Not only is it lovely to read it is also from The Berkshire Review, the local arts, review and culture paper for me!

"Whipped cream and knives." Only today did I run across this twisty phrase, juxtaposing the saccharine and the sadistic, which Stephen Sondheim used to describe the tone of A Little Night Music, his hit musical from 1973. The image makes me cringe. It's too close to razor blades hidden inside Halloween apples, but then, so does the musical itself. As any lover of Sondheim's immense gifts knows, the source of this work was Ingmar Bergman's gossamer comedy from 1955, Smiles of a Summer Night. One of the main virtues of the current West End revival directed by Trevor Nunn is that it reflects Bergman's achievement, aptly described by Pauline Kael as turning boudoir farce into lyric poetry. Every actor onstage could easily carry the drama if the music were omitted. That's such a rare accomplishment that I came away dazzled. Still, there are no knives in Bergman's screenplay, and it's worth asking where they came from in the musical. The easy answer is from Sondheim himself, but that's the same as pointing to a mystery none of us will ever penetrate: true artists are as secretive as they are expressive.. A tinge of psychopathology embitters the perfumed atmosphere of this, Sondheim's most complex work.

Sondheim wields such a fine scalpel that turning the blade on him is like carrying coals to Newcastle. So let's glow a little. The London critics were mostly ecstatic over Nunn's revival, which is as intimate and delicate as the last revival, mounted at the National Theater in 1995, was oversized and vacant (I remember nearly walking out, and yet Judi Dench, as the central female character, Desiree Armfeldt, won the Olivier Award that season for her portrayal). A large pit orchestra has been reduced to eight musicians playing offstage. It's been the trend, both here and in New York, to perform Sondheim with smaller forces, all the more to point up his intricate wordplay. Having said that all the principals are superb actors, I should add that they sing in tune and hardly drop a stitch executing the score's complexities, which veer into polyphony and chromaticism quite often. Opera companies, including New York City Opera and Los Angeles Opera, have been impressed enough to mount their own productions (Nunn's is apparently set to open on Broadway this fall). The chorus of five singers who wander the stage and comment musically on the action are adept enough to be young opera singers, and only a wretchedly crude amplification system mars the experience -- the use of loud reverb in a few numbers is especially noisome.

I wish I could look around the room and say, "We all know the plot already, right?" But that would be presumptuous. The interwoven story-line is a tangled lover's knot -- recapping it proves nearly impossible. Bergman's film centers on four couples from every layer of Swedish bourgeois life, who join for a weekend in the country. Over the course of a midsummer night they wind up playing musical beds, amorous tricks, connived schemes to net new partners, and other gambits of the standard Feydeau farce. We are principally drawn to two characters, however, the worldly ageing actress Desiree and her former lover, Fredrik Egermann, a lawyer who has been led by mid-life crisis into an unsuitable marriage with a peach-cheeked young girl. The fact that he has yet to take her virginity after eleven months springs the action of the plot and sets the tone of erotic confusion throughout. Emotions are both stirred and shaken, until eventually the various schemers wind up with the right partners. And yet a sense of failure pervades the happy ending. In essence the four women have won, for the men are infantile and self-deluded. Bergman leaves us wondering if the game of love is worth winning, however, when it involves humiliating each man and exposing his foolish vanities. The boudoir and the spider's web are not that far apart. Cupid's dart could be tipped with curare.

Sondheim wrapped this poignant comedy of manners in his most sophisticated and delicious score. It's often pointed out that almost every number is in 3/4 time, like Der Rosenkavalier, but before you think of Strauss, realize that the main source is actually Ravel's La Valse, which turned the heady ebullience of a Viennese waltz into something dark, slinky, treacherous, and off kilter. Hugh Wheeler, who wrote the book for A Little Night Music, was Sondheim's most literary and theatrically canny collaborator -- he also wrote the book for Sweeney Todd. He knew enough to take Bergman's tragicomedy and soften the tragedy into bitter-sweetness. Fredrik and Desiree wind up happily together without damage to either one beyond the rueful self-deprecation of the show's most famous song, "Send in the Clowns." Before making his film, Bergman had directed a stage production of The Merry Widow, which inspired him to give his movie its warmly romantic period setting. Wheeler has pushed it even further into the wistfully nostalgic operetta world. Desiree and Fredrik are variants on Léhar's Hannah and Danilo. As portrayed by the delightfully Junoesque Hannah Waddingham and the suavely self-possessed Alexander Hanson, the lead couple evoke indulgent smiles from the outset. We never worry for an instant that they won't find each other in the end. So much for the whipped cream.

Sondheim's lyrics, the source of the knives, evokes grimaces more often than indulgent smiles. Many of his musicals leave you feeling at once delighted -- how can his wit, musical invention, and verbal ingenuity not create delight? -- and unsettled, because as adroitly as he disguises his dark materials, Sondheim is essentially a misanthrope. Broadway musicals don't simply have happy endings. They are machines for fabricating sentimental outcomes from any situation. Sondheim dismantled the machine early on, in Company (1970), whose ambivalence about love and marriage disturbed the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, so much so that his name almost became box office poison. After the extravagant flop of Follies (1971), which took the Broadway musical as its subject, stripping the glamour down to a shivering carcass, Sondheim must have grocked that ditties and dancing couldn't hide the sting, bitterness, and cynicism that imbue him so thoroughly. Link: A Little Night Music at the Garrick Theatre, The Berkshire Review.

Which makes his next show, A Little Night Music, all the more miraculous. Somehow it emerged as a bubble that could burst at any moment, releasing some quite unpleasant odors, the whiff of sexual betrayal, masochistic fidelity, jealous male rage, and vicious hypocrisy. All are present in Sondheim's lyrics, and yet the bubble floats above us, shimmering and glimmering, without any of his knives destroying it. I came away marvelling that Nunn and his company so exquisitely knew what they were about. There was no lingering queasiness, and yet nothing had been dumbed down or evaded. This production is the epitome of art concealing art. Or in this case, concealing the grinning death's head behind smiling silk masks."

Link: A Little Night Music at the Garrick Theatre, The Berkshire Review.