Closing comments on A Little Night Music

We have all seen the glittering praise from the press about A Little Night Music. However, it isn't the journalists and press who make up the audiences each night. Obviously as we know, Saturday night saw the final curtain call for the first-rate cast of the West End's most sophisticated, intelligent and wickedly funny shows. So, I thought it might be nice to post some of the comments from the punters who were lucky enough to revel A Little Night Music one last time. Forget the pomp, verboseness and cerebrality of the press critiques who like to talk in theatre jargon, here is what the paying public thought.

"I went for my final visit to the show last night and yet again I was blown away by how good the show was, the cast were all giving their best and the chemistry between some of the actors was brilliant. It was nice to see the theatre verging on full for once and the cast seemed to really pick up on this and if possible improve on their performances!"

"It was nice to see the show once more before it closes, it is just such as shame that it is closing already.
Afterwards I did go to stage door, not that I was imposing on the cast, but they were genuinely more than happy to chat and sign the programme. Kaisa and Kelly both stopped and chatted for about 5 minutes each and they were genuinely dissapointed that the show was closing."

"Very sorry to see this one die. It does kind of make one wonder what difference, if any, the much-vaunted (on here) tourist season does actually make to ticket sales - if a show with such a pedigree can't even draw in the passing trade."

"Well, what a final night it was! Such touching last performances - it was obviously hard for the cast to play it for their final time and say goodbye to such gorgeous music and fantastic characters. And all the way through the run it's felt like there's a real warmth between the entire cast - last night more than ever.
There was a great energy but definitely a last night feel. I think a lot of the audience had seen it before so there wasn't always the huge laughs that certain lines get when people see it the first time. Kaisa seemed to be the only person who managed to be bubbly and full of smiles to the end - but then she does have a more cheerful part than the others! Hannah seemed completely tortured to be singing Send in the Clowns for the last time, she almost had to snarl the lines towards the end. Alex was on top form as usual but I did see tears in his eyes a few times. Hannah and Alex really took their time building up to You Must Meet My Wife - that song remains my favourite bit in the show - his amazing singing and her hilarious reactions! Gabriel was very solid, like Kaisa, great performance. Every Day a Little Death was very emotional - both Jessie and Kelly shed a lot more tears than usual. The beautiful chorus were stunning as ever, I've really enjoyed them every time.
At the very end, the 2 other Frederikas (Holly was on last night) came on in costume to take a bow and the swings came on too. The whole cast looked very sad but then - a stroke of genius - people started throwing flowers on to the stage and it really lifted everyone and the cast all started picking up a few each and laughing and the audience loved it, it really brightened up a sad moment. There were a few curatin calls, more flower gathering and then Maureen said a few lines. She just explained who the 2 other girls were - she seemed to forget the swings! - and then just said it was such a shame "such an intelligent and lucid show" was closing."

"The show was brilliant as always, and I ended up sobbing like a baby. Shed a tear during Every Day A Little Death, but from Send in the Clowns onwards I was blubbing! Very sad to see it close, I've loved the show so SO much. One of the strongest casts I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing, and I wish them all the very best for the future. They are all brilliant and deserve to go on to other great things!"

(All comments from the ALNM thread on the What's On Stage forums.)

A Message From Jessie!

A Little Night Music plays to West End audiences for the last time tonight at the Garrick Theatre and as it marks the end of Jessie's first professional role since I'd Do Anything it will definitely be a momentous occassion. The support for Jessie during IDA and thereafter has been remarkable and she has a little message for you all!

"I'd like to say a huge thank you for everyone's support throughout A Little Night Music and I'd Do Anything. From the bottom of my heart I cannot thank each and every one of you enough."

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I'm sure I speak for us all when I say we look forward to seeing what Jessie gets up to next and, as ever, the blog will continue to report all the news and information.

What would you like to see Jessie do next? Have you got any ideas for what roles you think she should do in the future? Let us know in the comments section!

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.

Happy 1st Birthday!

This time last year I filed the very first blog entry on this, the Jessie Buckley Fan Blog and who would have thought a whole year later it would still be going? I certainly didn't.

Of course I had ambitions for the blog, half inspired by the standards and the success achieved by David and co with their fantastic blog for Rachel Tucker and undoubtedly a little bit of selfish desire to make something respected and enjoyed. However, never in my wildest dreams did I even dare to imagine let alone even predict the veritable successes and things that what would come my way due to something that started out as a bit of an experiment and eventually became something I had to be responsible for, dedicated to and passionate about.

Measuring success is quite a personal and subjective thing and in a purely numerical and statistical way, the blog has been more successful than I ever thought possible. With over 60 thousand visits, enough to fill a football stadium at a cup final as I have been kindly reminded about, from all over the world these figures never cease to amaze me. But it has never been about getting hits from America, India, Hong Kong or where ever else in the world. For me the success I am most proud about is having achieved to set up and run a site or blog that remains respectful, of a high quality and most of all effective in what it aimed to do; that was to act as a fan site for someone of incredible talent.

Naturally, none of the success of the blog could have been if it were not for the success and talent of its subject. Hopefully Jessie's success will continue to grow and her talent continue to be recognised.

Who knows if this blog will see its 2nd birthday but in the meantime I hope all of you who have taken enjoyment in reading it and following it can look back and appreciate what a good year it has been for the blog and for Jessie herself. Happy Birthday!

A Little Night Music Closure

Contrary to a recent press release that A Little Night Music at the Garrick was to extend its West End run until 5th September, it has now come to light for reasons currently unbeknown to us that the production is reverting back to its original closure date of 25th July.

As all the major and reputable online theatre news sites are saying, A Little Night Music will be closing on 25th July. It appears that the reasons behind this decision aren't being made completely clear or are perhaps being held back in anticipation of a casting announcement for the Broadway production which begins rehearsals this coming October. In the meantime we can only speculate if it means many of the cast are going to Broadway or if indeed it means that the recession is managing to sink its teeth into the highly acclaimed Sondheim show as well and so cannot carry on until September, like it has done with many other West End productions causing them to close early and unexpectedly.

A Little Night Music transferred to the West End in March after its critically acclaimed and sold out run at the Menier Chocolate Factory and has continued to rake in rave reviews in the national and local press.

Obviously, if you still haven't caught the show at the Garrick or want to see it again time is of the essence! Links to reputable ticket sites such as westendtheatre.com offering deals with hotel stays or dinners and cut price tickets are on the right hand side.

With the show closing in just 23 days, this means news of what Jessie will be getting up to next will soon be out. As ever, make sure to check back here regularly for all the updates.