A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC.
London.
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim book by Hugh Wheeler suggested by Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night.
Garrick Theatre (transfer from the Menier Chocolate Factory).
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 2.30pm.
Runs 2hr 55 min One interval.
TICKETS: 0844 412 4662 (booking and transaction fees).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 April.
Love and desire and hate in three-four time.
Ingmar Bergman filmed Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in 1975, making directly a link created two years before by Stephen Sondheim’s use of a Mozart title for his musical from Bergman’s 1955 film comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.
Being Bergman, melancholy underscores the comedy. The summer night’s three smiles bring happiness for young innocents and the middle-aged caught amid amorous follies. But the final smile for the old, understood only by the wheelchair-bound Countess with her distant memories, offers a different sort of release.
Sondheim, a creative user of pastiche, composes entirely in waltz-time, ironically a dance scarce born and certainly not socially bred in Mozart’s day. By turn nostalgic, pungent and bitter, the waltzes depict bourgeois and aristocratic fn de siecle Sweden.
Trevor Nunn’s production confects that lost world out of a misty dream on designer David Farley’s moonlight-tinted set, enhanced by Hartley T A Kemp’s hazily nocturnal lighting. Out of this dream come count, lawyer, actress, who then close by waltzing back into a dream.
Between, however, Nunn finds comic sharpness. There’s nothing dreamily vague about the comic emphases, and no production can have mined Hugh Wheeler’s book more thoroughly for sexual innuendo. Yet this compromises the sense of fond remembrance. Maureen Lipman’s Countess is a sharp commentator on her own life as on others’, but there’s little sense of past years of passion; rather, decades of acerbic comment seem to lie behind her.
And Hannah Waddingham’s stage-star Desiree seems far too composed to be involved with a very unmilitary Dragoon (did no-one teach Swedish soldiers to sit up straight?). The young adults, clergyman-to-be Henrik for whom ‘cello-playing (the sound that opens and closes the evening) is sublimated sex, and an older-looking-than-her-age Anne Egerman remain two-dimensional. Only Alexander Hanson’s lawyer combines sharp focus with convincing inward regret.
The score, with some intriguing Jason Carr orchestrations, is magnetic as ever, though Send in the Clowns is the wrong moment to over-emotionalise, its melodic line lost in emphasising feeling the song itself makes perfectly clear. Over-amplification tends to depersonalise speech and loses musical subtlety. But Sondheim can take it.
Henrik Egerman: Gabriel Vick.
Mr Lindquist: Lynden Edwards.
Mrs Nordstrom: Fiona Dunn.
Mrs Anderssen: Laura Armstrong.
Mr Erlanson: John Addison.
Mrs Segstrom: Nicola Sloane.
Fredrika Armfeldt: Katie Buchholz/Holly Hallam/Grace Link.
Madame Armfeldt: Maureen Lipman.
Frid: Phil Pritchard.
Anne Egerman: Jessie Buckley.
Fredrik Egerman: Alexander Hanson.
Petra: Kaisa Hammarlund.
Desiree Armfeldt: Hannah Waddingham.
Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm: Alistair Robins.
Countess Charlotte Malcolm: Kelly Price.
Swings: Florence Andrews, Ben Fleetwood Smythe, Sian Howard-Jones.
Director: Trevor Nunn.
Designer/Costume: David Farley.
Lighting: Hartley T A Kemp.
Sound: Gareth Owen.
Orchestrations: Jason Carr.
Musical Supervision: Caroline Humphris.
Musical Director: Tom Murray.
Choreographer: Lynne Page.
Assistant director: Tom Littler.
Associate costume: Poppy Hall.
2009-04-11 00:01:05