Sunday, January 10, 2010

"Liaisons... What's Happened to Them?"

Review: A Little Night Music
Walter Kerr Theatre, New York

January 6, 2010


"Of course the summer night smiles. Three times... At the follies of human beings, of course." So Madame Armfeldt says as Trevor Nunn's minimized A Little Night Music opens, which winks more than usual at Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. During the evening, touring actress Desiree (Catherine Zeta-Jones) reunites with her old lover, Fredrik (Alexander Hanson), married to the younger Anne, but must fend off her military dragoon Count Carl-Magnus (Aaron Lazar) first. The farcical exchange of partners feels grounded here; the fates are watching, much like the summer night. A ghostly vocal quintet--Nunn's best touch--is wise to the cast's frivolities, for these five appear to have also dabbled in love and lust.

Oh, isn't it rich? Well, not entirely. While Nunn's scaled-back staging draws out the tragedy simmering beneath the effervescent comedy, the orchestra of eight (reduced from twenty-seven) sacrifices grandeur. Stephen Sondheim's endlessly witty score deserves swells of sweeping swings, in its permutations of the "Night Waltz" and full-cast chorales like "A Weekend in the Country."

Where's passion in the art? Mme. Armfeldt would ask. And what of the cast? "The first smile," she relates, "smiles at the young, who know nothing." Indeed, the three youngest characters (putupon Henrik, virginal Anne, and the sensual maid Petra) offer unsophisticated characterizations. The second smile is more promising: "at the fools who know too little." Lazar dials down the Count's pomposity (and uses his tenor to great advantage). Erin Davie surprises with a more emotional take on bedraggled wife Charlotte: bruised by the charade, but still clinging to her piquant exterior. Hanson, meanwhile, is a charming, sturdy Fredrik prone to laughing it all off.

But even his mask falls during the show's hit, "Send in the Clowns." Zeta-Jones is radiant and luminous as Desiree until then, though she pushes hard on brittle one-liners. When she arrives at "Clowns," she sheds the theatrics and delivers the song with beautiful understatement.

The night's third smile is for "the old who know too much": Angela Lansbury, now 84 years old, who lords over the production. In her scenes as Mme. Armfeldt, she is arch and deliberate; in her song "Liaisons," suddenly warm, wise, and even giddy to be gifted "a tiny Titian" from an ancient affair with a duke. She's not what one expects of the wry, weary matriarch, but more than the rest, she gets Sondheim and the interplay of artifice and pathos. Send in the pros.

No comments:

Search This Blog