A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC


Pasadena Playhouse’s epic Sondheim Celebration continues this month with A Little Night Music, a Broadway-couldn’t-do-it-better revival that tops even February’s magnificent Sunday In The Park With George.

The magic begins the moment the show’s 22-piece-orchestra launches into an Overture that doesn’t simply preview Night Music’s most memorable Sondheim melodies (and Jonathan Tunick’s full orchestrations), we get to hear their lyrics sung in glorious five-part harmony by The Quintet, five Liebeslieder Singers who will reappear throughout the evening to comment, like an operatic Greek Chorus, on the romantic roundelay about to ensue.

Mark Esposito’s elegantly choreographed “Night Waltz” then has the entire cast of principals exchanging partners in a dizzying array of permutations, signaling from the get-go that none among them has yet found their perfect match, even those currently married to each other.

From then on we launch into stories that have captivated audiences since A Little Night Music’s Broadway debut five decades ago.

Composer-lyricist Sondheim and book writer Hugh Wheeler’s 1973 adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night introduces us to glamorous stage star Desiree Armfeldt (Merle Dandridge), her former lover Fredrik (Michael Hayden), Fredrik’s “child bride” Anne (Kaley Ann Voorhees), his sexually frustrated son Henrik (Chase Del Rey), Desiree’s current lover Carl-Magnus (Ryan Silverman), and Carl-Magnus’s disillusioned wife Charlotte (Sarah Uriarte Berry).

Also along for the bumpy ride are Desiree’s wheelchair-bound mother Madame Armfeldt (Jodi Long), the actress’s tween daughter Fredrika (Makara Gamble), and a household of servants, chief among them the saucy Petra (Ruby Lewis) and the macho Frid (Adam James King).

Act One sets the scene for the country weekend soon to come with some of master songwriter Sondheim’s most memorable gems.

Sung consecutively and then in counterpoint, “Now, “Later,” and “Soon” reveal Fredrik’s frustration with his virginal wife, Anne’s fear of sexual intimacy, and Henrik’s teenage horniness.

Fredrik expresses his desire for his former lover to get to know his teen bride in “You Must Meet My Wife” (something Desiree is less than thrilled about); “Liaisons” has the elderly Madame Armfeldt instructing her granddaughter in the gentility of her generation’s romantic entanglements; and Carl Magnus does his best to convince himself that the discovery of a half-dressed Desiree and Fredrik together in her boudoir was entirely innocent in “In Praise Of Women.”

Most powerful of all, “Every Day A Little Death” gives us a deeply unhappy Charlotte laying bare the devastation of her marriage to a cheating louse.

I’ve seen six previous productions of A Little Night Music, but none have come close to matching the sheer brilliance of this latest revival, directed by David Lee with supreme attention to character development and detail, gorgeously designed, and above all revelatorily performed by some of the finest actor-singers you’re likely to see and hear all year.

It takes a bona fide star to truly convince us of Desiree’s glamour and fame, and Broadway/TV’s Dandridge is that incandescent star. Not only that, but her “Send In The Clowns” proves that even a song written expressly for someone with a limited vocal range can soar to new, ovation-earning heights when delivered by an actress with Broadway pipes.

A superb, sublime Berry gives Charlotte a caustic tongue equal to her aching heart, and her gut-wrenching “Every Day A Little Death” cuts like a knife.

Soprano stunner Voorhees is flighty ingenue perfection as Anne, stirring up fires down below in Del Rey’s darkly handsome, powerfully intense Henrik even as she keeps hubby Fredrik (a terrific Hayden in amusingly stuffed-shirt mode) at arm’s length.

Silverman gives Carl-Magnus a puffed-up ego to match his buffed-up physique, Gamble is a precocious delight as Fredrika, and the divine Long is dry-tongued magnificence as the wheelchair-bound Madame Armfeldt.

Big-biceped King gives Petra ample reason to get frisky before the tangy, tantalizing Lewis launches into a show-stopping “The Miller’s Son” that manages to match Dandridge’s “Send In The Clowns” in the length and volume of cheers it inspires.

Liebeslieder quintet Georgia Belmont, Jared Bybee, Kim Dawson, Oriana Falla, and Arnold Geis provide heavenly harmonies and wry commentaries throughout the show, with Brandon Borkowsky, Mikaela Celeste, Danny Cron, and Audrey Williams completing the Broadway-caliber ensemble as assorted servants.

Unlike Pasadena Playhouse’s locally cast but otherwise mostly outsourced Sunday In The Park With George, A Little Night Music gives us master director Lee’s brand-new-for-the-Playhouse vision, and a from-scratch production design to match.

Scenic designer Wilson Chin and lighting designer Jared A. Sayeg keep things appropriately understated in Act One the better to dazzle when weekdays spent indoors in the city become an outdoor “Weekend In The Country” in the land of the midnight sun.

Kate Bergh’s sumptuous costumes are turn-of-the-20th-century perfection as are Christopher Enlow’s wigs, and sound designers Danny Erdberg and Ursula Kwong-Brown mix soaring vocals with music director-conductor Alby Potts’ Broadway-size-and-caliber orchestra. (Seeing all twenty-two musicians in their elegantly-dressed splendor at the beginning of Act Two is a thrilling bonus.)

Darryl Archibald is music supervisor. Amanda Rose Villarreal is intimacy coordinator. Jill Gold is stage manager and Dylan Elhai is assistant stage manager. Casting is by JZ Casting. Ovation Award winner Christanna Rowader is standby for Charlotte and Desiree.

For a production to surpass the uniformly lauded brilliance of this past winter’s Sunday In The Park With George, it must be in a class all by itself. Pasadena Playhouse’s utterly breathtaking A Little Night Music is all that and more.

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena.
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
April 30, 2023
Photos: Jeff Lorch

 

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