(Photo by Michael Brosilow)
"Was that a farce?" asks Desirée during the reprise duet of Stephen
Sondheim's famous "Send In The Clowns", a song most rapturously heard
within the context of its story –
a subversive theatrical reference to loony comedy covering up disaster. Good
question though, Desirée. The
flip-flopping lovers gallivanting carelessly through a 1900 Swedish estate
would seem to argue that, yes, "A Little Night Music", with a score
by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, is an escapist comedy the likes
of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - but nestled in that frame are some
of the most perceptive songs of Sondheim's prolific body of work. Songs about
life, love, and class, a particularly scary topic in the context of nineteenth
century Sweden. Deceptively silly, "A Little Night Music" is actually
a riveting Chekhov play masquerading as a wistful, effervescent musical.
That Chekhovian cocktail of romantic
comedy and wise social commentary is in fine form at Writers’
Theatre in Glencoe. Writers’ has a marvelous understanding and appreciation
of its own size, and its new production of “A Little Night
Music”, which opened on Thursday night at
its one hundred eight-seat Tudor Court theatre, intensifies that stirring
privacy so often lost in productions or filmed versions of the “Smiles
On A Summer Night” stage adaptation.
Desirée Armfeldt (Shannon Cochran), a
lauded actress succumbing to middle age, finds herself rekindling an old flame
of long lost love – with the regal Fredrik Egerman (a
warm and infinitely cooky Jonathan Weir), a family man with a young virgin
wife, Anne (Kristen French) and a depressed, bashful son, Henrik (Royen Kent).
Complicated by marriages, families, mistresses, and Counts, the two lovers
efforts to stay apart and come together are, all at once, delightful,
saddening, and blissfully romantic. And Writers’ tiny, yet feisty
space infuses even more emotional resonance into the already heartfelt hijinks.
Intimate productions of Stephen
Sondheim's works are quite common nowadays. John Doyle's recent Broadway
revivals of “Sweeney Todd”
and “Company”, the former
having toured to Chicago, went so far as to put instruments in the hands of the
actors, inciting a musician's union firestorm all in the name of intimacy. The 2009
Broadway revival of "A Little Night Music," a transfer from London's Menier
Chocolate Factory starring Catherine Zeta Jones and eventually Bernadette
Peters, also minimized the play's orchestrations to uneven effect. But there is
always a hovering caveat to Sondheim-as-chamber-musical, and that is the
missing lushness of the score.
Jonathan Tunick's role in Sondheim's
success is often understated, but his orchestrations were always as
groundbreaking and unprecedented as the master composer's scores. “A
Little Night Music” is one of Sondheim’s
best, incorporating an uncharacteristic amount of memorable melodies into the songs
while keeping true to his complex meter and lyricism. And the splendor of
Sondheim’s creation is beautifully
reverberated in the fullness of Tunick’s orchestrations.
That grandeur is sadly missing from Writers’ five-person pit,
lead by director Brown and unabashedly placed upstage. Songs like the Act One
finale, “A Weekend In The Country”,
and the swelling reprise of “Send In The Clowns”
in the play’s final moments lack the unparalleled
thrill elicited by unbridled vocal and orchestral power.
But William Brown’s
unintentionally site-specific production in the idyllic town of Glencoe eases
the absence of the musical’s auditory bigness, fixing its focus
on the ever important, smaller numbers like the mega-hit “Send
In The Clowns” and the heart wrenching “Everyday
A Little Death”. The relationships, their twists and
turns, have never been represented quite so clearly as they are here. On Kevin
Depinet’s set of simply draped fabric and a
marble green floor, attention is paid solely to the fine array of actors. A
parade of wonderful performances traipse the boards at Writers’,
particularly from the women.
Sung
with vibrant pain by Tiffany Scott, “Everyday A Little Death” is one of many small-but-mighty
victories of Writers’ production. Scott’s Charlotte is a fractured rendition of
the uptight Countess, struggling to survive in a relationship with Count Carl-Magnus,
an inflated manly man requiring her to unflinchingly accept his infidelities –
including his affair with Desirée. Charlotte adorns a mask of
bitter sassiness, feigning the illusion of contentment, but the character is
anything but content. Scott’s brash verbal self-defense and her subdued
cheerless despair make for a hauntingly memorable Charlotte Malcolm.
With the
compacting of the working-class chorus – the poor employment of the “Night
Waltz” bookending the play being the only glaring mistake in Brown’s production
– the most depthful class commentary is saddled on Petra, a servant played by Brianna
Borger with a fire raging behind her infectious smile. Borger’s turn at the
formidably difficult “The Miller’s Son”, a song in which Petra fantasizes about
her future husband – a businessman or the Prince of Wales – only to realize her
stationary place in society, is magnificently well sung, with unrivaled lyrical
clarity and gorgeous expressiveness.
Much has
been made of Deanna Dunagan’s return to the stage, here, as Madame Armfeldt, Desirée’s aged mother with a salacious
past. Last seen in Chicago in her Tony Award-winning role as Violet Weston in
Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County”, Dunagan is back – this time in a musical.
Unlike Violet and most Madame Armfeldts you will ever see, Dunagan is nice as peach
pie. Dunagan softens Armfeldt’s bite, which, though an intriguing variation on
the part, reduces the character to a fleeting and mostly humorless cameo.
Seemingly complacent, Madame Armfeldt’s recollections of a fonder, more
scandalous yesterday are, here, somewhat redundant.
But by
far, the most off-the-wall interpretation in Writer’s “Night Music” is Shannon
Cochran as the middle-aged actress with a flair for flings, Desirée Armfeldt. In
SAT parlance, Cochran’s Desirée is to Glynis Johns’ (the role’s
originator, and a perpetually aristocratic rose) as Princess Dianna is to Queen
Victoria. Cochran’s uncommonly casual, fun-loving Desirée brings a great deal of clarity
to all the calamitous efforts these men go through to win her over. In Writers’
production, Desirée is a girl you can pound down a
beer with – a not-so-crazy choice if you consider the Strindbergian parallels. Of
course, there are no suicides in “A Little Night Music”.
Despite
a few less than successful performances – Royen Kent plays the young, woeful
Henrik Egerman with a far too modern teenage disposition, complete with “um”s
and “uh”s, and as his close-in-age stepmother, Anne, Kristen French allows
naivety to cloud her entire portrayal - Writers’ “A Little Night Music” is a sweet and pleasurably
sorrowful treat. Experiencing this garden romp outside of the artificiality of
the city, surrounded by spring trees and new-grown grasses, makes for a buoyant
and cleansing “weekend in the country”.
"A Little Night Music" with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler runs at Writers' Theatre in Glencoe through July 8th.
