“Art isn’t easy,” Sondheim the master wrote, and producing Sondheim’s art is particularly not-easy. Each of his musicals, the great and near-great alike, poses a trap into which directors, designers, and performers too often fall.
In the case of A Little Night Music, his adaptation (with librettist Hugh Wheeler) of Ingmar Bergman’s rondelay of regret Smiles of a Summer Night, the trap is setting an appropriate tone for the narrative’s multiple romantic threads, the most important of which involves stuffy lawyer Egerman (Jason Danieley), his much younger, wedded-but-not-bedded Anne (Sabina Collazo), and old flame Desirée Armfeldt (Emily Skinner), all thrown together in a country estate over a fraught weekend.
When a company is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with period style, a creeping archness can take over this sort of material. Witty lines become too knowingly delivered, smirking is the order of the day, and the guts of a passionate musical drama go by the wayside in an orgy of superficiality.
All of that is by way of rejoicing that the current, justly sold-out revival by the Barrington Stage Company of Pittsfield, MA could be the most robustly acted and, yes, passionate rendition of this favorite piece out of the dozen or so I’ve attended, and that includes Hal Prince’s Broadway original. Director Julianne Boyd, her designers, choreographer Robert La Fosse, and the cast are clearly aware that the engine of this show has to be emotion fully felt, and they pull out the stops accordingly. It all believably takes place in the polite society of turn-of-the-20th-century Sweden, but what drives them is urgent and immediate.
You can tell this production is sensitive to the material’s beating heart by its emphasis on color. Most Night Musics I’ve encountered seem to have been studying the wrong Bergman movies, the ones obsessed with alienation and repression. Their staging takes place on bare wooden floors against cutouts of birch trees, with dreary backgrounds of dark blue or merde brown. But Yoon Bae’s backdrops feature rich pastels and pen-and-ink reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans, the Madeline illustrator. Sara Jean Tosetti’s eye-popping costumes seem easily as expensive as the outer- (and under-) wear of folks of this class would be, and all are dazzlingly set off by David Lander’s lush lighting. It isn’t hard for a cast, or an audience, to get in the mood for love and lust with a physical production like this. (The saturated red of Desiree’s backstage curtain and divan promise the heat that the acting delivers. Yowzah.)
And oh, that acting. Collazo captures both the allure and the annoying affect of a naïve bride who knows how to flirt but not how to follow through. In turn, Danieley, so great in The Full Monty years ago, fully embodies the two sides of Frederick, hungering for Anne’s youth and beauty while ever aware, with a shrug and a chuckle, that the coupling couldn’t be more wrongheaded. Another Broadway veteran, Mary Beth Peil, is a Madame Armfeldt whose memories of being a once-famous courtesan may be fading but whose Continental allure remains, authority and wisdom both hard-won and real. (A startling resemblance to Nancy Pelosi does nothing to reduce her eminence, believe you me.)
I don’t have enough words for the contributions of Sierra Boggess and Skinner as, respectively, the neglected Countess Charlotte and her weekend hostess Desirée. Boggess, the original Ariel of Broadway’s The Little Mermaid, is an actress of astonishing subtlety. Notwithstanding an Eve Arden-esque way with a cynical quip, she displays all the sorrow and self-loathing of a humiliated wife acting as cat’s-paw in her husband’s betrayal. Skinner, now detached (as it were) from Side Show, is the first Desirée in my memory who actually looks like she enjoys touring and has the stamina to keep it up. In short, she’s playing a Star and seems to be a Star, and as such we can readily accept the desire as well as the jealousy she variously inspires in those at the chateau. Skinner’s hearty interpretation intensifies the heartbreak of her rendition of “Send in the Clowns,” which she turns into a magical, memorable three-act play.
There are weaknesses here and there. Cooper Grodin overdoes the buffoon dragoon for my taste; the show benefits when the imperious Carl-Magnus is less a chocolate soldier and more a real threat. Young Noah Wolfe seems to be playing tortured Henrik’s introversion on the top, rather than actively working against it; every day may bring another death, but we still want to see characters struggle at being alive. (He does better when wrangling with Sophie Mings’s voluptuous Petra, dripping with Life Force.) And though Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations are credited, they don’t sound like the soaring Tunick I remember, not with the limited instrumentation of two keyboards plus three strings and a reed player.
But why quibble when one is so transported? This is Boyd’s farewell production at the distinguished regional theater she co-founded in 1995 and has managed ever since. Although I have only been a Barrington visitor for a few seasons, I feel confident in saying that nothing becomes her tenure as artistic director as the manner of her leaving it. Because this Little Night Music is nonpareil.
A Little Night Music opened August 10, 2022, at the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage (Pittsfield, MA) and runs through August 28. Tickets and information: barringtonstageco.org
