Brilliance in the twilight at Centerstage
by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com
The things we do for love.
That’s the theme of most of drama and all of comedy, and it, with a pretty garnish of “what fools these mortals be,” is the center of “A Little Night Music,” currently at Centerstage, and aren’t we lucky fools with three more weeks to catch it?
“A Little Night Music” is Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, as near perfect as a musical comedy can get, possessing wondrous music and sparkling comedy and (surprise, since this is Sondheim) a soft heart.
“A Little Night Music” is based loosely on “Smiles of a Summer Night,” the film that brought Ingmar Bergman international recognition. It is a play about fools in foolish love and it’s about as close to French farce as a bunch of buttoned-up Scandinavians can get.
What Sondheim did was make it irresistible with a score written entirely in three-quarter time, all waltzes and mazurkas and minuets, and lyrics that are complex, brilliant and simply magical.
Kate Baldwin as Countess Charlotte and Maxwell Caulfield as Count Carl-Magnus in “A Little Night Music” at Centerstage. The musical, by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, runs through April 13. Photo by Richard Anderson
Quick plot. Scene, the perpetual twilight of midsummer Sweden, turn-of-the-20th century. Widower, attorney with a rich extramarital past and a young son in divinity school takes an 18-year-old bride who is reluctant to, er, complete the contract. They go to the theater where the leading actress was the better half of the widower’s great love affair. Young wife runs out of the theater, widower stops by the dressing room after the show.
Eventually, all of the characters—the actress, the attorney, the virginal bride, the comically confused divinity student, the jealous count with current dibs on the actress’ bed, the countess, assorted servants and a Swedish chorus of five that waltzes in and out to deliver trenchant comment, all gather at the actress’s mother’s chateau for a weekend in the country.
Stephen Bogardus is charming as Fredrik Egerman, the attorney befuddled by love, and he makes a lovely pair with Barbara Walsh as Desirée Armfeldt, the actress who fears she has made her entrance too late. Walsh does wonders with “Send In the Clowns,” which inexplicably became the signature song of “A Little Night Music.” Walsh manages to revive the song, which is a great accomplishment considering it was bludgeoned into insipidity by Judy Collins 30 years ago.
Kate Baldwin is wonderful as Countess Charlotte, humiliated wife of the tin soldier who is Desirée’s jealous lover, carrying tales of Fredrik’s infidelity to sweet Anne (Julia Osborne), crashing the weekend party at the chateau and attempting to seduce Fredrik at dinner.
Then there is the virgin Anne and silly, overwrought Henrik Josh Young), the divinity student with an insistent libido. The innocents literally stumble into each other while Henrik’s looking for a limb high enough to hang himself.
Polly Bergen does a star turn as Madame Armfeldt, the legendary courtesan who slept her way into her chateau, an incomparable wine cellar and a fabulous art collection, and who is appalled at the state of the courtesan business these days.
Centerstage has made a practice, in the last ten years or so, of staging musicals that a sane producer would not try to present in the space available. “Sweeney Todd” and “HMS Pinafore” in the Head Theater? Both sounded like spectacularly bad ideas, but both productions turned out beautifully, big things in small packages with pared-down production values that steered our focus to the score and the book and tightly drawn performances by fine actors.
So when Centerstage announced Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece “A Little Night Music” this season, I thought, how perfect, and sure enough, it turned out nearly so.
