'Night Music': in key, in sync

Like all of the great romantic comedies, Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music is unsparing in its depiction of human folly.

In an enchanting production running at Center Stage, the characters pay a price for their blind self-indulgence, their benighted yearnings, their frantic pursuits of will o' the wisps -- but the cost never is as high as they -- or we -- deserve. A beneficent fate rescues us from our worst enemy, who always turns out to be ourselves.

When the show is over, we exit feeling that something -- or someone -- has seen right through us. We know ourselves to be absurd, forgiven, even blessed.

That's the meaning behind the tale that Madame Armfeldt tells her granddaughter as the show begins. On a summer's night, she says, the sky smiles three times: first for the young, the second time for fools and a third time for the old.

The Center Stage production has drawn Broadway veterans Polly Bergen, Barbara Walsh, Stephen Bogardus and Maxwell Caulfield. The cast skillfully mines the material's bittersweet nuances -- and their performances are enhanced by Candice Donnelly's gossamer gowns and Riccardo Hernandez's suggestive set. The latter features a reproduction (playfully hung askew) of an 18th-century masterpiece, the Dark-Haired Odalisque, in which a young woman lies stomach-down on rumpled bedding, her buttocks prominently exposed.

Talk about setting the mood.

A Little Night Music is based on one of the rare Ingmar Bergman films with a happy ending, Smiles of a Summer Night. It is set in Sweden around 1900, and when the action begins, everyone is paired up with the wrong person:

A middle-aged lawyer has taken an 18-year-old bride, and 11 months after the wedding, she remains a virgin. A famous actress is carrying on an affair with a married officer with a brain the size of a pea, though his other attributes are impressive. A young student is in love with his stepmother.

And that's before things get complicated.

Sondheim initially wanted to give his musical the same name as the Bergman film but couldn't get permission. Instead, he chose the English translation of the title of Mozart's most famous serenade, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Mozart intended his piece to be light entertainment, performed by a chamber ensemble in private drawing rooms. Sondheim's show, which comes close to being an operetta, has much the same feel.

For something so seemingly frothy, immense thought went into crafting Night Music. Sondheim wrote almost exclusively in 3/4 time -- mazurkas, polonaises and, most notably, waltzes -- and there is something about the three-beat measure that is inherently unstable. It propels movement and, therefore, drama.

Look everywhere, and you'll see trios: in families (Madame Armfeldt, her daughter and granddaughter; the attorney, his wife and son). I even counted four distinct romantic triangles, so that the plot itself is just one variation on the 3/4 theme.

The first few minutes of Wednesday's performance were rough; perhaps a case of opening-night jitters. Lyrics were muffled, and the dance that begins the first act was clumsy and uncertain.

But then actor Josh Young (Henrik, the student) took the stage and opened his mouth to sing "Later." Out poured his rich, chocolaty baritone. Audience members settled back to enjoy themselves, and the other performances clicked into gear.

Barbara Walsh brings to the role of the actress Desiree Armfeldt a sardonic delivery underscored with warmth. She has a way of drawing out her lines in the beginning, only to speed up at the end, so that she accumulates power like a train hurtling down the track.

But Walsh and the director, Mark Lamos, have the good sense to stage the show's most famous melody, "Send in the Clowns," very simply. Walsh merely stands in the center of the floor and sings the words. She neither forces the emotion nor embellishes her phrasing, and the effect is lovely and moving.

So, later, when Walsh went off-key for one strange and inexplicable moment, it didn't mar her performance as it might have. It was so brief, it almost increased the authenticity of her rendition, rather than detracting from it.

Nor is she the only performer with an idiosyncratic delivery. Polly Bergen significantly slows the beat every time her character, Madame Armfeldt, an aging courtesan, takes the stage. Bergen rounds off each syllable and holds it up to the light as if it were a pebble she had picked up on the beach. Then she drops each word into our laps, one at a time. The effect, though, is never precious. Madame Armfeldt is at the end of her life, and this is her swan song.

And what a song it is. It stays with you. Even though I'm too old for fairy tales, when I walked out of Center Stage, I found myself scanning the night sky, hoping to catch it in a smile.

mary.mccauley@baltsun.com

Related topic galleries: Ingmar Bergman, Academic Progress, Music Theater, Classical Music, Celebrity

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