A Little Night Music, book and music by Stephen
Sondheim, directed by Valerie Rachelle. At PCPA’s Solvang Festival
Theatre, Saturday, August 12. Shows through August 27.

Reviewed by D. J. Palladino

Certainly there was sex in American musicals before this play
debuted in 1973. Consider the dissolute randiness of Cabaret. But
A Little Night Music — based loosely on the
uncharacteristically comic Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer
Night — makes the couples coupling seem so “Me Decade” — a
wink-wink, we-all-do-it-folks laugh, followed hastily by
repercussions. I overheard a Solvang audience member talk about how
those Europeans all have lovers and such but this production
doesn’t seem European.

First off, the actors are not very sexy. Edward High­tower’s
Count is such a boorish caricatured male chauvinist, the play feels
like a feminist-penned tragedy. All the fun of a sex romp is
destroyed knowing that Melinda Perrett’s Countess is probably
beaten by her husband, an offhand remark we take seriously because
Hightower makes him so sinister. Thus this waltz musical seems like
a cultural apocalypse at times. (Leonard Cohen could’ve written
it.) The minimal staging with lovers darting across invisible
borders and in front of gilded gates seems to lower the platforms
of civility, giving the childish characters the hypocritical veneer
needed for mannered comedy. It’s often a bummer.

The music is nice, though. Before Sondheim became so fugue-y and
impressionistic, he played lush melodies. Night Music sits on the
cusp with songs like “You Must Meet My Wife” and “Remember,” mixing
talk and song as well as wonder and sarcasm. The melodic side, of
course, is represented by Sondheim’s greatest hit, “Send in the
Clowns.” It is lovely played outdoors but, honestly, the song bears
only a tenuous relationship to the play.

When Bergman — and later Woody Allen — pulled out the stops for
this story, they scored by making stuffy Scandinavia seem Italian.
This troupe wants to tighten up the screws. Reserved theatrics and
a plain set make the heart of Night Music shrink. Instead of
clowns, the director should have ordered a few more summer smiles,
to lighten the guilty pleasures of all this screwing around.

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