Ok kids, it’s time to put that Glee cast album away. It’s fall – time to class it up and see a real musical starring real people in a real theatre, don’t you think? And when the subject is musicals and the target is class, the answer is “A Little Night Music.” The show has a downright impeccable pedigree: “A Little Night Music” boasts music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, one of the most important composers of the last century. Not only that, but the concept was lifted from an Ingmar Bergman film and even its title is the literal translation of the name of a Mozart symphony. Sophistication abounds! And lucky you, you’ll get a chance to see this rollicking velvet-draped romantic comedy with your very own eyes when it begins its run at the Performance Network Theatre in Ann Arbor on November 15.
“A Little Night Music” begins in 1900 when a motley group (a lawyer and his virginal trophy wife, an aging actress and a seminary student among them) converge on a rural Swedish estate. EMU professor Phil Simmons is directing the production and has found a lot to love about these ragtag characters. He gushes, “It’s just so rare to find a show where the streams of consciousness for all the characters are set to extraordinary music – the characters are so hilarious, so complex, and so human.” It doesn’t take too long for furtive flirtations to turn into full-fledged liaisons and liplocks during this weekend in the country.
If this all sounds a little bit Jane Austen, then you don’t know Sondheim. His lyrics are brash and erudite with the sharpest wit in musical theatre, and “A Little Night Music” is not an exception. How many other composers have the nerve to pen a paean to trysts with the line “Too many people muddle sex /With mere desire/And when emotion intervenes /The nets descend”? But this is the very sort of character Sondheim relishes: the brazen and whip smart protagonist.
But just because Sondheim is a freaky genius doesn’t mean that Simmons treated the original version as though it was a gospel. He took some important artistic liberties with this version of the show.
“We’re doing it without the Lieder Singers (the Greek chorus of sorts) and dividing the lyrics the Lieders would ordinary sing between all the principal characters. It’s served to really sharpen the characters,” says Simmons. (Apologies to all you Lieder lovers out there.)
Despite the rather cynical view on love embraced by “A Little Night Music,” it is doubtless one of the more fun and silly of all Sondheim’s musicals. We are, after all, talking about the twisted mind that spawned the musical version of Sweeny Todd. So, if you are feeling like a trip to the theatre this autumn, the show runs from mid-November until the end of December. Tickets can be purchased on the Performance Network’s website or at the box office, which offers half price tickets for students for that evening’s performance.
