'A Little Night Music', along with 'Sweeney Todd', represents Sondheim at his most operatic, so it’s not uncommon for either work to be found in the repertoire of opera companies. They are also, together with 'Company', among his most popular and accessible works, 'A Little Night Music' in particular, with its Mozartean title and Bergmanesque inspiration, shows him at his most assured and refined.
For this production by James Brining, Opera North has assembled a mostly excellent vocal cast, led by Sandra Piques Eddy and Quirijin de Lang as the central couple Fredrik and Desiree and with the legendary opera singer Josephine Barstow in the cameo role of Desiree’s mother, Madam Armfeldt. Sondheim’s score receives powerful, but never reverential advocacy from the Opera North Orchestra under conductor Oliver Rundell, with effective in-period design and costumes by Madeline Boyd. But though the musical numbers are given full weight, the cast are less successful in pointing up the ironic high comedy of Hugh Wheeler’s book (as good in its way as the score, at least to this critic), so that the long sections of dialogue between numbers take on the texture of longeurs. This is a real shame and the principal failing of this production: tightening up the pacing would certainly improve matters.
Fortunately, there is still much to compensate. Both Eddy and de Lang convince as the middle-aged former lovers, with de Lang in particular showing himself a deft physical comedian as well as an excellent light baritone; and Amy J. Payne is a splendid Petra, the biddable housemaid, singing her one number of the night 'The Miller’s Son' with effortless control and impeccable characterisation, so impeccable, one might wish Sondheim had given her another number!
Corinne Cowling as Anne and Sam Marston as Henrik lacked the last degree of stage presence to hold their own in this company and Christopher Nairne, though vocally secure, was an unthreatening Count Carl-Magnus, not entirely plausible as someone who’d come out best in a duel. Helen Evora was a splendidly acidic Countess Charlotte. But special honours go to Barstow, who reminds us, in her one number of the evening, 'Liaisons', of her beginnings in straight drama before her distinguished operatic career. This number, in which the preposterously wealthy Madam Armfeldt recounts her long life as the world’s most successful courtesan and laments the shoddy state of life and love nowadays, is the wittiest of the evening and here it is given full measure and precise characterisation of the kind the composer would surely approve.
Not an overwhelming production of 'A Little Night Music', then, but the pluses outnumber the minuses.
Reviewer - Paul Ashcroft
on - 6.7.22
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