On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (19 page)

MADAME ARMFELDT
: The first smile smiles at the young, who know nothing. The second at the fools, who know too little. … And the third at the old, who know too much—like me.

The concept of the smiles was too rich for Sondheim to resist, and he gave his Frid a song on the matter, “Silly People.” It was an excellent way to remind the audience of this central idea, and the music is almost menacing, creating an arresting dissonance within the score—within the entire show, even. To a growling accompaniment that seems to uncoil from the lowest instruments, Frid states the theme of the smiles in a kind of ecstatic contempt. “Silly People” could be called the work’s essential number, but it occurred very late in the running time, when the plot was nearing its resolution and the audience is thinking, Cut to the chase, already. The song was dropped in Boston.

In all, Hugh Wheeler wrote a truly funny libretto, giving all his characters a chance to amuse the house (though all the “gay” observations belong to Madame Armfeldt and the Countess). In traditional operetta, a format codified in the 1920s, the comedy was always relegated to one or two jesters of marginal importance in the action; everyone else is a lover, an official, or a villain. But
A Little Night Music
, operetta though it be, uses its cast as an ensemble, interlocked in versatility. And of course there is no chorus, only the five Liebeslieder Singers, whose burnished vocal tone supports the varied vocal abilities of the principals. Désirée and Egerman (and sometimes the Countess) are often given to actors with “Broadway” voices, smooth enough but short of operetta’s silk. The maid, Petra, is a Broadway belter, also not silken but a fierce competitor, while the Count, young Henrik, and the lawyer’s wife, Anne, are usually a baritone, a tenor, and a soprano. In fact, the original Anne, Victoria Mallory, shadows the role, because she was such an irresistible charmer
and
so accomplished a singer that Sondheim wrote the role around her high-flying soprano, leaving some of her successors boxing above their weight.

Lawyer Egerman was Len Cariou, primarily a speaking actor on the Shakespearean level but Lauren Bacall’s vis-à-vis in the musical
Applause
(1970), and Hermione Gingold made a marvelous Madame Armfeldt, hurling her juicy Wheelerisms at the public as if each next one must top the last.
^*
But Désirée occupies the pivotal role, though she has relatively little to sing, even in a form, operetta, that was always known above all for vocal splendor. Egerman at first seems to be the work’s protagonist, for the action starts by concentrating on his odd little household of the wife who won’t sleep with him and the son seething with unspoken frustrations. However, once Egerman and his old flame Désirée meet up, she takes over the show’s driveline. From a quiet domestic drama the play turns into an adventure: will she succeed in winning Egerman back? In this, she reminds us of
Follies
’ Sally and, still to come,
Sweeney Todd
’s Mrs. Lovett, who both reconvene with men they loved and have been separated from, Sally for a single evening and Mrs. Lovett till death do them part. But those are sad tales, while
Night Music
is a comedy. Girl will Get Boy.

Désirée has become a choice diva role for, among others, Jean Simmons, Dorothy Tutin, Sally Ann Howes, Judi Dench, Frederica Von Stade, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bernadette Peters, and even Elizabeth Taylor (in the film version): everyone from opera singers to movie stars. Originally, however, the part was hard to cast. Prince wanted someone at once worldly, vulnerable, somewhat European in flavor, and in possession of a good sense of the irony that lives at the heart of light comedy. It came down to Glynis Johns and Tammy Grimes; I wonder if Prince considered Leslie Caron (who, much later, played Madame Armfeldt in Paris). Prince ended in choosing Johns, apparently because she projected a “softness-inside-a-hard-shell” feeling that Prince thought perfect for Désirée: and Johns was. That feeling, presumably, is what Sondheim tapped into when he wrote “Send in the Clowns” for her during rehearsals.

This is famously Sondheim’s outstanding song hit. Mark Eden Horowitz’s
Sondheim On Music
lists some four hundred separate recordings, by Rosemary Clooney, the Lettermen, Liberace (as a piano solo), and the University of Utah A Capella Choir, for starters. Of them all, Sondheim prefers Johns’ rendition. I still remember, the first time I saw the show, when Johns got to the first interesting chord—it’s G Flat with a major seventh—on “You in mid-
air
,” an appreciative little gasp ran through the house. There was, too, that so very operetta-esque bittersweet moment, for Désirée has failed to land her lawyer, and the song expresses the exquisite pain of having one’s valentine returned unopened. Yet its melody, so apt at that moment, expands spectacularly into bliss when the lawyer at last comes to his senses for the happy ending and takes Désirée into his arms. And note that the number’s imagery is theatrical, as befits an actress—“entrance,” “farce,” “timing,” and of course “clowns.”

Sondheim wrote not only “Send in the Clowns” during the five-week rehearsal period but a substantial fraction of the score, including one of his most playwrighting numbers, “A Weekend in the Country.” There was nothing like it in his previous work: a small epic of song and dialogue moving from place to place, all musically motivated by a ritornello—a recurring tune—suggesting suspense and travel. This is Désirée’s scheme to “reset” her relationship with the lawyer, at her mother’s country house. An invitation is delivered at the lawyer’s home, the Count and Countess get involved, expectations are raised, then all the principals and the Liebeslieder group join together, each individual with his own agenda;
^*
when suddenly the façade of Madame Armfeldt’s mansion was revealed, orchestrator Jonathan Tunick stowed a quotation of the first seven notes of Richard Strauss’
Der Rosenkavalier
into the texture—it’s a horn call, suitable for what in effect is a hunt—and the curtain falls.

Interestingly, “A Weekend in the Country” was created very much like “Rose’s Turn,” plotted out point by point in rehearsal and then written. Prince showed Sondheim how Boris Aronson’s sliding screens would fashion “set changes” as the story moved from place to place, giving the number extraordinary flexibility in what it could show. Thus, Anne and Petra discuss the invitation and, seconds later, Désirée and Fredrika preview their future as a completed family. Fredrika guesses that the lawyer is her father-to-be (Désirée: “Dear child, you’re uncanny.”), instantly we’re back at the Egermans’ house, and so on. One wonders what would have happened if
Night Music
’s scenery had been of the old-fashioned kind, with backdrops and mini-sets moved in on bulky wagons in the
Gypsy
manner—because in that case “A Weekend in the Country” could not have been realized.

We should note as well that Sondheim planned a subtle emphasis on the “three smiles” theme in a unique relationship between “Liaisons” and “Silly People”—that is, between Madame Armfeldt and Frid. She owns the theme in the musical but he owns it in the movie—and, of course, they are the only adult principals who represent the Armfeldt country estate. Thus, they create a “class partnership” of high and low that reflects
Night Music
’s interaction of social classes generally. (Petra, the Egermans’ maid, is of course Frid’s vis-à-vis, and she elaborates on the show’s junction of classes in “The Miller’s Son,” giving a verse each to iconic figures of the settled bourgeoisie, the upstart entrepreneurial group, and the nobility.) Then, too, “Liaisons” and “Silly People” are both in
, an unusual movement for music heard on Broadway, and Jonathan Tunick’s orchestration further bonded the two numbers in rhythmic undercurrents in the bass and splashes of harp.
^*
This makes the loss of “Silly People” all the more regrettable.

In all,
A Little Night Music
is the first Sondheim show that brings the musical organization of opera to Broadway in an overt way, and thus marks a break within the Sondheim-Prince canon. Bit by bit, the show is creeping into the opera-house repertory, but the point is not that opera singers can take all the parts. Rather, it is that the music acts as the work’s sole animating force. Listen to the numbers alone and you can follow the plot; this is not true of
Company
or
Follies
.

One might categorize
Night Music
as a Singspiel, the German term for works in the time of Mozart and Beethoven that we call opera but which navigate between the numbers through spoken dialogue, as do
The Magic Flute
and
Fidelio
. It is all the more astonishing, then, that Sondheim felt Hugh Wheeler never quite understood how the music fits into music theatre. Sondheim told me that Wheeler was musically inclined in general, but that Sondheim’s other librettists seemed to comprehend far more naturally than Wheeler how song would devour first-draft dialogue, or how melodies would recur for dramatic reasons.

All the same, Wheeler’s book is one reason
Night Music
continues to play well today. Much of it comes more or less straight from Ingmar Bergman’s movie script, including the key passage that tells us exactly what the story is about. It occurs during the aforementioned play-within-a-play sequence. Désirée is just getting to what, in the stage directions, Wheeler calls “her first-act set speech,” meaning the lines toward which the entire act of this old blunderbuss of a French comedy has been heading. Something else is going on at the same time: Désirée has spotted Egerman in his box. In Bergman’s film, she lets off a millisecond’s smile. In
Night Music
, she does a take, a bigger piece of business, easier for an audience to catch in a Broadway house. In any case, Anne takes note. Though sexually closed to her husband, she is jealous all the same, and now she throws a distracting scene, when suddenly, in lines all but straight from Bergman, Wheeler gives Désirée her big moment, the credo of the show and something not unlike the equivalent of a close-up:

DÉSIRÉE
: Dignity. We women have the right to commit any crime toward our husbands, our lovers, our sons, as long as we do not hurt their dignity. We should make men’s dignity our best ally and caress it, cradle it, speak tenderly to it, and handle it as our most delightful toy.

Of course! Because Egerman’s dignity as a man is hurt by his frigid wife. The Count’s dignity is hurt by finding Désirée and Egerman together in sly circumstances. Henrik’s dignity is hurt because everyone patronizes him and—the mortal blow—the woman he so guiltily loves (again: she’s his stepmother; how many Commandments does that break?) teases him incessantly. In a tragedy, someone would have to pay with his life, but, in this comedy, all dignity is restored by the final curtain.

Opening on February 25, 1973,
A Little Night Music
was the third show in the post-
Forum
Sondheim-Prince era but the first smash hit in its reception. All five of the Sondheim-Prince titles of the 1970s are now classics, but only
Night Music
opened as one of New York’s favorite things, a hot ticket of a show that everyone is talking of in glowing terms. Even the
New York Times
’ idiot Clive Barnes—who so misunderstood how Sondheim innovates in his pastiche numbers that Barnes suggested the
Follies
cast album be issued on 78s—raved. And there was this: days before the premiere, during previews, Glynis Johns was struck with hypoglycemia and rushed to the hospital during previews. Prince, to protect the production, contacted Tammy Grimes. It was a notable opportunity for her, as her career, peaking early on when she carried a smash,
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
(1960), at the age of twenty-six, seemed to sink somewhat thereafter. However, as actors sometimes will, Grimes “made demands” (as Prince tells us in
Contradictions
), which slowed negotiations, and, meanwhile, Johns made a fast recovery.

Night Music
’s rich character interplay allowed director Trevor Nunn to stage it on the small scale, for London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, in 2008. Along with the comparably intimate Donmar Warehouse, this is the chic venue for what we might call “reinstructed” revivals, in which subtlety of portrayal replaces the musical’s traditional rhetoric of lavish sets and costumes, production numbers, and so on. Londoners eat it up, including those who habitually attend nothing but Shakespeare, Chekhof, and Brecht, and the Nunn
Night Music
, seen on Broadway, did make a strong argument in favor of this approach, especially as Angela Lansbury gave Madame Armfeldt a lift with a genuinely touching portrayal instead of the usual snarky riffing. Lansbury was especially compelling when speaking of the wooden ring she was offered by an admirer. It was an heirloom, apparently something very special in his family, but, her courtesan pride thus offended, she sent him packing: