Review: A Little Night Music by The Georgetown Palace Theatre
by Michael Meigs
A Little Night Music at the Georgetown Palace theatre is a giddy delight. Stephen Sondheim’s elegant fable has the magic of a midsummer night in Sweden. The sun never fully disappears, time is in suspension and the world hums with yearning and expectation.
In this gentle world of lovers and fools the story is attractively simple. Sondheim’s music and lyrics lift in subtle fashion the sentimental dilemmas of the cast of vivid, idle upper class characters, transmuting a Feydeau-style farce into something far more touching and poignant.
Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler had been inspired for this 1973 musical by Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of A Summer Night. 
Bergman attended and appreciated the musical but commented simply, “These are not my characters.”
That’s just as well. There's little of Bergman's darkness about this glittering tale. Central to the story are a married pair: Frederik Egerman, a gentleman of middle age and considerable gravitas, and his blonde 18-year-old Anne, a breathless young thing who might more properly be his ward than his wife. Alas for Frederik, his young bride is skittish of the pleasures of the flesh. In their eighteen months of marriage she has never admitted him to her bed.
Ah, the flesh, its delights and temptations, and the keen edge of time! "The summer night smiles three times,” we hear from the elderly grande dame Mme Armfeldt. A Little Night Music accordingly gives us the innocent intensity of ardent youth, the knowledgeable longing of middle age and the wry wisdom of age.
Why the separation, those long years ago? Perhaps young men of a certain aristocratic responsibility could permit themselves the entanglement of an affair but not the entanglement of marrying below their rank. Desirée is the daughter of Mme Armfeldt, formerly a grand courtesan, now a wealthy widow; Desirée’s daughter Frederica, with a name similar to Egerman’s, is another hint at that entanglement.
Self-important huffing-and-puffing dragoon officer Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm is Desirée’s current lover. David Sray gives us a comic, striding portrait of self-assertion, as a man who owns his horse, his mistress, and his wife, and perhaps values them in that order. His discovery of Frederik in Desirée’s apartment is a scene of high comedy. Carl-Magnus demands satisfaction – a duel – while Frederik, wrapped in the Count’s own bathrobe, without a shadow of conscience resolutely lies his way out of confrontation.
Countess Charlotte – played by Jenny Lavery – is the most poignant figure of all, a woman radiating frustrated sensuality, deeply disappointed in her marriage. In this plot there are few prospects for her. Carl-Magnus, that brute, sends her to tattle to delicate Ann the news of Frederik’s infidelity with Desirée. Lavery is crushed, luscious and strong. I was ready, myself, to ride to her rescue, if only that had been possible.
Standing outside these refined maneuvers is Petra the Engman’s serving girl. Amy Minor blows through these drawing rooms like a tonic gust of warm air from the south, tempting son Henrik’s fragile moral principles and celebrating the joys of the flesh.
Artistic Director Mary Ellen Butler says that the Palace designed this one to be less expensive, with minimal fly-away sets, house-produced costumes, and reduced expenditures for talent, but even so, the show feels richly produced. Bravo as well to the talented chamber orchestra team of seven musicians conducted by pianist Jonathan Borden, situated in the penumbra at deep center stage.
The Palace’s A Little Night Music is a profoundly satisfying evening of music and knowing comedy, with just enough of an edge to render it grandly humane. With sound, song and sight the players remind us that our own “night music” of love and longing moves with us through our lifetimes.
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A Little Night Music
by Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler
Georgetown Palace Theatre
