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Loss weekend
The Lyric fine-tunes A Little Night Music
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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In the intimate space of the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, Spiro Veloudos’s mounting of A Little Night Music puts flesh on the brittle bones of the arch 1973 Stephen Sondheim operetta and turns it into a winning and even touching evening of musical theater. The 1955 Ingmar Bergman film that furnished Sondheim and book writer Hugh Wheeler with their source, Smiles of the Summer Night, is a breathlessly graceful and gracious sexual roundelay wherein the follies of the fin de siècle characters are presented with a mixture of compassion and humor. But the musical is too much in love with its own cleverness, and the more lush the production, the smoother the repartee among the wounded veterans of the battles of love, the less human it feels — despite the high points in the score, which is one of Sondheim’s most melodic. The Lyric Night Music isn’t perfect, but the actors come across as vulnerable men and women rather than seeming rigged to make points about the vulnerability of men and women, and the poignancy of the Bergman story comes through. This is especially true of the star-crossed young couple: Anne, an adolescent who’s still reluctant to consummate her year-old marriage to a middle-aged friend of her father’s, and her stepson, Henrik, an exasperated virgin whose lustful thoughts war with his religious training. Baby-faced Billy Piscopo is funny and likable as Henrik, and Lianne Grasso conveys the conflict in Anne’s affection for him by playing the character as alternately maternal and playfully companionable. While these two are finding their way toward each other, Henrik’s dad, Fredrik (Christopher Chew), is rekindling an old affair with the actress Desirée (Maryann Zschau). What prompts you to root for them to correct the error of their long-ago parting is the warm interaction of the two actors. Their performances, both a little busy and overplanned in the first act, relax in the second, in time for her to serenade him with the rueful, bittersweet "Send In the Clowns." The musical performances, under Jonathan Goldberg, are consistently good. Drew Poling, who plays Desirée’s narcissistic dragoon lover, Count Carl-Magnus, sings so well that you can almost forgive his mugging. Leigh Barrett as his wife, Charlotte, has a bigger challenge, since the role is insufferably masochistic. How do you get away with a lyric like "Every Day a Little Death"? Barrett comes close: she and Grasso underplay the duet, simplifying it from an acidulous complaint to a sad one. The only unfortunate attack on one of the Sondheim songs is by Elizabeth Hayes as Anne’s maid and confidante, Petra (she’s also Henrik’s sexual tutor). The number is "The Miller’s Son," which almost always works in performance, but Hayes is so overemphatic and gesticulates so much that I felt I was watching a set of illustrations to accompany the lyric. The fault may lie in part with the staging. But Hayes’s Petra never feels right — she’s too prickly and sarcastic. Andrea C. Ross does sweet, unaffected work as Desirée’s young daughter, Fredrika, striking the right blend of adoration and hopeful longing when she sings about what it’s like to be the daughter of a touring performer in "The Glamorous Life." Best of all is Bobbie Steinbach as magnificent old Madame Armfeldt, Desirée’s mother, who lives in the country — where everyone winds up in act two, a guest at her estate — devoting herself to the counseling of her granddaughter and the memories of her many love affairs. Steinbach has the wittiest lines, and she makes every one ring without allowing you to lose sight of her character’s emotional life. She even brings to life the desiccated "Liaisons" ballad Sondheim wrote for the character; her rendition is an object lesson in the dramatic structure of a musical number. At its most assured, Steinbach’s performance elevates Sondheim and Wheeler to the level of Schnitzler or Marivaux.
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