With “Jersey Boys” now in the midst of a long summer run at the Mercury Theater, that theater’s familiar, longtime artistic partnership of L. Walter Stearns and Eugene Dizon have moved uptown to the Theo Ubique Theatre, where they are at the helm of another very different but nonetheless seasonally apt production, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “A Little Night Music,” as adapted in 1973 from the Ingmar Bergman film “Smiles of a Summer Night” and not seen so often around town these days.
Rather than street lamps and bouncing horns, the mis en scene here is summer at the Swedish home of aged Madame Armfeldt (Honey West) at the dawn of the 20th century. Therein, as Madame delivers Lady Bracknell-like bon mots to her granddaughter Fredrika (Tessa Newman), we witness the romantic complications involving a lawyer named Fredrik Egerman (Patrick Byrnes), his son Henrik (J Allan), his shy wife Anne (Chamaya Moody), his caustic old flame Desirée Armfeldt (Colette Todd, making a welcome return to this stage), the pompous Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Kevin Webb), the Count’s wife Charlotte (Maya Rowe) and a flirtatious maid named Petra (the terrific Madison Kauffman), who, by virtue of her station and spirits, gets to have sex with whoever she wants while laughing off all of the hypocritical moralism of the fancy people who surround her.
“A Little Night Music” is operetta-like in its structure (Sondheim liked to call it a “theme and variations” or a”tragic farce”) and transfixing in its musical pleasures, not the least of which is “Send in the Clowns,” a cynical ballad subsequently recorded by everybody under the sun. I prefer Petra’s “The Miller’s Son,” a celebration of sexual expression using the argument that it’s what makes life worth living, as well as “You Must Meet My Wife,” a song with a driving melody and a lyric infused with paradox. (In Sondheim’s “Company,” you get “Sorry-Grateful.” In “A Little Night Music,” it’s “She lightens my sadness. She livens my days. She bursts with a kind of madness. My well-ordered ways. My happiest mistake, the ache of my life.”) And then there’s “Every Day a Little Death,” which has the killer lyric: “Men are stupid, men are vain, love’s disgusting, love’s insane,” which I recently read on the Internet as describing 21st century life while in your 20s, not that I would know.
I am happy to report all of those songs are really well sung here under Dizon’s musical direction, all emotionally keyed to the right things, rooted, rich and entirely enjoyable. The scenes and the general milieu prove more mixed in this staging (the limited choreography is from Brenda Didier) because some lack beat-by-beat specificity and the whole struggles to find the necessary visual sweep of everything happening all at once in different parts of the place and the night.
It’s a tricky show, this one, as the emotional climaxes comes as fast as the revelations and it’s easy to overplay them in an intimate space like Theo; West has the right sardonic tone but some of the younger folks are a tad on the nose when their performances would benefit from their holding back their smiles and anger, to bowdlerize a theme from the show, and focusing on their characters nuances.
But if your question in reading this as a Sondheim fan is whether or not there will be rewards from attendance, whether the night might smile for you on Howard Street? Not the whole time, but smile at these mostly young, talented singers you will.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “A Little Night Music” (3 stars)
When: Through July 14
Where: Theo Ubique Theatre, 721 Howard St., Evanston
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $44-$92 at 773-939-4101 and theo-u.com
