QOTD: worth remembering

"I really think the best course is to act as if you are living in a functional world. Act as if the people around you are of course sane adults who own their choices. Often, they will surprise you by being just that." —marshlc, on the "Tell Me About It" discussion board

A Little Night Music

Thursday night, cattitude and I saw the current Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, starring Bernadette Peters and Elaine Strich (and Alexander Hanson, but it was Strich and Peters that made me want to see this).

It was as good as I'd expected, which is very: I'm a Sondheim fan, but had never seen this show, only listened to the cast album. Sondheim's songs are excellent, but they gain from the context of the rest of the show). I'd wanted to see Elaine Strich act since we saw her one-woman show Elaine Strich at Liberty a couple of years ago, and Bernadette Peters is as good as I'd heard. (I suspect I've seen her before, but I'm not sure.) Her "Send in the Clowns" was almost heart-breaking, as well as technically very good: a bit of my brain was detached enough to notice the skill involved in putting those pauses, as if to catch her breath, in without ever actually losing her place.

We had a very good time; this was worth waiting for. I continue to be impressed that Strich and Peters are the replacement cast; this is the production that originally had Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (There aren't enough good roles for older women, or maybe there aren't enough directors and producers willing to put on those plays.)

Strich, as Madame Armfeldt, has only one song to herself, "Liaisons," which she did well. And I caught on one bit of the lyric, and wondered if it was meant as characterization: Mme. Armfeldt, reminiscing about her past, sings about having been the mistress of the King of Belgium. The play is set "at the turn of the last century," or around 1900; the timing suggests that this was likely Leopold II, the infamous creator and ruler of the Congo Free State. The musical is about (heterosexual) romantic/sexual relationships, and there's definitely political text there (for example, Count Carl-Magnus's jealousy and treatment of his wife and his mistress); I don't know whether Sondheim or Hugh Wheeler, who wrote the book, thought about the implications of "In the palace of the king of the Belgians," rather than picking it for scansion. But it sheds a less flattering light Mme. Armfeldt, though I don't know how much the king's mistress would plausibly have known about goings-on in the Congo around 1870. (I can imagine her having learned about it years later, been glad to no longer be involved with him, but also still glad of the villa and money he gave her, and determined to play up the romance or status of a king, any king.

The choreography is also very good, both larger things like the way Frederika is mostly excluded by the adults in the opening waltz, and small things like the way several of the actors mime riding a train or bus (a slight anachronism, perhaps, but it works). The Playbill lists an "associate choreographer," suggesting that at least some of the choreography is from the original Hal Prince production.

[I don't have a lot to say about the play as a play, except that it works; I'm glad not to be anywhere near anything like Count Carl-Magnus's possessiveness and double standards, or in the sort of milieu where that kind of thing is normative; and that I think it's technically a comedy.]