Review: Gorgeous ‘A Little Night Music’ is alive with desire and dread at the Marriott Theatre
Review: “A Little Night Music” (4 stars)
The most artful and sophisticated Marriott Theatre production in quite some time, director Nick Bowling’s exceptional, in-the-round staging of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “A Little Night Music” — an adaptation of a 1955 Ingmar Bergman movie and often described by its composer as a “tragic farce” — is a throwback to the more ambitious days of suburban musical theater in Chicagoland.
I’ve had to rack my brains to recall a Sondheim production here not only so well stocked with boffo Chicago and New York talent but so beautifully cast in almost every role; it’s already taking me back some 20 years to Gary Griffin’s stellar Sondheim stagings at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, much admired by Sondheim himself.
Chicago remains well stocked with Sondheim devotees ready and willing to travel. This one, not to be missed by disciples of the Great One, merits a night in the country (if you can apply that to suburban Lincolnshire), if not the entire weekend.
With the possible exception of his famous staging of “The History Boys” for TimeLine Theatre in 2009, this is to my mind the best work of Bowling’s career, almost all of which I’ve seen. This nationally underrated director, the associate artistic director at TimeLine and once a frequent artist at Court Theatre, has figured out how to make a formatively complex show (Sondheim liked to call it “a theme and variations”) that sometimes can feel arch, cynical or overly stiff instead pulse with life, complexity and throbbing human desire.
Bowling has a whole slew of assists on the stage, beginning with Alexandra Silber as Desirée — Silber is familiar to Marriott audiences from her counterintuitive performance as Marian the librarian in Katie Spelman’s 2024 staging of “The Music Man.” She has an unusual voice, and that might not appeal to everyone for, say, “Send in the Clowns,” but it sure appeals to me, given how she makes every line a battle between acceptance and desperation, alternate fighting against and resigned to her lot. Classic Sondheim paradoxes, all. Desirée can so often come off a bundle of cliches of actresses of a certain age, all narcissism, hedonism and irresponsibility. Here, Silber uses her unique physical energy and spontaneity to make her deeply vulnerable and thoroughly alive.
This is hardly the only fascinating performance. Addie Morales relaunched the national tour of “Les Misérables” as Cosette, so that might offer a clue to the strength of her voice as Anne, the young ingenue who competes with Desirée for lawyer Fredrik’s romantic ministrations. Morales turns another character who can be irritating into one whose lot, and whose needs, demands attention.
Fredrik is played by Andrew Samonsky, another richly timbred vocalist who here has the lack of ego necessary to turn Fredrik into a sad, lonely and fundamentally ordinary man, which is exactly what Wheeler and Sondheim intended him to be. Add Carmen Roman, for goodness sake, as the all-seeing Madame Armfeldt, the sardonic soothsayer of this story of otherwise insubstantial people revealing nothing but their own insecurities, and you can have quite the lineup.
All singing and moving in three-quarters time at the halting dawn of the 20th century.
Actually, I’m not done. Madison Uphoff’s Petra, she who sings of “The Miller’s Son” and who comes with an awareness of the speed of life’s trajectory usually unknowable by the young, nearly bursts with sexual energy, cheeks flushing as she romps in the flesh and muses in song. And, last but not least in this list of human highlights of a formidable ensemble is Veronica Garza, playing the betrayed Charlotte; Garza’s “Every Day a Little Death,” one of Sondheim’s most haunting and beautiful melodies, is worth the drive all by itself.
Aside from a couple of moments of overplaying elsewhere in the cast, overall a minor matter here, the tone and balance of this “A Little Night Music” is exquisite all night long. As is Ryan T. Nelson’s musical direction.
Thanks to how its characters spin dizzily from one to the other, never realizing (despite a matriarch’s best efforts) that true happiness lies only in self-knowledge, “A Little Night Music” works ideally in the round, something that is not true of every Sondheim musical. Here, Regina Garcia’s set is very simple but all that’s needed, allowing Sally Dolembo’s costumes to slowly reveal this milieu, still strikingly familiar, as bustles are unbustled and fumbling lovers fight off buttons so that naked skin can emerge into the light.
Great productions of Sondheim musicals, and this is one of those, always fill you with a certain existential dread. Based on what I saw Friday night, I’m not sure the Marriott audience these days is fully used to that, as distinct from rocking out with Elvis or “Footloose” or something, but it should be understood that Bowling would not have snagged this cast for those titles. Oh, no.
But everyone worth their salt in the theater wants to do “A Little Night Music,” for it reveals so much with every performance. I only hope this show can find another circular home.
