Stylish Sondheim on North Shore
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 9/12/2000
EVERLY - You can put almost anyone into many of the classic American musicals and still come out with a good show. I once saw an ''Annie Get Your Gun'' that was terrific, even though Ginger Rogers and Robert Goulet were in it.
The shows of Stephen Sondheim are a little bit different because they require an elusive dimension of style - and not just a generic Sondheim style; each of Sondheim's best shows requires its own style.
''A Little Night Music, '' based on Ingmar Bergman's 1955 film ''Smiles of a Summer Night,'' demands elegance, confidence in period style and costume, skill in finding the emotional reality in artificial comedy. It requires the musical skills of operetta, even of opera, as well as those of musical comedy. In the story, old lovers and new arrive at a house party in the country during the summer; in an evening of magic, relationships unravel and knit themselves up as each person arrives at a new dimension of self-understanding. The music is a series of bittersweet waltzes, climaxing in the show's unexpected great hit, ''Send in the Clowns.'' Only one tiny bit of underscoring slips into 4/4 time, perhaps the residue of an earlier version of the music.
The North Shore Music Theatre has lined up a cast with impeccable Sondheim credentials for its new production. Donna McKechnie and Merle Louise are working together for the first time since the original production of ''Company'' in 1971; McKechnie has recently been appearing in a revival of ''Follies.'' Louise was also in ''Sweeney Todd'' and ''Into the Woods''; Chuck Wagner was in ''Into the Woods'' too. Diana Canova was in a Broadway revival of ''Company'' supervised by Sondheim. Not everyone is quite right for this particular piece, but all of these performers are experienced pros able to twist their tongues around Sondheim's intricate rhymes. They can sing and act, and sing and act at the same time, which is the specialty that Sondheim requires.
As the famous actress Desiree, McKechnie looks glamorous and she's fun to be around, bubbly and immensely likable, although she's miscast. McKechnie is an all-American girl, like Joan Blondell or Eve Arden, and it's impossible to believe for a second that this Desiree is a famous interpreter of Racine or Ibsen; she's not Phedre or Hedda Gabler but Annie Oakley or Cassie in ''A Chorus Line'' - a musical-comedy queen. McKechnie, famed as a dancer and choreographer, moves well, but doesn't dance; she has a better voice than this part lets her use - it was written for an actress, not a singer - but she does arrive at a moment of truth when she finally has to. Louise, confined to a wheelchair as old Mme. Armfeldt, works too hard at sounding gruff; the heart-of-gold part comes as second nature, and she sings ''Liaisons'' with tough-minded tenderness.
Some of the others were even better. Jeff McCarthy is excellent as Desiree's old lover, the lawyer Egerman, full of the anxieties of middle age, unaware of how ridiculous his quest for youth is. Julia Haubner is uninhibited and fun as Petra, the servant who isn't as hung up about sex as her employers, and she really puts over her great song ''The Miller's Son.'' Wagner creates a bluff, entertaining caricature of the dimwitted dragoon Desiree is toying with, and Canova gives the best performance of all as his repressed and desperately unhappy wife - she has presence (she looks like Queen Elizabeth II), bearing, delivery, and voice, and in a part that lends itself to caricature, she finds a human reality that hurts.
The young lovers find themselves at a disadvantage in such experienced stage company. Both Angela Gaylor and Adam Monley overdo the earnestness; they struggle to act as young as they are. In addition, Gaylor hasn't gotten her promising voice under control yet, so she keeps slipping out of the piece's vocal musical style. The child, Natasha Ashworth, has a sweet gravity that is appealing, and there were some very good voices in the chorus/supporting cast, one of which, Susan Derry's, is exceptional.
The staging by Barry Ivan was intelligent and fluent, and moved pretty much like clockwork, although at Friday night's performance a bed slipped out of position and a headphoned techie had to come onstage and push it into line so that it could make its exit. A dizzying amount of furniture and decor rose from beneath the stage floor, and the costumes, some borrowed from the New York City Opera, looked splendid. Conductor Antony Geralis kept things moving along, and the orchestra, which enlisted some of Boston's finest freelancers, played with spirit and finesse. The sound system blared and overloaded during some of the soprano high notes in the opening vocal overture, but it soon settled down, providing a better-balanced sound picture than most downtown shows. The only thing to remind you of downtown is the North Shore Music Theatre's notoriously unsolvable parking hassle, which is enough to bring a frown to any summer's smiling night.
This story ran on page F10 of the Boston Globe on 9/12/2000. © Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.