Sondheim in Waltz Time: A Little Night Music at Opera in the Heights

Although Opera in the Heights mounts a most credible A Little Night Music (1973), Stephen Sondheim’s most accessible musical, there’s a pall over Lambert Hall.

If you’re reading this Saturday, November 22, there are only two more performances, tonight and Sunday matinee, November 23. Three performances of this iconic musical does not make a run. Why this is so might be related to the next news…

Beloved Maestro Eiki Isomura, who for many seasons has reigned as OH’s music and artistic director, has moved back to Philadelphia for family health reasons. Concurrent with his OH duties, he was – and still is – the opera producer at Temple University. A stalwart captain for Opera in the Heights, he led over 40 productions during his superlative tenure and gave us some remarkable performances that still linger in memory: an incandescent Madame Butterfly in his own Japanese translation; The Little Prince; L’italiani in Algeri; Lucia di Lammermoor; a ‘50s be-bob Elixir of Love; the regional premiere of Scalia/Ginsberg in a co-production with Holocaust Museum Houston; a splendid Amahl and the Night Visitors; a galvanic tango-infused María de Buenos Aires; an intoxicating Die Fledermaus; a charm-filled La Cenerentola; a volcanic Il Trovatore. He was OH’s heart and soul and will be sorely missed. God speed, Maestro. 

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As of now, the baton has not been passed. Newly appointed Artistic and General Director Kathryn Frady has said that future conductors will be hired on a “per-production basis.” As for Isomura, “there has not been a formal announcement about any change in his role at this time. We are still in the midst of internal conversations and transition planning.”

In her first appearance at Lambert Hall, conductor Carolyn Watson led a reduced orchestra (a string quartet with piano and clarinet) in a revised score with grace and charmed emotion. There are no “Liebeslieder Singers” to wryly comment on the action, but the quartet’s music has been melded onto the main characters, which makes a good compromise. OH just saved the expense of four additional players

After the disappointment of Follies (1971) – now certified as one of his greatest shows (“Time heals everything,” as Jerry Herman once wrote) – Sondheim wanted to write a romantic comedy, perhaps even a hit. Now, everybody knows that you can’t sit down and write one, for who knows what the public will respond to, what songs might become standards, or what will play out-of-town to encourage that word-of-mouth excitement to get butts into the seats.

He and his famed director Hal Prince thought that Jean Anouilh’s Ring Around the Moon would do the trick, a highly stylized comedy of manners. Anouilh refused. Then playwright Hugh Wheeler, now on board as one of the creative trio, suggested Renoir’s social satire film Rules of the Game (1939) or perhaps Ingmar Bergman’s classic Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) with its rueful ambiance set in perpetual sunset. Sondheim overwhelmingly approved Bergman. The Swedish director agreed to the rights, and off the three went to create a show.

Exceptionally sung and performed by Opera in the Heights, and directed sporadically by Alyssa Weathersby, the musical is its own “theme and variations.” Sondheim loved to challenge himself, often to show off. Instead of a string of numbers that might sound as if the same composer wrote them, how about a musical whose very theme is in waltz time: ¾ meter? Then you can vary it by subdividing it into 6/8 or even 12 beats. It’s a grand idea, and Sondheim conquers it. The score sparkles even in this reduced orchestration. It is quintessential Sondheim with rhyming lyrics that rival the best of W.S. Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame. 

A sublime choice for a musical comedy, now re-titled A Little Night Music, like Bergman’s movie, the musical is infused with the theme and variations on love: the loss of it, the want of it, the physical-ness of it, the remembrance of it.

Stuffy lawyer Frederik (baritone Scott Clark) once had an affair with now somewhat-famous actress Desiree (mezzo-soprano Melanie Ashkar). She plays in the provinces where everyone thinks she’s a star. She was the love of his life, and he hers, but he gave her up. Life upon the wicked stage, you know, is not for stuffy lawyers. Years later he has married a very young Anne (soprano Laura Corina Sanders), still a virgin after months of marriage, but he dreams of Desiree. He sees her at the theater and then visits her for a tryst.

However, Desiree has a lover, the married toxic brute Count Magnus (baritone Kellen Schrimper), who carries on affairs in full knowledge of his wife Charlotte (mezzo-soprano Riley Vagis). Situations get complicated, of course, and they all meet at the country estate of Desiree’s worldly mother and ex-courtesan Madame Armfeldt (mezzo-soprano Jana Ellsworth), whose many past liaisons have given her “a duchy…extravagantly overstaffed châteaus…fire opal pendants…and a tiny Titian.” Frederik’s son Henrik (tenor Ben Rorabaugh) unsuccessfully beds Petra, but secretly loves Anne. While Desiree’s daughter, Frederika (soprano Whitney Wells) – “I’m illegitimate,” she boasts – learns life’s love lessons at the feet of her soigné grandmother, Madame Armfeldt.

Jealousy, unrequited love, male pride, feminine wiles, and raw sex – that would be earthy maid Petra (mezzo-soprano Melissa Krueger) and her fling with butler Frid (tenor Anthony Nevitt) – all get deliciously mixed up in this adult romp. It’s too sophisticated for a farce, but as a modern dissection of love and marriage, along with its fools and clowns (a Sondheim specialty), it works wonders.

The singers are splendid, although soprano Sanders is much too old for virginal teenage Anne. She sings gorgeously, though, as do Clark, Ellsworth, Krueger, Vagis, and Schrimper. But it’s Ashkar who gets the best number, “Send in the Clowns,” her only solo. Believe it or not, this American Songbook standard didn’t make much of an impression during the show’s run until folk superstar Judy Collins recorded it in 1975 on her album “Judith.” Like a meteor in hyperdrive, the song soared to pop heaven and received the 1976 Grammy for Song of the Year. Sondheim was mystified. Why this ballad? Well, why not? It is gorgeous, and simple, and true, and the dark plummy voice of Ashkar runs with it and makes it her own. It’s tremendously effective under her sultry rendition as she realizes that her true love has passed her by. Give Ahskar the Grammy.

A loving note on OH’s production. What’s up with those teeny surtitles projected stage right and left? You can’t read them. If you can’t decipher Sondheim’s intricately rhymed lyrics or tongue-twisting patter, what good are they? Magnify them! And the constantly changing set design – those boxwoods, those flower urns, that bed – why must we wait while the orchestra noodles snippets of Sondheim for stagehands to rearrange the set after every scene? Give us a unit set, even with that damned bed, for an effortless, cinematic switch in setting. Who needs topiary? Get this show moving!

With definitive singing and acting, and a small orchestra that effortlessly captures the nuance of Jonathan Tunick’s famous orchestrations, Opera in the Heights’ production of this classic musical – one of the best ever – is very fine indeed. It’s as refreshing as “a weekend in the country.”

A Little Night Music continues at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 22; 2 p.m. Sunday, November 23 at Opera in the Heights, 1703 Heights Boulevard. For more information, call 713-861-5303 or visit operaintheheights.org. $35-$85.    

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