Valse Triste

By T.E.Kalem

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC Directed by HAROLD PRINCE Music and lyrics by STEPHEN SONDHEIM Book by HUGH WHEELER

This is a jeweled music box of a show: lovely to look at, delightful to listen to, and perhaps too exquisite, fragile and muted ever to be quite humanly affecting. It is a victory of technique over texture, and one leaves it in the odd mental state of unbridled admiration and untouched feelings.

Hugh Wheeler's book was inspired and adapted from Ingmar Bergman's 1956 Smiles of a Summer Night, a kind of Gallic sex comedy set in turn-of-the-century Sweden. The characters are subliminal staples of theatrical lore, more familiar as types than sharply etched as individuals. The hero (Len Cariou) is a prosperous lawyer somewhat baffled and buffeted by middle age. Widowed, he has attempted to regain his lost youth by marrying a child bride (Victoria Mallory) who, after eleven months, is still skittishly virginal. Completing the household is Cariou's son (Mark Lambert) who has a jittery case of postadolescent puritanical guilt and an unholy crush on his stepmother. He, in turn, is pursued by a lusty wench of a maid (D. Jamin-Bartlett) who believes that sex is an act rather than a word.

The frustrated Cariou looks up and beds down his ex-mistress (Glynis Johns). She is an actress fabled for her affairs on-and offstage who is currently pleasuring herself with a hussar (Lawrence Guittard). This is our old friend from Roman comedy, the miles gloriosus, the soldier puffed up with vanity, rage (when he encounters Cariou), and the sternly ludicrous conceit that his wife (Patricia Elliot) and his mistress ought to be equal paragons of fidelity. This tangled skein of love and its counterfeits is happily unraveled in Act II at the country house of the actress's mother (Hermione Gingold), an old crone and an amorous relic of the King of the Belgians who bestowed a duchy upon her. Her philosophy: "Solitaire is the only thing in life that demands absolute honesty."

The complicated narrative line necessitates rapid crosscutting of scenes so that continuity of impact and emotional involvement are somewhat fragmented. More distracting is a pseudoGreek chorus of three women and two men who sing out the next stop in the plot rather like train conductors.

Still and all, the mood of the evening is impeccably sustained and, rather surprisingly, it is not so much jolly and summery as triste and autumnal. It is as if these world-weary beings had sated their aristocratic tastes on almost every experience except the simplest of joys. Designer Boris Aaronson's nobly brooding setting of towering white birch trees seems almost like a comment on the frivolity and emptiness of the characters' lives.

Nothing lends the show quite so much strength as Stephen Sondheim's score. It is a beauty, his best yet in an exceedingly distinguished career. The prevailing waltz meter is more suggestive of fin de siecle Vienna than the Scandinavian north, but why carp? In a show almost without choreography, Sondheim's lyrics are nimble-wilted dances. Literate, ironic, playful, enviably clever, altogether professional, Stephen Sondheim is a quicksilver wordsmith in the grand tradition of Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Lorenz Hart. There are three standout numbers. One is Liaisons (Gingold), a lament that courtesans are not the elegantly larcenous creatures they used to be. Equally arresting are Send In the Clowns (Johns), a rueful gaze into the cracked mirror of the middle years, and The Miller's Son (Jamin-Bartlett), a gath-er-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may paean to the flesh.

Producer-Director Hal Prince, who demands mere perfection from a cast, gets very nearly that here. He has curbed Gingold's hammy excesses, lit up the sexy enchantress in Johns, and released in Cariou a presence, as well as a voice, that marks him for the top of the U.S. musical stage. Ardent admirers of Prince's Company and Follies may be startled and a trifle dismayed that he has devoted his formidable skill and inventive energy to what is basically a bittersweet operetta. But then, the only predictable thing about Hal Prince is that whatever he does is the best of its kind. T.E. Kalem

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