A Little Night Music – Leeds Playhouse

Sandra Piques Eddy and Quirijn de Lang in A Little Night Music at Leeds Playhouse. Picture: Tristram Kenton

A Little Night Music continues at Leeds Playhouse until 16 July 2022.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

What an extraordinarily generous composer Stephen Sondheim was. A little Night Music gives substantial singing roles to the young and the old, the aristocrat and the servant, the dolt and the susceptible. As the evening progresses, each one of these wring ever more lavish applause from the audience.

Opera North/Leeds Playhouse collaborations have played to considerable acclaim over recent years. James Brining’s production of A Little Night Music is a revival from only a year ago and stands as a tribute to the composer who died last November. Many of the cast members reprise their roles, with fresh impetus coming from some new faces.

Glynis Johns, the original Desiree, was hired for the 1973 show for talents other than singing. Consequently, much of the musical weight fell on other shoulders. Sandra Piques Eddy in the role, on the other hand, has a magnificent voice and sets chills quivering up the spine from her first note.

She runs a gamut of roles, playing the ageing but remorseful ex-lover of Fredrick (Quirijn de Lang), with great style, displaying the acting and movement skills that a previous generation of opera singers would have classed as being of minor importance.

Indeed all the female artists play their roles with passion and insight into character. Not a weak link in the entire ensemble, including members of the chorus (The Quintet) who provide comedy while doubling as stage hands.

Opera North favourite, De Lang has to play Fredrick with considerable understatement. After all, he is the monochrome father/lawyer/bureaucrat who counterpoints the multi-coloured characters around him. Nevertheless, his singing is as immaculate as ever. His elegant stage presence is used for comic effect as he tumbles into the fountain, positioned centre stage.

Second leads, Christopher Nairne as Carl-Magnus and Helen Évora as Charlotte, provide comedy just a shade this side of good taste It almost feels like a betrayal as we applaud one of Nairne’s numbers (ironically entitled ‘In Praise of Women’) – well sung, but entirely the wrong sentiment for our times. People near me were visibly squirming in their seats when Magnus orders Charlotte her to pack his suitcase.

The third pairing is Anne Egerman (Fredrick’s wife of 11 months – Corinne Cowling) and Henrik (Fredrik’s son form a previous marriage – Sam Marston). Marston is clearly a talent to watch with a fine tenor voice that he is prepared to take risks with.

Then of course, there is the redoubtable Josephine Barstow as Madame Armfeldt. Her long career has taken in Sondheim shows before, notably Follies in 2017, and she is no stranger to Opera North. She presides over the life of her daughter, Desiree, with sardonic resignation, reflecting as she does on her own life as a courtesan. I particularly relished the acerbic bite of her delivery.

Madeleine Boyd’s set design cleverly exploits the Playhouse’s thrust stage, choosing a busy arrangement and re-arrangement of props for Act I, but shifting to a more static setting for Act II. To begin with, the Chorus provides the muscle to move around tables, wheelchairs and crockery while a central fountain focuses attention (and provides plenty of slapstick) in the second half. I noticed that the front of the stage has a ragged, unfinished look, presumably making the point that the stage and the audience meld into one another. Mercifully, the tinkling fountain is switched off as the Act II action begins.

Conductor James Holmes manoeuvres the orchestra through Sondheim’s intricate score with aplomb. From an initial ambition to produce a  romantic musical, “something flowing and operetta like”, based on Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler put together a blockbuster of a feel-good piece. The romances do not quite go the way you expect (this is Sondheim, after all) but all are concluded most satisfactorily.

We felt uplifted as we walked out into the warm Leeds night.

Mike Tilling