‘A Little Night Music’ review

Madame Armfeldt’s declaration "a great deal seems to be going on in this house" late in "A
Little Night Music" draws a knowing laugh from the audience in Kobacker Hall on campus.
It’s a tribute not just to the actress Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers’ sure comic timing, but also to the
recognition of just what an understatement that is.
Yes, much is happening in Stephen Sondheim’s romantic farce on stage through the weekend at Bowling Green
State University, all kinds of bedroom antics, couplings, consummated but mostly frustrated, bedroom
scheming – and all of it makes for highly satisfying musical theater.
This is a musical known for introducing one standard, "Send in the Clowns," and though it was
originally an afterthought, the show builds to the song. The melody crooned by thousands, doesn’t make
its appearance until a clarinet plays a strain to introduce Christine Amon’s heart-rending rendition
deep in the second act. As the actress and serial mistress Desiree, Amon strips the song of its lounge
act accretions, getting to its raw emotional core.
That stunning performance – I wished someone in the audience had been bold enough to yell
"bravo!" – is the culmination of all that precedes it.
The production, directed by Michael Ellison, excels in every aspect. "Send in the Clowns" may
be the only popular tune from the score, but the other numbers are full of memorable tunes and witty
wordplay.
At one point as the middle-age lawyer Fredrik Egerman (Darin Kerr) sings about his young wife to his
former mistress Desiree, with whom he hopes to canoodle again, he notes his wife’s devotion by saying
when he’s done smoking she saves his "cigar butt."
To which Desiree responds "bizarre but…"
Ellison and the cast bring out the humanity beneath all the clever repartee.
Yes, in a way Fredrik with his 18-year-old wife Anne (Rachel Beck) is something of a buffoon. Yet Kerr
plays him with great dignity even in the face of his marriage’s lack of intimacy. After 11 months the
couple has yet to have sex. Still Anne allows that when her husband kisses her brow she doesn’t mind too
much.
Rachel Beck’s Anne for all her frivolity has the sense of a mature woman lurking somewhere beneath those
frilly frocks. Maybe that’s what Fredrik’s stern son Henrik (Scott Sanville), who attends divinity
school, senses. Even as he spouts Lutheran dogma he longs for his father’s wife.
His opposite is the lusty maid Petra (Kara Bergman) who celebrates the joys of sensuality in "The
Miller’s Son."
Madame Armfeldt, Desiree’s mother, is also no stranger to the bedroom though as she explains in
"Liaisons," her romances were of a more regal kind. She was a courtesan to royalty, most
famously and scandalously to the King of Belgium, and lives comfortably on the gifts she received. She
regrets that in these days lawyers have replaced princes.
She is in her way prim and has taken Desiree’s daughter Fredrika (Allison Stark) – a curious,
not-quite-innocent observer – to live on her estate, rather than on the road with her mother.
It is that estate, on a night of midnight sun, where matters come to a head in the second act. Desiree’s
current lover Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Drew Ochoa), a jealous, small-minded, vain dragoon, who brags
of his affair to his wife Charlotte (Elizabeth Pearse), shows up to stifle anything that may be going on
between the lawyer and actress.
The audience is guided through these tangled, sordid yet comic affairs by a Swedish chorus of five –
Nathan Kendrick, Kristen Basore, Rebecca Pethes, Gregory Ashe and Audrey von Almen – who set the scene
and comment on the action, often echoing the characters’ own words.
From the first they establish the waltz time that runs through the entire musical score, singing of a
long ago tryst, the details of which have started to fade.
The small orchestra, conducted by Emily Freeman Brown and made up of members of the Bowling Green
Philharmonia, is a vital collaborator bringing out the music’s nuances, and underscoring the passions.
It provides the swell of strings under the climatic kiss. When Fredrik and Carl-Magnus stew over how
things would be better if Desiree wasn’t so perfect in "It Would Have been Wonderful," their
vocal duel is echoed by the orchestra’s martial beat with insistent bassoon and muted brass commentary.
A typically delicious bit of orchestration by Jonathan Tunick.
In the end Fredrik promises Desiree that unlike the times when he made early exits from her performances
he will sit through all eight shows of her next run. I doubt anyone would make a quick exit from BGSU’s
stellar production of "A Little Night Music."