The Cast of A Little Night Music in Concert on Sondheim's Horny Musical and a Score Fit For an Opera Star

On June 27, the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical A Little Night Music will be presented in concert at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, its ravishing, romantic score having been lavished with new orchestrations for a 53-piece orchestra by original orchestrator and longtime Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Tunick. The sound of the orchestra—the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Tunick himself—will be nearly double that of the original production, which featured only 27 musicians.

It’s a musical setting fit for a bona fide opera star, and this production has one in mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who made her Met Opera debut in 1991 in Die Zauberflöte; last season, she performed in the new opera Dead Man Walking.

“I come from a different world,” Graham, who plays glamorous but past-her-prime theater star Desiree Armfeldt, told Broadway.com during a break in rehearsals at the DiMenna Center. “But in some ways the storytelling is operatic. And the music is just so beautiful. Unfortunately, I don't have an enormous amount to sing, but I'm hoping to make the best of what I can.”

“You do get the song,” countered Jason Gotay, who plays Henrik Egerman in the show.

“I do get the song,” Graham agreed. 

As Graham admits, she had thought she'd reached a stage in her career when—to borrow a line from that song—she'd stopped opening doors.“It's a miracle for me, at this point in my career, to do something new,” she said. “I'm having such a blast. I'm surrounded by the best of the best. And it's a high bar, but…”

“You’re vaulting it,” said Gotay.

The concert staging, directed by John Doyle, is also a dramatic change of scenery for Tony winner Ruthie Ann Miles (Countess Charlotte), who was, until very recently, performing the role of the ragged Beggar Woman in Sweeney Todd—a much shadowier musical world. “There’s no hiding in this one,” she said. “I really enjoyed hiding in dark cubbyhole places in Sweeney Todd, behind the wig and behind just the darkness of the story. In this one, it really is about peacocks. Everyone's a peacock.”

“This is some of his most lush, romantic music,” said Gotay. “It is such a contrast to the book, which is so raunchy and so dirty. It’s like the horniest Sondheim show. That juxtaposition is really fun to play with.”

Famously, apart from a few measures, Sondheim composed A Little Night Music in variations of triple time. The cast is finding room to move within Sondheim’s ostensibly constrictive musical corset. “There’s freedom within boundaries, freedom within restriction,” said Jin Ha (Frid).

“For us in musical theater, the chance of singing with a 53-piece orchestra is nil,” said Tony winner Shuler Hensley (Count Carl Magnus). “It's just extraordinary. It's like you're inhabiting a world of sound that you just can live in. It’s pretty spectacular.”

Appreciators of the work of Jonathan Tunick have had plenty to enjoy recently: revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily Roll Along, the posthumous Sondheim musical Here We Are and, most recently, the Encores! Titanic and the one-night-only Follies concert at Carnegie Hall. At the Tonys, he took home the award for reorchestrating Merrily We Roll Along—his first Tony recognizing his work with Sondheim.

“I'm going to go way out on a limb here and say that the orchestra is the star of the show,” Graham said to a chorus of agreement.

“I've been listening to his orchestrations since I started listening to musical theater,” said Kerstin Anderson (Anne Egerman) of rehearsing with Tunick in the room. “It's like whoa! We were listening to the orchestra downstairs, and he was conducting, and I was like, ‘This came out of his head.’ It’s incredible.”